The Cloud in the Shell

The three great themes that run through Southwest Indian religious thought are curing, obtaining a personal spirit power, and the bringing of rain. And of these three the greatest is rain.

We don't know exactly why the ancient Hohokam made the hard trip to the Sea of Cortez to gather shells, or why they carved them with such skill and imagination. We do know that they used many for their own adornment and some for trade with the Mogollon and Anasazi. But there may have been another motive: bringing rain to the desert.

The assumption is derived from a ritual practice of the Papago Indians who probably are descendants of the Hohokam. Each summer a group of men would gather from several villages to make an arduous journey to the Gulf of California. The ostensible purpose of this trip was to gather salt. But the trip was as much a religious pilgrimage as an economic venture. The troup was led by a man who had made many such trips before and had thereby earned the title siiwanyi "rain priest." Along the route the men tested their own endurance in the face of heat, fatigue, and thirst. The whole trip was, for each man, a kind of vision quest wherein he might encounter a supernatural being and gain a guardian spirit.

But there was another major theme to the pilgrimage as well: the bringing of rain clouds back from the sea. Along the way the rain priest made a poetic speech in which he referred to a restless desire brought on by the withering of nature. The poem recounts that a guardian spirit fulfills this desire by refreshing the Earth with rain. On arrival at the beach the pilgrims entered the sea and cast corn meal and prayer sticks into the waves. Shells and stones were picked up and taken back as fetishes. Before turning homeward the rain priest asked the ocean to send a sea breeze to blow them home safely. When the group arrived home, boys greeted them with bull-roarers whose sound was intended to imitate the rain coming from the ocean. And the purification ritual for the returned pilgrims included further poetic reference to rain sent by the guardian of the "rain house standing in the west."

It seems clear that the Papago understood that the Gulf was the major source of summer rains. And the trip, the salt and shells, and the accompanying rituals were designed, among other things, to bring the rain back from the sea. It seems likely that the Hohokam also understood this weather pattern, and the trips we know they made to the Gulf may have had a similar end in view.

Beyond the cosmetic use they made of shell, as jewelry which reflects their paramount interest in rain and waterrelated symbols such as toads, lizards, snakes, seashells, and water birds, they may also have viewed shell as having the power to attract the clouds that rose up out of the sea to the southwest.

Riddles from page 43

certainty that Sunset Crater erupted in the winter of 1064-65, for example. Paradoxically, this was not at all what Douglass had set out to accomplish.

Although it had been recognized for centuries that the annual growth rings in trees vary in width due to the differences in yearly precipitation no one had thought of this as useful knowledge. But Douglass believed that sunspots affect earthly climate. If he were able to establish a climatic record based on tree rings, he reasoned, he then could correlate that record with the already available history of sunspot cycles.

Indeed, he compiled such a calendar by cross-dating or overlapping the ring records of older and older trees. Working with living conifers, however, he could go back no further than the year 1450. Older wood was needed.

On a serendipitous hunch, unaware he was about to revolutionize the study of past cultures, the astronomer then asked archeologists to send him bits of the beams and other timber fragments from their ruins. With such samples, he was able to extend his ring chronology further back through the centuries. It turned out, too, he could determine the precise year the ancient builders had cut down a tree.

Knowing the ages of the oldest and youngest wood in a ruin provided chronological brackets with which one could estimate the period of occupancy. Because the rings reveal whether each year was wet or dry, one also could reconstruct the climatic changes over the millennia. Almost until the day he died in 1962, at the age of 95, Douglass continued his efforts to relate the weather to sunspots. He never did, but tree-ring dating remains as powerful a tool to archeologists as X rays are to surgeons.

His scientific heirs at the university continue the work continually refining the chronology, constantly seeking new climatic interpretations. “One problem is in relating the climatic reconstructions to prehistoric human behavior,” Dr. Jeffrey Dean says. And while there are no more Mesa Verdes and Chaco Canyons to unearth, none of the big spectacular sites, the spades have not been put away. Probably more archeologists are in the field than ever before, in fact. The reason is that current U.S. environmental laws require that prehistoric remains the bureaucrats call them “cultural resources” be examined on any land involved in a federal project. As a result, teams of archeologists regularly race ahead of bulldozers.

So, the clues to the past continue to multiply. What they can teach us, as Bill Longacre puts it, is “how people have coped with various problems, both environmental and social. This can't help but give us a better understanding of how we might cope.” In retrospect, prehistoric people did not always act with wisdom. At Keet Seel, they denuded their area of trees, which accelerated erosion, which destroyed their farmland.

Still, Haury feels the ancients adapted well, by and large. Of the desert Hohokam, he says: “Anybody who can survive this country as long as they did had to be sensitive and adjustable to the environment. And they carved out a good life for themselves.”

Man in the Land of Prophecy

"Man is not himself only, not solely a variation of his racial type in the pattern of his immediate experience. He is all that he sees; all that flows to him from a thousand sources... He is the land, the lift of its mountain lines, the reach of its valleys....

"...(man) is aware of a steady purr in the midriff of his being, which, if he is an American, comes to the surface in such half-articulated exhalations as 'Gosh, but this is a great country!' "To feel thus about your home-land is a sign that the mysterious quality of race is at work in you. For new races are not made new out of the dust as the first man was. They are made out of old races by reactions to new environment. ... Where two or three racial strains are run together, as cooperative adventures in the new scene, or as conqueror grafting himself upon an earlier arrival, the land is the determining factor in the new design..."It draws, this land of prophecy... from all up the California coast to San Francisco between the sea and the Sierras, from districts east of Rio Grande toward Texas, from Chihuahua and Sonora of the south. But... it takes its dominant note from the place of the Sacred Mountains, from the place of our Ancients."