BASKET MAKER I

DRAWINGS BY PAUL COZE

souvenirs. One grieves to realize how much of the prehistory of southern Arizona's valleys was landplaned into oblivion by the creation of cotton fields, of southwestern Colorado's plateaus was, and is, wiped out by clearing for bean farming. Our country's ideas of property law, based on the English common law, allow an individual landowner to preserve or destroy his own land values and the historic resources on it. Some recent legislation in certain states purports to modify this principle, but its effectiveness has so far been doubtful. It is, apparently, only on government reservations that the ruins of ancient villages, cemeteries, and trash mounds have any chance to survive and record the ebb and flow of the history of an intriguing people. By far the best protected of these-in fact, you might say they are the only ones with real protection-are the magnificent sites in the parks and monuments of the National Park System. So long as our country functions with its present cultural and educational ideals and a relatively high standard of living, these outstanding examples of our national heritage of history and prehistory will continue to develop tolerance and understanding in the minds and hearts of interested visitors by interpreting the fascinating stories of the great exhibits the parks and monuments contain.

Typical scenes which could have occurred at several of these well-known areas were selected by the author and artist for portrayal, although the sequence is admittedly incomplete. Ideally the National Park System should include areas representative of our best types of scenery and locations where significant historic events transpired. Thus, all of the major kinds of Southwestern ruins should be included, as well as samples from each time period, so that the full story of evolution and retrogression could be shown. In practice this ideal has been impossible of accomplishment: for example, no national monument has been estabEstablished to conserve any of the comparatively modest Mimbres ruins which, however, yield amazingly beautiful pottery. In this article little or nothing is said about the widespread group of peoples in southern New Mexico who made brown pottery, nor about the little-studied Patayan area of western Arizona, the Chihuahuan Casas Grandes, the peoples of the northern periphery, etc.

In selecting, then, well known locations at Mesa Verde National Park and in the Southwestern National Monuments we have rather overstressed the Great Pueblo Period in the pictures of Betatakin, Mesa Verde, Walnut Canyon, Wupatki, Chaco Canyon, and Aztec Ruins, and the subsequent Renaissance Period in the views of Bandelier, Tuzigoot, Casa Grande, Tonto and Montezuma Castle. Some aspects of Basket Maker life are represented by Canyon de Chelly, but we have made no attempt to include the early pueblo periods, except for the pit house people at Sunset Crater, chiefly because few of the flimsy houses of these periods have been excavated in the parks and monuments and stabilized for exhibit.In pictorial reconstructions such as these, guessing is bound to play a large part. The archeologist unfortunately recovers only imperishable objects-he can prove little about the ancient ones' social routine, music, dancing, drama, their concept of the world, law, or politics. He can only infer such things from such fragmentary evidence as he finds and from the practices of surviving descendants (if there are any)and in the Southwest we are fortunate in having them, less changed by white man's culture than are most other Indians. In the Pueblos, it has been said, "you can catch your archeology alive."

So in the pictures, as you will note from the captions, the details are mostly correct. Usually the people are wear-the ruin which is pictured as restored. Where necessary, Paul Coze and his assistants made scale models of the build-ings from engineered ground plans and profiles furnished by the National Park Service and checked the restorations on the ground. From these models he completed the final paintings, all of which were based on direct studies made on the spot. The Montezuma Castle study was actually painted by moonlight, the Aztec Ruins painting, in the glow of fire from the firepit.An attempt was made to show an aspect of each area which is distinctive: thus Chaco Canyon is noted for its architecture and Tuzigoot is highly fortified and obviously was designed in fear of warfare. At Aztec Ruins cere-monialism was greatly stressed, for there are three other Great Kivas (unexcavated and perhaps not contemporary, however) in addition to the one which is restored and which we show in full panoply. And certainly no one will deny that Montezuma Castle is a romantic place in the moonlight! Where we were forced to guess, we can at least say we have had the guesses checked by several experts, and we hope the guesses are good enough so that other authorities will not be able to prove us wrong. It is only fair to point out, however, that a minimum of artistic license was allowed: e.g., Tyuonyi Ruin has been pulled a little into view from the door of the Bandelier kiva, the Walnut Canyon cliffside is a composite of several locations, and the Tonto cliff dwell-ings have been brought on an air line closer to their fields to gain clarity.

Basic Peoples of the Southwest

Dr. Erik K. Reed elsewhere in this magazine has briefed a description of the earliest inhabitants of the Southwest. Archeologists suspect these hunters and gatherers of wild food developed by the time of Christ into four basic groups of peoples which they call by the unfamiliar names of Ho-hokam, Mogollon, Patayan, and Anasazi. Each of these cultures have geographical and time sub-divisions, some fairly well known from excavations, others sketchily postulated solely on the basis of surface surveys. With these somewhat technical names we will not be too much concerned, for the complexities are interesting primarily to the archeologist, but it may be well to outline them briefly. Hohokam (Pima word meaning “people who have gone”). Ancient inhabitants of southern Arizona deserts, perhaps having their roots away back among the Cochise people mentioned by Dr. Reed.

Not too much digging has been done in their area, perhaps because much of the early excavations were done by eastern institutions staffed by men free in the summerand they naturally chose the cooler plateau country for their work.

From about the beginning of the Christian era to about the 1000-1100's when they reached a cultural peak, the Hohokam developed a distinctive and rich type of life by irrigating their desert corn, bean, and cotton farms with extensive canal systems.

They made plain and red-on-buff pottery, paddling the wet clay to make it thin. They were notable for much stone carving, carved and etched shell, a probably ceremonial ball game in large oval courts, well developed weaving (probably) and other crafts, three-quarter grooved stone axes, and cremation-type burials. There was considerable influence Pre-historic people developed a rich type of life by from Mexico. Their houses were one-story, of wattle-and-daub construction, and had depressed floors and covered side entrances.

After 1300 A.D. they were joined by Pueblo groups from the north and east, and large clay houses such as the Casa Grande were built within protective compound walls. There is a gap in their subsequent history, but their descendants, in part, may be the Pima and Papago of today.

Mogollon (Named from mountain rim, Ariz.-Ν.Μ.). Mountain people of southeast Arizona and southwest New Mexico (perhaps also descended from the Cochise) who were somewhat Pueblo-like, but with differences. Scientists argue whether Mogollon is a basic group, a fusion of Hohokam and Anasazi, or a derivation of Anasazi-a squabble unresolved because of insufficient excavation.

They were agriculturalists, but depended much on wild foods and hunting. Red and brown pottery, scraped thin, well polished. Later there were red-on-brown and red-on-white as well as black-on-white types. Earth and cremation regions. Later masonry houses were rough pueblos, but with irregular rooms and patios. Brown and gray pottery, paddled thin; probable cremation burial.

By 1200 A.D. they had disappeared from the eastern part, at least, of their territory. Their blood may run in the veins of the Yuman Indian tribes of the Colorado River.

Anasazi-(Navajo word for “the ancient ones”).

Prehistoric farmers of the great northern plateau of the southwest, including the drainages of the San Juan, Little Colorado, middle Rio Grande, Upper Gila and Salt rivers, southern Utah and some of eastern Nevada.

This is the part of the country which has received most attention and where sequences have been most studied, although there still are surprising gaps and blank places. The Anasazi cultural sequence is a continuous one, divided by archeologists into successive time periods: two called “Basket Maker,” and five called “Pueblo,” culminating in the present day Pueblo Indians.

They developed architecture from early in the Christian era through several types of pit houses and associated surface granaries to great communal apartment houses of masonry several stories high. Their earliest evidences are found in the Four Corners country where Utah, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico meet, and their Great Period centered in the San Juan River drainage. The pit houses seem to have become, through the passage of time, the distinctive round, subterranean kivas (society houses-men's clubs-churches), while the surface granaries evolved into the rectangular secular rooms.

Pottery was gray, black-on-white and black-on-red, and, later, polychrome. Gray cooking ware generally was peculiarly corrugated on the outside by finger impressions in the coils of clay. All wares were thinned by scraping. Axes were full-grooved (in contrast with those of the Hohokam), weaving and handicrafts were well developed, and earth burial was most common.

Following the breakup about 1300 A.D. of the Great Pueblo centers of the San Juan drainage because of drougth and warfare, the Anasazi re-grouped and concentrated along the Rio Grande from Taos to San Marcial and on the Little Colorado, where they were flourishing again when found by the Spaniards in 1540.

Two circumstances have contributed much to our relatively great knowledge of the Anasazi: (1) rock shelters were often used as habitation and storage places from Basket Maker times on, and, when dry, caves preserved a wide range of objects including vegetal and animal substances which ordinarily deteriorate in open sites; (2) presence of datable wood in the rock shelters and in some burned open sites has enabled the creation of an accurate calendar based on tree-ring dating, thus allowing us definitely to place any given ruin in its correct time relationship with others.

How Ruins Are Dated

Although it has been told many times, the story of the tree-ring dating technique is so important it should be repeated. Archeologists long had known the relative ages of most of the Southwestern ruins, but they did not know the exact ages. Stratigraphy, or the study of the pottery and other utensils, tools, and weapons in the layers of trash mounds, had given them the preliminary answer. By carefully trenching the mounds (or “city dumps”) they had recorded how the broken bits of crockery had changed in type burial. Some rectangular rooms seem to have been for ceremonial purposes.

By 1050 A.D. the unusual Mimbres pottery with its strange animal and plant designs was developed, and houses changed from a pit to pueblo style, but with less orderly arrangement than farther north.

About 1200 A.D. the Mimbres valley was abandoned. There seems to have been Mimbres influence in the Chihuahuan settlements of 1200-1450 and the northern Mogollon may have furnished increments of population for the western Pueblos (Hopi, Zuñi, Acoma).

Patayan-(Hualpai word meaning “the old people”). Western Arizona from Flagstaff and Prescott south of the Grand Canyon west to the valley of the Colorado River.

A little known area, archeologically, where agriculture was difficult in the highlands, and its traces were periodically covered by river overflow in the Colorado River valley. Settlements may have been inhabited only seasonally. Pit houses and masonry forts in the Flagstaff and Prescott from the bottom, or oldest, layers to the upper, or most recent. If a pottery type or sequence occurring near the top of one mound was found near the bottom of another mound, scientists know the second mound was later. Thus villages could be arranged in order of time but it was difficult to estimate exact age in years for it is impossible to tell how long a mound took to form.

The problem was solved by the University of Arizona's noted astronomer, Dr. A. E. Douglass. He was studying sun spots, which affect rainfall, and official weather observations seemed to show they are cyclical. He sought a longer series of weather records to analyze the cycles more thoroughly.

Knowing that some trees regularly add a growth ring each year-thick rings in wet years, thin rings in dry ones-he started with modern pines in the Flagstaff region and worked out a master scale of these varying ring widths which covered several hundred years. Asking archeologists for prehistoric wood from roof beams, posts, charcoal, etc., from cliff dwellings and pueblos, he found that rings in this wood, too, could be recorded on a master scale.

But the prehistoric scale could not be made to overlap or join the historic one, and a series of expeditions had to be organized to find wood which would bridge the gap. This was done at Showlow Ruin in Arizona by Emil W. Haury and Lyndon L. Hargrave. With the master scale completed, tree-ring experts can date ruins by examining the pattern of ring widths in a beam or charcoal from a given site. When this pattern is compared to the master scale and found to correspond at a particular place, it is obvious that the date of the year of the outside ring is the year in which the tree was cut or died, and, hence the site must date then or later.

With this extremely valuable yardstick (which now goes back to the year 12 Á. D.) archeologists are able to date cultural change with certainty. Incidentally, they found out that most ruins were considerably less ancient than previously supposed, and that some major advances in architecture, pottery, etc., had surged to completion in decades rather than centuries, as once thought.

Recently a new dating technique has been contributed by the physicists: the Carbon 14 method. By determining the amount of this unstable and steadily deteriorating isotope which remains in dead organic tissues and materials such as fiber, shell, horn, dung, etc., physicists arrive at dates which are accurate to within about 200 years. The method works best on substances which are from five to 25 thousand years old, and is thus more valuable in the study of really ancient man than in the dating of more recent cultures.

The Basket Maker Period

At about the time of Christ there roamed the Four Corners country of colorful canyons and mesas a nomadic group of hunters and seed-gatherers known as the Basket Makers. Just how far their territory extended we do not know, but somewhat similar peoples occupied Coahuila, Mexico, and Big Bend, Texas, at probably the same time. This nomadic period has been called Basket Maker I. Shortly thereafter they became more sedentary, because they obtained corn and the knowledge of how to plant and cultivate it. Just how they learned this is a matter of speculation, but it is presumed the knowledge came from more highly developed peoples in Mexico. Frequently this new stage is named Basket Maker II.

When harvests became large enough to require storage,the people built circular pits, or cists, in the dry floors of shallow caves and lined them with slabs of stone, adding a superstructure of poles, brush and plaster and often covering them with a flat stone. These granaries often received secondary use as sepulchers in which the doubled-up bodies of the dead were placed, along with other personal possessions, thus indicating belief in an after-life. The exceedingly dry atmosphere and sands proved to be remarkable preserving agents, drying the bodies to a mummy-like appearance, and conserving for the centuries the products of the Basket Makers' art and industry.

Consequently, we know considerable about their appearance. They were Indians, usually slender, and of medium size as compared to average stature throughout the world. They were predominately non-Mongoloid in character, already somewhat mixed in physical type, and this mixture is believed to have taken place in northeastern Asia and early during the peopling of the New World.

Very few of their houses have been found, for the caves were used merely as temporary shelters, and their flimsy habitations must have been out in the open. However, these have been discovered to have been more developed than once surmised because some found near Durango, Colorado, were eight to 30 feet in diameter and fairly complicated.

On the floor of a shallow cave and on a dug and leveled terrace just in front, the floors were saucer-shaped and plastered with mud which butted up against a series of short, horizontal logs laid around the rim of the "saucer."

ground on the metate with the mano or hand stone. Horizontal sticks and small timbers were laid in mud mortar and chinking until an inward-leaning wall of head-height was produced. On top of this they built a dome-shaped roof of logs laid in cribbing fashion.

No vestiges of entrances remained, but the floors had a central heating pit and there were many metates (grinding stone mills) and storage devices, the latter slab-lined pits, mud domes, or a combination of the two. These houses date in the 300's A.D.

The origin of these houses, which survived in one form or another clear down to the modern round kivas of the Pueblos, is lost in antiquity, and may derive from very ancient structures in Asia; but the knowledge of them may have been brought from there by Indian emigrants, or at least the idea of the northeastern Asiatic earth lodges may have diffused from there to America.

But it is the variety of Basket Maker art and industry which amazes us. Marie Wormington in her excellent "Prehistoric Indians of the Southwest aptly states: "The problems which these ancient people faced stagger the imagination of modern man. They had no metal, no pottery, no cotton or wool, no draught animals. Really all they did have was their own ingenuity to wrest the necessities of life from a none too favorable environment. It is remarkable how, by utilizing wood, bone, stone, plant fibers, and even their own hair, they not only produced all that they needed to survive, but also provided the base from which arose the high culture which culminated in the great communal dwellings of later times."

Paul Coze's painting of the Basket Maker cave in Canyon de Chelly, where many such sites have been found, gives a glimpse into the activities of these busy people. The lack of clothing is pretty typical, for although mens' woven band G-strings have been found, no loin covering has ever been discovered on a mummy. Women's scanty aprons were of a fringe of strings of juniper or yucca fiber attached to a waist cord, and there were a few shorter ones, finely woven. In winter both sexes threw over their shoulders a tanned deerskin mantle or a light, warm blanket made of narrow strips of rabbit skin wrapped around yucca cords which were then tied together in close parallel rows. The usual apparel probably consisted of some pretty paint on the chest and a fine pair of sandals.

Not that these items of footgear, very useful in a rocky country, were insignificant. Far from it, many were finely woven of yucca fibers, sometimes with the beautiful red and black designs showing both on the bottom and the top of the double sole. Such sandals probably were a great deal of the time pridefully displayed near the sleeping mat or hearth, while the owner tramped around on his hornilycalloused soles except during real cross-country going.

When people wear few clothes, they usually make up for it with much paint and many ornaments, and the Basket Makers were no exception. They tied bone points together into combs and topped them with feathers; feathers also were made into loops and worn as pendants. They fancied beads of all sorts-stone, bone, seeds, acorn cups, and shell, some species of which were from the Pacific coast, denoting trade relationships with western tribes even at that time.

The men were preoccupied with their hair, which was fancily parted into various hanks tied with string, but the women sacrificed theirs, at least at time of death, for the good of the family. Most female mummies have their hair hacked off to a shaggy two or three inches.

Basket Makers, as their name implies, wove beautiful baskets of several types, and bags, and headbands. They manufactured a variety of cordage and rope (much of human hair), and knotted game snares and large nets for catching animals. One of the latter, resembling a huge tennis net, found in White Dog Cave near Kayenta, contained nearly four miles of string and weighed 28 pounds. It was 240 feet long, more than three feet wide, and could have caught driven animals if it were stretched across a narrow canyon or defile.

Their weapons were darts, thrown by an atlatl or spearthrower, which effectively lengthened the arm and added propulsive force; short, curved clubs of wood; stone knives; and clubs fashioned from deer antlers. They also had wooden planting sticks for their corn (of tropical flint type with small ears), curved sticks for dressing skins, wooden scoops for digging, and bone weaving tools.

Corn and squash were undoubtedly their staple foods, supplemented by some small animals such as rabbits, prairie dogs, gophers, and field mice caught with their snares, and a few larger ones killed with the atlatl dart-deer, mountain sheep, and mountain lion. Meat could be broiled or roasted, while their corn and wild vegetal food such as roots, grass and sunflower seeds, nuts, berries, and yucca and cactus fruits probably were ground on the metate with the mano or hand stone.

Then they could boil or stew food in baskets (many of which were woven so tightly as to hold water) by dropping hot stones into the liquid until the water was hot enough to complete the cooking. Some of the wooden scoops have charred edges, and could have been used in pairs to hold the hot stones, like pincers.

Basket Makers already had at least two types of dogs, for well preserved burials of them have been found. They do not resemble wolves, so must have been domesticated in Asia and brought to America long ago by their masters. One resembled a medium-sized collie or shepherd, while the other was a terrier type with shorter black and white fur.

All in all the Basket Makers must have lived a full and busy life (although a fairly quiet one, for there is little evidence of warfare) from about 100 to 500 A. D. Then enough changes had occurred so that students use another label, the "Modified Basket Maker Period," to show a new type of life. This we shall take up after we see what the Hohokam were doing all this time. How were the Hohokam doing down on the desert? Probably pretty well, but we do not know so much about them, for only one Pioneer village has been dug, at Snake-town on the Pima Reservation.

The Pioneer Hohokam Period

Apparently they were living in big squarish or rectangular houses, some with diameters as great as 32 feet, with depressed floors, brush and mud walls, and vestibule side entrances. They must have been farming corn by flood plain irrigation, for the canal system does not seem to have been in existence yet.

There is some little doubt about the duration of this period, which is usually given as from 300 B. C. to 500 A. D., because the woods they used in construction (mesquite, ironwood, cottonwood) do not date by the tree-ring method, and there have been insufficient finds of traded pottery from the north to definitely tie the Hohokam to the more accurate northern dates.

At any rate, they were pretty well developed and perhaps considerably in advance of the Basket Makers, and suffer in comparison only because their habitation sites were in the open, did not preserve perishable materials, and have been little studied.

We know they ate corn, mesquite and screwbean pods, and saguaro cactus fruit, but there is no evidence of squash or domestic beans. Sturgeon bones (from a then deeper Gila River) have been found in their trash, and other fish may have been eaten, as were jackrabbit, cottontail and deer.

They made brown and gray pottery, thinned by paddle-andanvil, and decorated with incised concentric lines and painted geometric and small elements in red. There were distinctive heavy-walled and effigy vessels, and also fired clay effigy heads of human beings, whether toys or representations of gods is not known. Their stone axes were three-quarter grooved and long-bitted, and they made stone bowls, dippers and palettes to grind pigments.

Ornaments were scarce and plain: disk-like beads of stone and shell, pendants of turquoise and shell, small bits of turquoise and shell used for mosaic work, plain shell bracelets, and incised bone tubes.

They cremated their dead, and then buried the remaining bits of bone and other objects in a special trench or pit.

At first sight this is not such an imposing list of traits as that of the Basket Makers, but it gains much stature when we remember the excellent pottery (the Basket Makers had none), the good houses (although the southern Arizona climate demanded less than the colder north), and the already sophisticated mosaic work. If their weaving and basketmaking was on a par, and there is no reason to suppose it wasn't, the Hohokam even in the Pioneer Period undoubtedly were advanced farther than the Basket Makers, and the dwellers of the plateaus may have learned much from them.

The Modified Basket Maker Period

During this period, sometimes called Basket Maker III, which began around 500 A. D. and ended about 700 A. D. in the nuclear San Juan area, there occurred so many changes that some students feel the term Basket Maker is a misnomer. The culture spread and extended north into Utah, as far west as southwestern Nevada, south to the Little Colorado in Arizona, and beyond Zuñi in New Mexico.

Remains of villages found in the open, on the mesa tops and canyon floors and in the caves show that the people had adopted a definitely sedentary type of life and were organizing regular communities of from just a few pit houses to as many as a hundred, although they were always separate and never built contiguously. They consisted of a circular, oval, or, later, a rectangular excavation with a pole-supported roof of brush and earth which looked like a small pyramid with the top cut off.

There was a firepit in the center of the mud-plasteredfloor, and the smoke escaped through a hole in the center of the flat part of the roof above. Entrance was through an antechamber, usually located at the southeast side of the house. There were usually several storage granaries close to the dwellings, which, although fairly crude, were probably quite comfortable.

While they were learning to build better houses, they also were finding out about pottery. Perhaps only the idea of pottery first reached them, for some of the early attempts were clay molded in a basket and not fired, but when it was learned that firing produced useful vessels that did not crumble when wet, ceramics became more and more im-portant, although baskets still continued to be made for special uses.

Their first pottery was gray, and later they decorated it with black. Some pieces of well-fired red or brown pottery with polished black interior show up in the Basket Maker sites and give us a hint that the Basket Makers probably got the concept of as well as actual pottery from peoples to the south.

Sandals reached their highest development at this time. The old square toe type was replaced by a crescent-shaped scallop type, and fringing was abandoned. Fur blankets still were made, but turkey feather cord commences to become the favored material, although the great birds may not have been domesticated until later.

New varieties of corn came into cultivation, and an im-portant new food, beans, made its appearance. Here, instead of chasing an elusive rabbit for breakfast, they had a constant source of protein, and the lowly bean, although it has never attained the ceremonial prominence Pueblos give to their beloved corn, by rounding out the diet may have enabled denser communities to grow up. It certainly held them closer to their land, for you can leave your corn farm and go off hunting, but those beans require continual attention!

Towards the end of the period the bow and arrow replaced the inferior atlatl, and grooved mauls and notched axes appeared. Presumably these new weapons and tools were brought by new peoples, who perhaps were drifting in to get their share of that good succotash, corn bread, and bean soup! At any rate, there was an increasing percentage in the burials, which now often were in refuse heaps where digging was easiest, of larger, more robust people with distinctly Mongoloid broad heads. Frequently the backs of the heads were artificially flattened, probably by the adoption of a cradle board with a hard back which molded the infant's soft skull when he was strapped tight.

This important period saw the innovation of many things which later became very typical of Pueblo life.

The Colonial Hohokam Period

This period which lasted until about 900 A.D. took the Hohokam into somewhat later times than the Modified Basket Maker development just described. In it the Hohokam established and enlarged a spectacular system of irrigation canals along the Gila and Salt Rivers, a project denoting strong leadership and cooperative effort. It is the more amazing because it was accomplished with stone axes, and wooden digging sticks and paddles; and the work seems to have been done by free men not under the domination of any despot or ruling caste.

The homes of the people continued to be simple units, much like those of the Pioneer Period, except they were smaller and rectangular with rounded corners. There is evidence of outside brush kitchens, much like those used by the modern Pima.

The most peculiar structures in the prehistoric Southwest now made their appearance-ball courts. These were large oval depressions, oriented east and west, open at both ends and up to 200 feet in length. Earthern banks formed side walls 15 or more feet high. Two stones set flush in the floor at the ends and one in the center apparently served as markers. The Maya Indians in Mexico were playing a ceremonial game with a rubber ball in similar courts, walled with stone, when Spaniards reached that area. They could strike the ball with only their knees, thighs, and buttocks, and when a goal was made through a stone ring set in a wall, it was a rare occasion. Such courts are found in Arizona in the Salt, Gila and Verde valleys and as far north as Wupatki National Monument northeast of Flagstaff where an unexcavated one is built of masonry. No one has proved any connection of the courts with those in Mexico, but it looks highly suspicious, and future excavations in the northern states of our sister republic may provide the answer.

Pottery was brown or buff painted with small, repeated geometric or life elements in red. Incising of pottery was no longer practiced; the human figurines became very common and more lifelike.

Cremated bones and offerings are found in small holes, pits, trenches, and pottery vessels. One of the most common offerings were palettes of hard rock, carved with a border and often having carved birds, snakes or animals ornament-ing the edges. On the mixing surface of many is a vitreous remnant of a lead mixture. It has been suggested that the lead pigment, possibly a facial or body paint, changed in the heat of the cremation fire from a dull color to a brilliant red with metallic globules, and may have had some ceremonial significance.

and often having carved birds, snakes or animals ornament-ing the edges. On the mixing surface of many is a vitreous remnant of a lead mixture. It has been suggested that the lead pigment, possibly a facial or body paint, changed in the heat of the cremation fire from a dull color to a brilliant red with metallic globules, and may have had some ceremonial significance.

Another unusual product was carefully fitted mosaic mirrors of pyrite crystals on circular stone bases. These were from three to eight inches in diameter, and usually had their backs ornamented with complicated designs in a variety of colors in superimposed layers, some cut away to show the others beneath. Suspension holes in the back argue they were some sort of pendant or "flasher." Exactly similar ones are known from Central America, so the Hohokam may have imported some, but they surely made others.

They carved stone vessels with desert reptile forms, while birds and snakes were the most common subjects on their bone carving. Their projectile points often were long and barbed and serrated. Carved shell beads and ornaments such as pendants and bracelets were much prized and common, and there were a few carved shell rings in the form of snakes.

The Developmental Pueblo Period

This term, which includes two phases which archaeologists have called Pueblo I and Pueblo II, denotes times of transition and change which lead to the classic Pueblo era. Cotton was introduced and the fabrics made from it assume an important place among their textiles. They domesticated the wild turkey (the dog had been their only tamed creature), made more use of the grooved axe, and definitely improved their pottery, experimenting during the second part of the period with new shapes and decorations for this useful new utensil.

You can make a general statement that Developmental Pueblo began about 700 A. D. and lasted until about 1100, but this is not true in all districts. Out away from the centers of development there were lags in learning, and some of the marginal peoples carried on old customs 150-200 years after they had been superseded by something new in the nuclear San Juan country.

For a long time archaeologists and physical anthropologists were misled by the new fad of skull-flattening, and supposed great numbers of immigrants had practically wiped out or submerged the Basket Makers, but recent studies show that the people remained generally the same, although there probably were some newcomers who merely joined the Basket Makers and helped carry on and improve their already-existing customs.

Just why the popularity of the vertically flattened profile at the back of the head we will never learn, but we do know it was caused by a hard cradle board back and it developed into a tribal idea of beauty which persisted until the coming of the Spaniards. Each group of people in the world develops such specialized ideas of good looks and we ourselves are not exempt - witness the wasp waists of the '90's and the flat silhouette of the flappers of the 1920's.

In the central part of the province the semi-subterranean pit houses became supplanted by surface dwellings which had only slightly depressed floors and are composed of several contiguous, rectangular rooms whose walls were of vertical pole-and-plaster (jacal) type construction, or of horizontally laid stones. This latter method grew into true masonry, which was used at the end of the phase to construct the first true "pueblos," usually of from six to 14 rooms ar-ranged in one long row or crescent shape, a double tier, an L-shape, or in the form of a rectangular U. These are some-times known as "unit" or "clan" houses.

Farther away from the centers, in central New Mexico and in the Flagstaff district, for example, pit houses con-tinued to be used for a much longer time, but they were dug deeper and entrance was gained by means of a ladder through the smoke hole, while the side entrance, much re-duced in size, was retained as a ventilator to bring in a steady draught of air for the firepit in the center of the floor.

Paul Coze's painting of the eruption of Sunset Crater shows some of the people who were living in pit houses as late as 1066 A. D.

The term "clan house" was applied by scientists who believed the little houses may have been occupied by a single family group such as the Hopi clans, which still exist today. In these groups, descent is reckoned in the fe-male line, the women own the houses, a child takes his mother's name and receives his ceremonial training from his maternal uncles, for they are of his clan, while the actual father belongs to another clan and works more with the cere-monial training of his nephews than he does with his own son. This system weakens as you go farther east until in some Rio Grande pueblos men own the houses, their chil-dren take their name, and clans are practically non-existent.

The Basket Maker-Pueblo people had been accustomed to performing their religious rites and ceremonies in the old circular pit houses at least partially underground, so they retained the old-style structure and usually built one south or southeast of the house block. These became more and more specialized and ultimately developed into what are called kivas. People are conservative in their religious thinking, and we do the same thing when we value medi-eval style architecture in our churches.

The kivas must have been the locale of ceremonies designed to cure the sick and pray for the all-essential rain for their crops. Another seemingly ceremonial structure found in some districts are large circular plazas of leveled earth, sometimes with a raised platform or dais at the north and firepits in the center. These probably were for big dances which were dramatized prayers for rain, and may have been in the ancestral line of the real Great Kivas which came into existence in the next period.

In addition to the houses, kivas, and dance courts there were also brush shelters with fire and cooking pits, and storage places which possibly provided outdoor cooking facilities during times of good weather.

The Developmental Pueblo people experimented enthusiastically with their new medium of pottery. First they decorated the necks of their culinary pottery by leaving un-smoothed coils of clay as bands on the necks; later the coils were pinched and ornamented by fingers or small tools to produce a corrugated effect that covered the whole vessel. Black painted decoration characterized the grayish-white non-culinary dishes. Designs for the first painted Basket Maker jars and bowls seem to have been taken over from those of baskets, but now textile designs were tried and finally very complicated geometric patterns came into fashion. Styles were widespread, although there was some tendency toward specialized differences between the east-ern and western parts of the Pueblo area.

They still made baskets, about which we know little, for most Developmental sites are in the open where such fragile material is rarely preserved. Sandals were of fine string with coarse patterns on the under side and they had rounded toes. Light cotton blankets commenced to replace the ones of feather and the still rarer ones of fur. Popular beads and pendants were those of colored shales, turquoiseand alabaster, while some bracelets were made of glycy-meris, a shell imported from the Gulf of California.

Corn was still the staple food, and the bow and arrow had completely replaced the atlatl as a weapon. Burial practices varied considerably, but most persons were in-terred in trash mounds, where digging was easiest, and were more or less flexed or doubled up.

It was during this period that the Pueblos reached their widest geographical extension, spreading north and west in Utah, farther north in Colorado, and farther east in N. М.

The Sedentary Hohokam Period During the Sedentary period, which is usually dated at 900 to 1100 or 1200 A. D., the Hohokam withdrew somewhat from outlying districts and concentrated in villages of scattered houses near the Gila and Salt Rivers. The usual type was an oblong pit house (or, really, a house in a shallow pit) with rounded corners, about 15 by 27 feet in size, with pole-supported brush-and-mud walls and roof. They were more carefully built, with a six-inch rim around them to keep out surface water, and the entryways were furnished with steps instead of ramps.

Towards the end of the period some villages had houses of several rectangular rooms with mud walls in which were sporadic stones, and some settlements were enclosed by compound walls. These two traits are thought to have been derived from the Puebloan Salado people who were to move into the valleys later.

Ball courts were much smaller, about 70-80 feet long, had closed ends, and oriented north-south.

There was great elaboration in red-on-buff pottery design-panels, negative designs, and interlocking scrolls-and much variety in shapes, including threeand four-legged trays, which were a Mexican trick. Jars for water or cereal storage became huge and held as much as 40 gallons or more, and decorated jars had a sharp "shoulder" or angle at the point of greatest diameter. Pottery figurines were hollow heads, or full effigies modeled in sitting position.

Only a few finds of casts or impressions have been made of what must have been a great industry in complicated textiles and basket making. Mosaic mirrors were still used, but palettes were inferior to those of the previous period, as were stone bowls which now were incised instead of carved with life forms.

Metates and mortars and pestles were well made and stone hoes commenced to be used. Their projectile points were long and beautifully flaked, sometimes serrated. Ear, nose, and lip plugs appear in this period but also may have been worn before.

The Hohokam specialty of shell work reached its peak in this period with many perforated disk beads, pendants and elaborately carved bracelets, as well as mosaic work. In the latter process they laid tiny pieces of turquoise and colored shell in a bed of lac spread on a larger shell. The lac was a plastic gum obtained from the secretions of a small insect which lives on creosote bushes.

Etching of shell occurred in this period (the 1000's and 1100's) although the process is not known from Europe before the 1400's. Perhaps they used fermented saguaro fruit juice, which becomes a mild acetic acid, to eat away the portions of the design which were not covered with lac or some sort of pitch. The covered portions would thus stand out in relief. The process has been duplicated in the laboratories of the Gila Pueblo by archeologists.

The Great Pueblo Period

From about 1050 to 1300 A. D. the strivings of our plateau people culminated in the Great Period, often known as the Classic Period, or the "Golden Age" of the Pueblos. Now came the true flowering of their architecture, their arts and crafts, and also, undoubtedly, their theocratic system and other aspects of their life and thinking. Large communities became the order, there was great development of the arts, and local specializations became so intensive that pottery and masonry styles, for example, from one center can be easily distinguished from those of another. The Pueblo boundaries shrank from the vast expanse once dotted with small unit villages to a relatively few centers mostly in the Four Corners country again, where some small pueblos were built, but where the emphasis was upon the erection of great terraced structures with hundreds of rooms, and second, third, fourth, and sometimes even fifth stories. Where suitable caves existed, they were utilized for cliff dwellings, ranging from the hundreds of small houses in Walnut Canyon National Monument, which were restricted in height to one story because the caves were low, to the great Cliff Palace (not really a palace, but a pueblo) and Spruce Tree House and others in Mesa Verde National Park, and Keet Seel, Betatakin and Inscription House in Navajo National Monument.

Canyon de Chelly

About 600 A.D. the Basket Makers are busy in a shallow cave above their corn fields in Canyon de Chelly, Arizona. The hunter holds an atlatl (throwing stick) and a rabbit stick in his left hand, a dart in the right, and watches the women weaving baskets and human hair cordage. (Some women have cut their locks.) Others build storage pits; a rabbit skin blanket hangs on a frame.

We have had to assume that the Pueblo women's dress and butterfly hair-do go no farther back than Great Pueblo times; thus, Basket Makers are attired in G-strings and scanty aprons,

Sunset Crater

About the time of the Battle of Hastings, 1066 A.D., a small group of Sinagua Indians lived in somewhat backward fashion northeast of what is now Flagstaff, Arizona, for their houses were still of the pit type although pueblo architecture was already well developed in the Four Corners region of the Southwest. They became alarmed when a series of earthquakes made cracks in the earth of their corn fields, and, when smoke, black cinders, and chunks of molten lava started to spew out, they hurriedly dismantled the wooden supports of their house roofs, and moved away. Here Paul Coze paints the scene as if a few die-hards had lingered until the actual eruption which eventually developed the massive cone of Sunset Crater National Monument. Some people are gathering their possessions as others dazedly watch the display.

Details of the eruption and the lava flow advancing around the burning pit house in the background are accurately taken from color motion pictures and slides of the outbreak of the exactly similar Paricutin Volcano in 1943 in Michoacan, Mexico. Types of pottery, basketry, clothing, weapons, and ornaments are from specimens in the Museum of Northern Arizona. The existence of the second little cone, which would have been covered by the continued building of Sunset Crater mountain, is, of course, conjectural.

Wupatki

Some ceremony is getting under way at Wupatki, Arizona, on a winter evening in the 1200's A.D. An official with a full length staff and two girls with small tablita headdresses wait in the unique, circular dance amphitheater, which had no roof. Sinagua people who built Wupatki had no kivas. The red rock ridge, seen today, would have been almost covered by rows of houses, as shown in the painting, done from an accurate model and actual photographs.

One of the typical scanty snows is melting, and the constant wind is drifting the smoke from their inside fires. A few ramadas, or brush shelters are shown, as is the habit in modern pueblos. There would have been no doors or windows on the lowest story, for reasons of protection from enemies. The man in the amphitheater has a long staff, like the one found with a burial at Nalakihu Ruin in the northern part of Wupatki National Monument.

Chaco

By 1100 A.D. huge, D-shaped Pueblo Bonito (Beautiful Town), begun in the 900's, in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, had reached its imposing peak. Four stories high, it had 800 rooms and 32 of the round kivas (meeting places for curing, rain-making, and fraternal societies). People are building a row of rooms out from the Great Kiva (which was much like the one at Aztec Ruins-see the double-page view of its interior in this magazine) which lies off the picture to the right. Men are laying the fancy banded Chacotype masonry, while women are plastering over it in the right hand corner.

All pueblos illustrated in the paintings arbitrarily are shown as if completely occupied; actually modern Pueblo Indians continually are building or re-building portions of their towns, while letting others fall into ruin. Also, lower rooms were shut off from light as upper stories were added, and often were abandoned, filled with trash, used for burials, or converted to storage. If about half of Pueblo Bonito were lived in at one time, we would guess a population of approximately 1,000 people.

Casa Grande

In the upper picture the Hohokam are branching a new lateral off of a main canal. Running a little pilot ditch ahead of them, they dug the softened mud with stone axes and picks, wooden sticks and paddles. Below is Compound A at Casa Grande National Monument in its heyday about 1400 A.D., with other compounds showing in the distance. Most houses, but not all, were inside the protective 10-ft. wall.

In the bottom picture the face and body paint, chin tattoo, and hair-do of the lady in the foreground is inspired by that of early desert Indians. Her shell jewels may be seen in the Arizona State Museum, as also the red-on-buff jar she carries. The Salado hunter at the ladder with his skin quiver is bringing back some odd plant specimens for his wife to experiment with.

One of the most impressive exhibits in the Southwest is the Great Kiva at Aztec Ruins National Monument, New Mexico, as restored by famed archeologist Earl Morris. Painted exactly to scale, the scene depicts a ceremony about to begin about 1250 A.D. in the huge structure, which probably was a sort of a community church. A clown dances in the center near a pile of vegetable offerings, dancers, chorus get ready in the left background.

Tuzigoot

Left on the roofs in the panic are the brownish red pottery jars and the broken brownon-yellow vessel of pre-Hopi type (to be seen in the Tuzigoot Museum), the drying corn, yellow pumpkins, and green squash. The frightened parrot had been obtained by trade from Mexico. The Verde River and Black Hills are in the distance.

Bandelier

The walls of the canyons of Bandelier National Monument, New Mexico, are composed of volcanic tuff, a soft ash which erodes into many small caves. These the Pueblo people of the 1400's and 1500's enlarged by chopping with their stone axes and picks to accommodate some of their kivas and also living rooms which became the back cubicles of pueblos built along the bases of the cliffs. Through the doorway we see against the background of autumn-colored boxelder and cottonwood trees the circular valley pueblo of Tyuonyi, four stories high and having three kivas in its plaza. A woman brings food to the weaver at his loom, while a boy on the other side of the firepit fashions a bow. Women brought food and watched ceremonies; kivas were mostly for men.

The glaze-decorated pottery may be seen in the Monument mu-seum. The loom, anchored by loops set in the earthern floor, is of the type still used by Pueblos and Navajos. The women wear the so-called "squaw" dress of woven cotton.

It is sunset at the end of a peaceful day in the 1100's at the Walnut Canyon cliff dwellings, Arizona. From one of them we can see canyon vegetation, and, with artist's license, the San Francisco Peaks on the skyline. Fires are lit inside the rooms (which are all of one-story), or in front of them. Their houses are built in shallow caves which occur mainly on three levels, and can be reached from rim-top cornfields by narrow trails which zigzag down side canyons and crevices.

On the overhanging ledge rock the returning hunter signals his success to his wife who is grinding maize on a metate. To her left, corn is piled for future storage, and her black and red pottery, baskets, and a ladle are scattered around. Black and white ware was traded in from northeastern Arizona; the parrot from Mexico. The old man wears a basket hat (from the Museum of Northern Arizona), rabbitskin robe, hair leggings, and holds a painted basket. Illustrated pottery may be seen in Monument Museum.

Salado Indians from the Tonto cliff dwellings are picking cotton about a decade after 1400 A.D., and carrying it uphill in baskets, some with tumplines. A visiting trader with his brown and blue textile quiver has brought shells from the California and Sonora coasts. The dubious, standing man wears a lace shirt, typical of the complicated weaves the Salado people knew.

The original quiver and lace shirt may be seen in the Arizona State Museum at Tucson. The cliff dwellings have been pulled closer to the observer to show more detail. Tonto National Monument is close to Roosevelt Dam on the Apache Trail.

Both types of villages had the same general plan; masses of rectangular rooms were arranged in the form of a rectangle, an oval, or a D, and terraced back upward from an enclosed patio or patios. The ceremonial chambers (kivas) were included in the courts or main block of the building, and their former underground character was simulated by filling with earth the corners left between the circular walls and the rectangular ones enclosing them.

Cliff Palace, the largest known cliff dwelling, had more than 223 rooms and kivas; Keet Seel, more than 200. The open pueblos, not limited in size by a cave, were much bigger; in Chaco Canyon National Monument, Pueblo Bonito had 832 rooms and kivas and Chettro Kettle and Peñasco Blanco are almost as large.The tendency of the people to abandon the outlying small houses and concentrate into the urban centers is not believed to have been due to a sudden increase in population but rather because pressure from nomadic enemies, perhaps intensified by drought conditions which made living hard for all peoples, caused it to be desirable to gather in populous centers as a means of self-defense. Indicative of this are the burned and pillaged unit structures which were found in peripheral districts, and also the defensive character of the great pueblos, which usually had blank outside walls over which the inhabitants climbed by means of ladders which could be pulled up in time of danger.

Mesa Verde National Park in southern Colorado has relics of a civilization that existed centuries ago.

The three best known localities where specializations were going on were Mesa Verde in southwestern Colorado, Chaco Canyon in northwestern New Mexico and Kayenta in northeastern Arizona, although it should not be forgotten that other distinctive developments occurred in the Southwest, such as in the Mimbres valley of southwestern New Mexico, among the Salado people on the Salt River, and in the Sinagua district around Flagstaff and Verde Valley. The Chaco people, blessed with ample supplies of fine yellowish-gray sandstone which split easily into tabular blocks, produced masonry of stones laid in horizontal bands of varying thickness and reached an architectural excellence not equaled elsewhere north of the Valley of Mexico. Their massive walls consist of veneer stones, carefully ground on the vertical faces, laid up with so little mud mortar that a knife blade can scarcely be inserted between stones. The interior of the wall was filled with rubble and mud. The Mesa Verde also pecked (with a hard stone or hammer) and ground their loaf-shaped blocks of gray sandstone on the vertical faces and made excellent masonry for their smaller rooms. The Kayenta Indians did not have such good building stone, so used more mortar between the irregular red sandstone pieces. Heavy logs with the bark removed supported the flat roofs. Sometimes the ends of these had their stone axe-cut ends so carefully ground they look as if they had been sawed. Over the logs were spread crosswise layers of smaller poles, brush, reeds or sticks, and then four to eight inches of mud. In the architecture-conscious Chaco, the sticks were sometimes pierced and tied into excellent and ornamental mats for ceilings or door coverings. One puzzler is that all these attractive masonry styles seem to have been covered with plaster inside (where painted geometric decorations were sometimes used) and out. And for all their building skill the Pueblos never learned to do much intentional bonding of corner joints, nor invented the arch. Kivas, specialized as to type, continued to be an impor-

Aztec National Monument in northwestern New Mexico was occupied by large population in 12th and 13 centuries.

Important part of every town, except in the west and south, but the Chacoans dreamed up the amazing Great Kivas. The interior of one of these, the reconstructed one at Aztec Ruins National Monument, is shown in Paul Coze's painting which was painted on the spot with living models, and gives an accurate idea of the tremendous scale of these impressive ceremonial chambers. Even larger ones are known from the Chaco Canyon, Gallup and Zuñi regions. Great Kivas were large, subterranean (or partly so) chambers surrounded by small above-ground rooms that may have been robing rooms for the priests. One recent authority on pueblo social organization thinks smaller kivas were for curing and rain ceremonials, while the great ones (they commonly occur in pairs) were associated with two major men's societies and may have been the forerunners of the dual kiva system which still functions in Rio Grande pueblos. There were some peculiar variants. Fire Temple at Mesa Verde apparently is a modified Great Kiva, while the Amphitheater at Wupatki Ruin in Wupatki National Monument is large enough, but had no roof or kiva features. Since these are the only two structures of their kinds known, it is impossible to learn from comparisons. The Amphitheater is associated with a ruin built by the Sinagua, a western group which never had kivas, so it may have been just an outdoor dance plaza, and that is the way the artist reconstructs it in his painting. There was a high degree of specialization and variety in corrugated and black-on-white pottery and considerable polychrome (black and white on red or orange) appeared in the west and southwest. So distinctive are these types that if you hand a sherd to an archeologist he can usually tell you within a few decades of when and about where it was made. Obviously, excellent artisans could make a good living by restricting their activities to one trade and becoming exceedingly proficient at it. Their products not only supplied other people of the pueblo, but were widely distributed among friendly towns by barter and trade In Pueblo Bonito.

Coiled baskets were better than earlier ones and out-number the twilled kind; beautifully polished stone hoes were lashed to the long axis of digging sticks; and several metates of graded coarseness were placed alongside each other in bins so that corn meal could be ground progressively finer as it was passed from one woman to another.

One type of sandal is squarish on both ends, while the other had a a jog or offset for the big and little toes. Women wore aprons with long fringes of string (and perhaps had the cotton "squaw" dresses, for all we know) while men had breech clouts of yucca fibers or of cotton.

There were three types of cradles, and cotton cloth for ponchos, blankets, and bags was woven on the true vertical loompractically the same as used by Pueblos and the Navaho today. Yucca or rush matting was commonly used on floors and for sleeping and frequently was wrapped around corpses before burial. The burials for the great ruins have been difficult to find, chiefly because the old occupational level at Chaco Canyon is covered with about 16 feet of valley fill, and interments for the cliff dwellings may have been in trash which has been washed down the canyons. Enough are known, however, to prove they still doubled up a great many of the bodies and placed burial offerings with them.

Bone, shell, and stone ornaments, some of them encrusted with mosaic work, continued to be popular. Typical were "thunderbird" pendants, pendants of whole shell, and thick shell bracelets.

A few of the many interesting articles which have been found in Great Pueblo dwellings are arrow-shaft straighteners of grooved stone, bone punches, wooden vessels, stone pot lids and rings of juniper bark for pot rests, fire drills and hearths for making fire by friction, lapstones or paint palettes, weaving tools of bone and wood, needles and bodkins of bone, copper bells, hairbrushes of stiff plant fibers, stone choppers and mauls, chisels, walking canes and crutches, rattles of deer roofs and insect cocoons, bone rasps, and bone dice. Ah, the Pueblos of the Great Period led a full and rich life!

And then, more or less suddenly, they had to abandon their San Juan homeland and move to other locations to carry on their civilization. Why?

The Chaco Canyon people left their huge towns late in the 1100's or early in the next century apparently because they denuded what was pretty much a marginal environment by cutting down all the trees and brush for building purposes and for firewood and kindling. Then erosion set in and floods deposited silt all over their valley floor, ruining the best farm land and covering up springs which once existed.

But Mesa Verde and Kayenta held on into the great drought which Dr. Douglass' tree rings say occurred from 1276 to 1299 A.D. Just imagine 23 straight years with insufficient rain and snow to mature more than one crop or two during the whole time-it would ruin a great country such as the United States, much less a Stone Age people who couldn't import grain from across the seas! The pendulum swings in archeological theorizing, and some scientists now feel that the drought might not have been the only factor involved, that incoming nomads and internal strife during the hard times may have been more important than once thought.

At any rate, by 1300 A. D. the Pueblos had loaded what few of their precious possessions they could carry on their backs and sorrowfully left their beautiful and beloved towns and started the trek to the Rio Grande and Little Colorado and Verde Rivers where they painfully had to start all over again. We know they intended to go back to the old homes, for most doors were carefully filled with masonry as a preservation measure.

Moreover, they must have lost faith in their Great Kivas and in the Mesa Verde Sun Temple they never finished in a desperate attempt to bring rain during the drought, for they never built a true structure of either type again.

TURQUOISE FROG PENDANT. Mesa Verde. The Classic Hohokam Period

From 1100 to 1300 A. D. we see the phenomenon of two peoples living in friendly fashion side-by-side along the Gila and Salt Rivers-the Salado people, close cousins of the Anasazi and thus Pueblo people, moved into the valleys from east-central Arizona. There they had developed a southern Pueblo style of life-no kivas, but they made poly chrome pottery, buried their dead, and lived in villages of multi-storied houses of stone, which were, however, sur rounded by walls.

What started the movement of the Salado is not known, but their later drift was probably hastened when the northern drought (it was not so severe in middle and southern Arizona) caused movement of peoples to the south, which, in turn, put pressure on more southerly groups.

The Salado and Hohokam were friendly, we know, for they lived within a stone's throw of each other at many locations, but there was astonishingly little intermingling of culture and no hybrid civilization arose. The Hohokam continued to cremate their dead, make their red-on-buff pottery (although with slightly thinner paint and different shapes), and lived in their flimsy brush-and-mud houses.

About the only idea they took over was that of the compound (which they had been using some before, remember?). Inside the compound wall they built some clusters of rooms with walls of vertical poles and adobe, but the greater part of the compound space was occupied by large mounds of earth, inclosed by heavy adobe walls 4 to 7 feet thick and from 7 to 10 feet high. They were about 80 by 120 feet in size. On these slightly stupendous foundations they built their same flimsy brush-and-mud Hohokam houses! Such is Compound B at Casa Grande National Monument. The even more conservative people lived outside the compound wall in brush houses.

Compound A at Casa Grande is different and must have been mostly Salado, although a few pole-and-mud houses have been found inside the compound wall. The houses were from one to four stories in height and were constructed much like Pueblo rooms, except that good building stone was non-existent and the Salado were forced to use layers of caliche, a clay which they quarried from a depth of from three to six feet below the topsoil. They wet it in the quarry pits to a stiff consistency, then patted it onto the wall in layers until a course a foot or two high was in place. This was allowed to dry and set (for caliche contains free lime) until it was hard enough for the next course.

Thus was the Casa Grande, a great watchtower-apartment house, built, and it forms the dominant structure of Compound A and the Monument. The builders must have wanted height, for the five rooms of the first story were never plastered inside and were filled with earth to give strength as an above-ground foundation. From the single fourth story roof, lookouts could have discerned approaching enemies at a distance of two or three miles, and thus were able to summon the warriors from the fields in time to prepare for defense.

The Salado also built cliff dwellings, such as may be seen at Tonto National Monument on the Salt River. Building stone was rough, so they used much mud mortar, but we know they were skilled craftsmen in weaving, basketry, and wood and shell work, or else they traded much with the Hohokam. As in the Gila Valley, they buried their dead and did not cremate.

In the Classic Hohokam Period both peoples must have cooperated in working on the canal system, which reached its greatest extent. Some ditches were as big as thirty feet wide and seven feet deep, and more than 250 miles of the system have been traced by scholars centuries later.

POTTERY DESIGN. WINSLOW BLACK AND ORANGE. Museum of N. Ariz.

Pottery figurines were few and poorly made, but there were singleand double-bitted axes with three-quarter grooves, which were better than before. Perhaps the Salado brought the new stone adzes, picks, and saws which appeared in this period. Stone hoes also became plentiful, and, although they were notched or had "ears" they are believed to have been held in the hands for digging, rather than being hafted. Palettes of stone were no longer made, and no mirrors have been found. Ball courts were still small, and the game seems to have been dying out, for some villages have none. Stone balls are found and may have been for some kicking game. After living with the Hohokam for a hundred years the Salado vanished, certainly by 1450 A. D., and pueblo-like structures were never built again in the Gila and Salt valleys (until modern times, that is). Some scientists think traces of them may be found in the late pueblos of northern Chihuahua; others think part of the Salado may have amalgamated with the pre-Zuñi. Reasons for the collapse of the interesting HohokamSalado partnership could be various; waterlogging of the land by rise of the water table, exhaustion of the relatively few acres of soil they could reach with their ditches, failure of the canal system if river channels scoured and left the intakes high and dry, internal strife and friction, coming of the Apaches-take your choice.

The Renaissance Pueblo Period

Far from crushed by their vicissitudes at the end of the 1200's, the undaunted Pueblo people established groups of new towns in the Verde Valley and Hopi area of northeastern Arizona, the Zuñi region of eastern Arizona and western New Mexico, the Rio Grande valley of central New Mexico, and the northern Chihuahuan portion of Mexico. The Salado development has already been mentioned.

Towns were even bigger than in the Great Period, some having more than a thousand rooms and covering up to ten or twelve acres. The period is sometimes called Regressive Pueblo, because masonry and pottery design deteriorated somewhat in excellence, but many techniques were improved or new ones borrowed during this time. It can also be said that in many locations they had inferior building stone to deal with, and that some of the sloppy pottery designs were caused by their experimentation with a fascinating new paint, a lead glaze which melted and ran into the most interesting blobs! Some of the dwellings were in caves like the ones at Tonto and Montezuma Well and Montezuma Castle in Montezuma Castle National Monument and Ceremonial Cave in Bandelier National Monument. At the latter place and all along the Pajarito Plateau of northern New Mexico the Indians also utilized natural cavities in the soft cliffs of volcanic ash and enlarged them with their stone tools.

Indian houses were built against the bases of cliffs.

In front, they built regular pueblos, some four stories high, using the cliffs as back walls and the caves as back rooms. The towns in the valleys, and on the promontories (such as Tuzigoot) and mesas usually were square, rectangular, or oval groups of rooms arranged in tiers around one or more plazas, in which were located the kivas. The “cities” of the latter part of the period mostly were straight rows of houses, terraced from one to three stories high, separated by streets or plazas. Masonry was from good to crude, and often consisted of adobe, although sun-dried bricks were not used until Spanish times. There were no Great Kivas. In addition to the glazes, which were only used for decorative lines and never covered the whole vessel, fine polychrome pottery was manufactured, particularly in the western part of their territory. From 1400 to 1625 A. D. some of the most lovely pottery ever made in the Southwest was being being produced in the Hopi country, and the modern ware of this tribe is a revival based on these old beauties.

Some of the new inventions were doubleand spiralgrooved axes, bone hooks, “pemmican pounders” resembling small mauls, straight pipes with elaborately raised or incised designs, and shaped loom stones for holding the lower beam in place.

When Coronado's expedition came in 1540, it found the men and women wearing kilts or loincloths of cotton, long robes of rabbit fur or feathers, and mantles of cotton or of deerskin. The women (some of them) had the “squaw” dress of cotton with the left shoulder bare, and embroidered sashes, which also were worn sometimes by men. Yucca sandals were their only footgear. Men bobbed their hair; unmarried girls wore the hair in the “butterfly” whorls on either side of the head.

Here, with the coming of the Spaniards, we leave the Pueblo chronicle to Dr. Reed's sketch of the historic times. To just what kind of heights their particular type of civilization might have led them had their course not been interrupted by the impact of Western Europeans is a subject for interesting speculation. Perhaps their communal style of life with its all-pervading sense of nature and its insistence on peace and democracy might have had a message for the troubled world. Perhaps it still does, for the Pueblos, despite their adoption of many of the white man's material ways, have maintained intact a remarkable portion of their gentle philosophy and different spirit.

The Pueblo pageant that had its beginning almost two thousand years ago in the purple-shadowed red mesa-land of the Southwest is still unfolding its drama. If you miss it, if you fail to know the Pueblos, you are neglecting one of the richest and most rewarding of all Southwestern experiences.

All hail the Pueblos-long may a great people prosper in their own distinctive individuality!