Tuzigoot National Monument

IS THIS YOUR FIRST visit to Tuzigoot? All of the Park Service guides develop some style of greeting to "break the ice" with a visitor. This is the one that seems to

CUSTODIAN

have taken hold at Tuzigoot National Monument (although, now we've noticed it, we'll try to vary it a little). All right, say it's your first visit. Let us take a quick look, tourist fashion, about the museum and ruins, then drop back by means of the archaeological record, into the real story of Tuzigoot, the Pueblo by the "Crooked Water."

First thing you want to see at Tuzigoot is the museum. Here, displayed in one of the largest exhibit rooms in the Southwest is the major portion of the unusually complete collection of implements, ornaments and various other traces of the material life at Tuzigoot in the 10th to 14th centuries A. D. Twentyfive large glass-topped cases are not enough for even the representative pieces. Below the cases, in the safest available space, are the enormous storage jars made to hold the corn and bean harvest of 800 years ago.

First, though, we should like to show you the little illuminated model in the first exhibit. Here, under a large picture of the ruins as they are today is a miniature pueblo in clay and sand. This is Tuzigoot as we think it might have appeared in 1350 A. D. Notice something strange about this multiple-roomed building? Yes, there are only three side entrances, and one of these was sealed by its builders. The only way to enter a room was through a small square opening in the roof, down a spindly, thong-bound ladder into the murky, close and dimly lighted interior. Even a model conveys the length to which the builders of this ancient fortified apartment house went to be sure that their enemies, perhaps ancestors of the nomadic Apaches and Yavapais, could not take them by stealth. At the first sign of danger, the ladders were quickly hoisted from the outside walls, and the rain. of arrows and other missles from the roof tops upon the intruders was ready to begin.

The fun and satisfaction of seeing a museum is to be able to wander about at your leisure and see things for yourself, so here we leave you. with the invitation to ask all the questions you wish. Yes, all these bright green copper ores, malachite and azurite, were used by the Indians, not to make copper they never learned to smelt the ore but to grind into paint which they mixed with grease and water. With this mixture, they could coat the colorful feather-tipped prayer sticks, or even adorn their own bodies.

And the pottery a whole alcove full of vessels painted and unpainted bowls, jars, pitchers. Yes, all this too came from the ruin of Tuzigoot. Notice these carefully decorated bowls. They are quite different from the firesmudged red and brown ware which was left unpainted. The decorated ware represented the Haviland and Sevres of that day, wares far beyond the technical achievement of the Verde Valley people. This fine ware was traded from the north, from the Jeddito mesa area near the present Hopi villages, and from other pueblos north of Flagstaff and Winslow. In the center of the room is a case all to itself, where you see a group of curious figurines, birds, deer and human, and clusters of miniature pots and bowls fashioned crudely and falteringly, out of clay. Some of these are the toys of the children of Tuzigoot. Others are effigy figurines, perhaps petitions of the ancient hunters for game. No, the flamboyant figure of Donald Duck really doesn't belong here we just sneaked him in. He stands with his bill in the air over the humble little gray figure of a duck in claythe Donald Duck of seven centuries ago!

Ornaments? Yes, here are some “hair pins,” long, carefully polished bodkins of deer humeri which the pueblo people delighted in sticking into their coiffure. And these delicate beads made from shell traded hundreds of tortuous miles from the Pacific Coast and the Gulf of California it took a half an hour to make each one, drilling the hole for stringing with a cactus thorn and a pinch of sand abrasive. Turquoise, as fresh and bright as it was when it was laid away with one of the honored dead, with tributes of shell bracelets and pottery.

Finally, here is one of the citizens herself, a slight person of middle age whose 4 feet 7 inches fit quite nicely into a glass-topped case. And there she rests, exactly as she was found in the sandy earth, her stone wristlets and bracelets of shell and her pendant earrings still in place, and two pottery bowls at her head, one suggesting a crude imitation, possibly her own, Of the fashionable “Jeddito” ware of the people to the north.

Ready for a trip to the ruins? So up the sandstone walk toward the top of the hill, where we find a honeycomb of crude masonry walls, 110 rectangular rooms hugging each other as though to keep from slipping off the steep slopes. We pause to catch our breath as we pass the first of the three units, a nine-room structure where five of the rooms have been reroofed, so that they once more take the aspect they once had when each harbored a family of hard-working Pueblo farmers. Below us, at the bottom of the hill, is another block of ten rooms built in a dangerously unprotected spot. The folk down there probably took to the upper rooms at the first sign of enemy attack, and enjoyed only the advantage of living nearer the river and the fields. Still further, in the valley bottom, modern farmers irrigate the same field the pueblo dwellers cultivatedeven the ditches you see today are not unlike those painstakingly engineered by the first citizens of the Southwest.

Now, notice this room over on the west side. Under a concealed glass we see a pocket in the wall in which a tiny skeleton is laid out. Yes. this is how the pueblo people buried infants who did not survive: most were laid away be neath the floors, while a few were placed, like this, directly in the walls and sealed up. Perhaps, as the Hopis used to believe, the spirit would stay protected in the room, to await reincarnation in the next child born into the household.

At last, we stand on the roof of the topmost room, looking down on the little dead city that was lost for six centuries beneath rubble and brush. It is not difficult to rebuild the city mentally, to re-roof the empty cubicles and see the women grinding corn on the troughed Metate stones in the open air atop the rooms. Here and there, a wisp of smoke curls lazily from the doorways in the roofs, and we know a fire has been kindled in the dark recess below. The chatter of the working women mingles with the scraping and ringing of the grinders. On the hillside below is the refuse pile and cemetery of the adults. Tons of potsherds mingle with kitchen refuse all ancient community dwellers lived close to their trash middens and the graves of generations upon generations lie scattered in the deep waste. Far down in the valley the hillocks of corn, with beans and pumpkins and gourds growing between stretch on either side of the Verde, where at least twenty other pueblos once lined the east side of the river, safely perched on other hills and mesas. As we descend once more, this imaginative restoration of Tuzigoot prompts us to know the whole story of our lost city, and we turn to the archeological record where clues of the past are being constantly sorted to build up a mosaic view of prehistory.

The first people in the Verde Valley were an unpretentious folk from the south who liv ed in pit dwellings, similar to those of the ancient Hohokam of the Salt River Valley, suggesting the two groups were closely related. This was probably in the 8th to the 10th Centuries A. D. These pit dwellers must have been little concerned with self-protection, since they lived down in the fields they cultivated, scattered clusters of their houses dotting the valley. The dwellings were simple pole and brush-covered huts built over a roughly square excavation a foot and a half below the surface, giving them later the term "pit house." Entrance was by means of a covered passageway leading partly underground into the room.

Just how long the uncomplicated existence of these simple folk lasted in the Verde Valley is a disputed question. But evidence is clear that sometime in the 10th or 11th Centuries A. D. the pit dwellers were forced to take refuge on the strategic hill tops. Perhaps the early Yavapais, followed later by the Apaches were to blame. These hunting peoples always considered the farming population, wherever they came across them, fair prey, and the corn and bean stores of the pit dwellers and later pueblo builders, once broken into, could provide easy sustenance during a particularly hard season. Result of these depredations was the establishing of the first small cluster of rooms on the hill of Tuzigoot, the nucleus of what was to be the pueblo.

Perhaps some of the Pueblo people from the north, the dry land farmers who made richly painted pottery, were induced to trade with the Verde Valley people, or even to remain where fields could be irrigated and were not dependent upon rain for a successful crop. We also find evidence that some of the latter contemporaries of the Hohokam in the south, the Salado people of the Salt River Valley, finding the alkali waters of their flooded fields hamp ering agricultural efforts, migrated north and settled in the Verde district. Even from off the Mogollon Rim to the east came a few settlers Who found the mellow river valley climate less strenuous than the cold winters and shorter summers of a mile high elevation. Slowly, the Verde population grew through the 12th and early 13th centuries. Then, in the year 1276 a foreboding of disaster swept through the Southwest. Fields to the north and east that had sustained fine crops for the dry land farmers lay parched and stunted. The next year brought no relief, nor the next. This was the beginning of an incredible 23 years of drouth, indisputably recorded today in the narrow rings of the trees which grew but little in those years. Village after village saw first the most adventurous, then the conservative population set out for lands they heard were still green. Pueblo settlements like those of Wupatki which had depended upon the moisture-conserving volcanic ash from Sunset Crater to harbor rain water found the ash layer too thin to counteract the drouth. Cliff dwellers of Walnut Canyon likewise abandoned their fields on the flats above Walnut Creek, a usually dependable stream which had ceased flowing for the first time in many seasons. So extensive was the drouth that even the great cliff cities of Mesa Verde lost their population and became the spectral ruins they are today.

But disaster did not find the Verde Valley. Here the river, though reduced, still supplied enough water to nourish the crop. Presently. as the drouth wore on, even more refugees poured into the hill top villages, adding more and more rooms, now all square and clustered in the true “pueblo” fashion. The older agricultural population was quickly amalgamated by these folk, but the outsiders, the warlike, nomadic people remained the enemies of the new villagers, and defensive planning of the pueblos was never neglected.

As the 14th Century dawned, and the drouth abated, the Verde Valley pueblos remained crowded and prosperous. The more recent arrivals showed no inclination to return to their ancestral homes. A hundred years passed before another event occurred to trouble the peo ple. During this time, the midden refuse on the side of the hill was growing to enormous proportions, and contained hundreds of adult burials; the dark and airless rooms grew more foul, and increasing numbers of sickly infants were laid away beneath the floors in shallow little graves, or sealed in the room walls. Perhaps, too, the increasingly strong enemy bands were beginning to find successful methods of attack upon the villages. Strangely enough, throughout the entire Southwest, the pueblo population was falling off in the crowded communal dwellings, and a clearly regressive period had set in.

By 1400 the Pueblo people were beginning to filter away from the Verde Valley. Room after room of the ancient, dingy villages fell into disrepair, until pueblos and cliff dwellings from Sycamore Canyon to Montezuma Castle and on far below Camp Verde had become only the repositories of archeological treasures for a distant generation of archeologists. Where did the Verde Valley pueblo and cliff dwellers go? That we can only guess. Since they had ethnic and trade connections to the north, per haps many of them returned to their ancestral grounds, now verdant again after the drouth. Some may have drifted east and south once more. Most reasonable conjecture is that by 1500 the lands of the Verde Valley were in the hands of the Yavapais and Apaches.

History first dawned over Tuzigoot and the neighboring ruins in 1583, when Don Antonio de Espejo, weary from touring the Rio Grande villages, the Zuni and Hopi pueblos, entered the Verde Valley to investigate reports of rich mines worked by the natives. Diego Perez de Luxan, historian of the expedition, records that at that time the valley was peopled by a