Past and Present Meet at Ventana Cave

Past and Present Meet Ventana Cave

New Discovery On Papago Reservation Turns Back History to 5000 В. С.

THE CAR SPED down the ribboned miles of excellent roads within the Papago Indian reservation of Southwestern Arizona. The radio played softly beneath our chatter about Ventana Cave. It was astonishing to have found almost 7,000 years of continuous Indian history in one cave. The radio's insistent voice broke through with news from Europe news of modern civilization giving portent of the possible fall of one civilization and the rise of another.

The irony of it struck us. We fell silent. Here we were speeding out to look at a cave that harbored the history of the rise and fall of civilization back to 5000 B. C. We were going to see stone age implements of some of the earliest residents of Arizona and to peer curiously at mummified remains of the Hohokams, who had played, laughed, worked, warred, University of Arizona scientists have pushed back human history in the Southwest to 5000 B. C. with the excavation of the continuously occupied Ventana [Window] Cave. It lies on the face of Castle mountain on the Papago Indian Reservation, 110 miles west of Tucson, Arizona.

Every scientist “works the rock pile.” Here is Dr. Emil W. Haury, head of the University of Arizona's anthropology department, 1934 Harvard graduate, who is sorting and counting stone age implements which are carefully recorded for the layer depths from which they were taken from the cave. The cave's spring lies in the background and rock paintings are dimly visible over the head of the recorder.

Sickened, and died before the first Spaniard came into Arizona. How different were they from us for all our automobiles, radio waves, thermos jugs with electrically made ice, and rayon clothes from wood pulp?

As the car stopped at the University of Arizona's camp for scientists and Papago helpers we were humbled. We lived in an era of great changes; now we would look through Ventana (Window) Cave back upon centuries of other changes. Life moves relentlessly on. Some day our own civilization might be an object of curiosity.

We began the 200-foot climb to the cave in Castle Mountain, which looks more like a dying camel than a castle from the valley floor. The eye-like slit of the cave on the southeastern face of the mountain seemed to close its lid knowingly as we hurried breathlessly up the steep and stony path. Not tears, but dust came from the eye during the last portion of the climb. The mountain echoed with explosive noises. The eye wept the dust of centuries of accumulated debris; the groans and rumblings were wheelbarrow loads of

stone age implements being dumped upon a

selection screen where the scientists worked to retrieve every significant item of a by-gone age. Our surprised eyes swept over the scene. The great cave with its single room was 150 feet long and 25 feet wide. It was roofed by an upward-swinging, overhanging bulge of volcanic rock which shadowed the inner portions of the shallow rock shelter. That roof is only five

feet from the floor at the back and 50 feet high at the face of the cave. There were the rock paintings or murals made by some unknown artist, there the spring of living water where men, women and children had slaked their thirst, and over there the lookouts from which the rolling valley below could be surveyed for marauding tribes. All about us were the tumbled tons of earth and artifacts in which the University scientists were reading the past. This was thrilling, having 7,000 years of history beneath the soles of one's feet. All that history packed into 12 feet of fill that had slowly brought the floor nearer the cave's roof. No wonder Dr. Emil W. Haury's face beamed through the dust and beard as he greeted us. He had found an archaeologist's dream-unbroken sequences of history which overlapped previous finds.

This cave ties right into the Cochise culture of the Sulphur Springs valley, dated at about 15,000 years ago by Dr. Ernest Antevs of Gila Pueblo, and into the Snaketown ruin near Sacaton which goes back to before the time of Christ and which included ball courts similar to those of Yucatan. The cave knits its history into that of dozens of other "digs" or ruins in Southern Arizona. They are like separated chapters of a mystery story while Ventana is the connected tale all in one book. But it is only book one of a series.

We began our exploration into the past by taking firm hold of the present. Dr. Haury was our guide as we moved through the cave and worked our way backward through history.

Shovels clattered, wheelbarrows dropped their loads noisily, and dust rolled higher. The cave's bats had been driven out already and left only a protesting rock wren who sang above us.

"This is what comes of not sweeping out the house," Dr. Haury said with a wry smile.

"Man is the dirtiest of all animals. He lives for their camp while annually harvesting saguaro fruit. They were worried lest the University would not be finished with the digging by late June so they could use the cave this year. That may have put speed into the ten excellent Papago workmen who were digging out the story of the ancient ones.

A thought struck us and for a moment we lost what Dr. Haury was saying about modern Papago living off the desert's plants and animals as Indians did in the past. Our thought was this: There work ten Indians, wearing Silicosis masks against the dust cutting into their lungs. They are uncovering thousands of years of history yet are directed by scientists and paid by one of the most recent of sociologi-cal agencies in our nation, the CCC's Indian division.

"And just below this thin modern deposit, left by periodic campers," Dr. Haury was saying as our attention returned to him, "you see four feet of fill in which the grass still shows. No water got back under this rock shelter to rot it. Because of the cave's dryness and that of the desert air the Hohokams who In his own filth and accumulated litter, Fortunately for us this is so. Look down that cut where the men are working."

We looked. It was a gaping hole 12 feet deep, six wide, and running from front to back wall of the cave. Scientists call it a strati graphic trench. The side walls of that cut showed the layered history of the cave, if one knew how to read it.

Our shoes trod on modern refuse, broken glass, tin cans, and commercial cloth. Papago today, like those of yesterday, use the cave

If were

Were buried here became mummified. I should estimate that those individuals lived between 1400 and 1000 A. D."

most important caves yet excavated in the entire Southwest."

"They are a part of the reason," Dr. Haury answered. "The ancient Hohokams always cremated their dead. These mummies give us the first evidence of the physical appearance of the Hohokams, which is the name archaeologists have given the pre-Columbian people of Southern Arizona. The cave is also important because it pushes the human history of this region well back before the time of Christ, because it bridges several gaps in the reconstruction of ancient civilization, and because it provides what we believe to be the first clue to that transition period when man changed from a culture without pottery to one with it."

Mute, pathetic, and noble in death were the mummies as the earth was carefully dusted from them. Some lay flexed and others in full length positions. Why had their families deviated from the accepted Hohokam rule and buried their dead instead of cremating them? "They were left-wingers, rebels," laughed a member of our party. The scientists did not answer, but gave thanks for the first description of the people.

"They were medium to small in stature," explained Prof. Norman Gabel of the University. "They were slight of build, small ofbone and, surprisingly, the men were not much more muscular than the women. They were Mongoloid in appearance. As you see, their hair was coarse, black, straight, and their cheekbones, in most instances, were wide. They must not be called primitive in type for all their round heads and sloping, low foreheads. They may have looked much like the modern Papago."

Efficient implements of a stone age period from the time of Christ to about 5000 B. C. are piled here for scientific recording. At left is a fine pestle resting on a metate or bowl for grinding grain. Many of the metates and manos [hand stones for grinding] show still the mineral colors ground on them for rock paintings on the cave walls. Excellent stone axes, hand hammers, scraping and cutting tools are in the piles.

Imagination could run riot as we lookedat them, for uncovering mummies requires patience, care, and time. Was the old man with the white hair a leader of the cave community or just someone's nice grandfather? The fellow with the wooden nose plug must have gritted his teeth when his nose septum was skewered and that plug pushed in. Was he a medicine man or chief? If not he, then was the chief the man with the shell earrings? Was that a children's burial over there (Continued on Page Thirty-Eight) Giant saguaro provided scant shade for the University scientists during excavation of Ventana Cave. Here is their camp, around which clustered the Indian workmen, with and without tents. One Indian mother daily gathered food from the desert cholla buds, succulent grasses and plants, jack rabbits to feed herself and son. The scientists got their food from tin cans.