Petrified Forest National Park: Home of the Ancients

PETRIFIED Ancint gosip? Newspaper Rock Ever-increasing tourist attraction

The Petrified Forest area, whose major interest is provided by the fossilized trees antedating by millions of years the coming of man, is domed with a surprising number of small stone ruins of settlements of prehistoric Pueblo Indians.

This seemingly desolate region evidently was relatively densely occupied by little groups of farming Indians for eight centuries, from nearly 1500 years ago to 700 years ago, with a few few villages containing another hundred years or so, into or through the fourteenth century.

The people had sufficient leisure, somehow, in this difficult environment, to indulge their artistic impulses by carving hundreds of petroglyphs on the low sandstone cliffs and great boulders.

The people who lived in the Petrified Forest region hundreds of years ago were Pueblo Indians of the same race seen today in the Hopi villages and other modern pueblos. They practiced agriculture, cultivating corn, beans, and pumpkins; and made pottery. They had tools and weapons of stone, bone, and wood, and they probably wore simple garments made of cotton cloth and the skins of wild animals.

In the sixth or seventh century of our era there were small groups of early people occupying the region, living in scattered villages of large circular slab-lined pit houses. These pit houses consisted of a shallow excavation walled with a row of large slabs of stone, covered over with a construction, perhaps shaped like a flattened dome, of poles, brush, and mud.

The early people made fairly good, but undecorated, pottery, both a polished brownware and crude, rough, light-gray, typical Basketmaker ceramics. It is possible that the two kinds of pottery represent two groups, or tribes, of Indians, coming into the Petrified Forest from different directions.

From a thousand years ago to about the middle of the thirteenth century there, apparently, was a fairly large Pueblo population in the Petrified Forest, as more than hundred village sites of the period have been located. They are mostly very small settlements, no longer of slab houses but of small adjoining rooms of stone masonry built on the surface.

The pottery of this epoch includes brown utility ware and several types of black-on-white and black-on-red painted ware. Some of this pottery was received by trade, not locally manufactured, from various other areas.

FOREST NATIONAL PARK Home of the Ancients FROM A NATIONAL PARK SERVICE BULLETIN

There may have been more seeps and springs than there are now along the escarpments to provide sufficient water for a farming population of the size indicated. It would be quite possible for many springs to have failed without any notable climatic change or decrease in rainfall. In the fourteenth century, characterized by polychrome pottery, a pink or tan ware with black designs outlined in white, there were only a few villages in the Petrified Forest area and they were notably larger than the tiny earlier settlements.

Trade with different regions is evidenced by the finding of fourteenth century Zuñi and Hopi pottery, as well as pottery from the White Mountains to the south, related to the former.

The people evidently collected into fewer and larger groups toward the end of the thirteenth century, and abandoned the area within another hundred years, joining either the Zuni people to the east or the Hopi Indians to the northwest. Whether they left because of failure of water sources or because of Apache attacks is not known. One of the few late sites is the Puerco Ruin, occupied from very early times on into the fourteenth century. This ruin, located adjacent to the main road through the monument, is built in the form of a hollow square about 230 feet by 180 feet, around a plaza 185 by 130 feet. It probably was two-storied, and could have housed a hundred families.

In the southern end of the monument are several sites that were built of chunks of petrified wood. One of these, koown as Agate House, was partially reconstructed in shoriginal style in 1933. The ancicat people also used petrified wood occasion-ally, extremely hard though it is, for flaked scone insera-sments such as acrowpoints.

Pictures and designs were carved or pecked in the aandstone faces of the low escarpment, foeming the edge of the mess just south of the Kio Puarco, and on great boulders fallen away from the cliff. A few are readily seta at the Feerco Ruin, and there are many others on and near Newspaper Rock. These petroglyphs include geometric patterns, shnilar to painted pottary desigua, and life figures. Petroglyphs can seldom be "interpreted"; they prob-ably have no mystic meaning, no story to tell. They They may be clan symbols in some cases, inscribed by passersby, in the same way that unthinking persons today scribble their names on rocks and buildings, or they may be art for art's sake, simply csual decocetions and art designs.