The Amerind Foundation

The Amerind Foundation of Texas Canyon A Small Archeological Center with a Large Reputation Story by Carle Hodge Photography by Gill Kenny

In about the year 1300, disaster befell a young man in the once-magnificent metropolis of Paquime, in northernmost Mexico. A professional grower of macaws had been breeding his birds on the second story of an otherwise abandoned house when the floor collapsed. He and his feathered charges were entombed in the debris for perhaps six and a half centuries-until their fate was intertwined with that of two Americans. One was a Connecticut industrialist who became beguiled by antiquity when he stumbled upon a prehistoric pot in an Arizona cave. The other was a curious schoolboy whose life was almost instantly transformed when he breached a research laboratory at Chicago's Field Museum. South from where Interstate 10 threads through the great granite boulders and Almost halfway to that hamlet of 165 people, cupped in the Little Dragoon Mountains, a discreet sign identifies the Double F Ranch. The Double F has seen its last roundup.

(Opposite page) The Amerind Foundation, a private research center and teaching facility, basks in the warm desert sun of Texas Canyon, near Dragoon, Arizona.

(Above) This Ramos polychrome hooded effigy jar was one of thousands of artifacts unearthed by Amerind archeologists in the late 50s and 60s at the ancient city of Paquime, near modernday Nueva Casas Grandes, Mexico.

Instead, one comes upon a cluster of pink, red-tile-roofed, Spanish-style buildings that seem to have sprouted from the rocky woodland. Here are the headquarters of the Amerind Foundation, a small archeological center with a large global reputation. Amerind has deciphered the secrets of prehistoric places with names that murmur like a desert breeze: Casas Grandes in Chihuahua, Painted Cave and Paloparado, Babocomari and Wind Mountain.

The private foundation also was a pioneering practitioner of what Dr. Charles Di Peso, its director since 1955, calls "historical reconstruction."

That means wedding archeology, ethnic studies, and history to "determine the lifeway of a people of a specific area."

Soon, if plans coalesce, Amerind will mount a search for an ancient Arizona folk that, legend has it, formed blankets from the fur of an animal "the size of a greyhound."

Amerind Foundation

The improbably bucolic location for all of this scholarship was not the capri-cious choice it might seem.

William S. Fulton, the Connecticut magnate who founded Amerind and whose bequests assure its perpetuity, learned of Indian ruins on the land. He bought the property in 1931 so he could excavate them.

His interest in such things actually had been ignited a dozen years earlier when he was assessing his father-in-law's Copper Chief Mine on Mingus Mountain near Jerome.

Hunting a new source of water for the mine, he began poking into caves in the vicinity, and in one of them he came upon a small, plain prehistoric pot.

The clay vessel, unremarkable in itself, was the seed of a vast collection that Fulton assembled over the remainder of his life. It still is seen by the 8000 or more visitors each year who stream, by appointment, through the museum he built on the ranch near Dragoon.

The museum, which grew by stages over the years, began because the collection soon overflowed the winter home the Fultons had constructed on the Double F.

Eventually he decided to incorporate his foundation. That was in 1937, by coincidence the year that curiosity overcame a Chicago high school senior.

His nerves steeled, Charlie Di Peso did something he had wanted to do for years. He brushed past a "Do Not Enter" sign and went into a research wing at the Field Museum.

A stranger in the hall demanded to know what he was doing. Within the hour, the stranger, Dr. Paul S. Martin, had invited the teenager to accompany him on an archeological expedition to Colorado. A career germinated.

(Left) Amerind's "by appointment only" museum houses a vast collection of Southwestern artifacts in addition to buckskin costumes from the eastern woodlands, woven baskets from the Pacific Coast, and a six-foot wooden Indian from Connecticut, who "guards" the main entrance.

(Right) The vast network of trade routes established by economically sophisticated Mesoamericans linked the ancient communities of Mexico with the Southwest.

Back at the ranch, meanwhile, Fulton recruited his first professional archeologist, a young man named Carr Tuthill. He also dispatched Dr. Emil Haury, of the Univer-sity of Arizona, to excavate Painted Cave in northeastern Arizona.

A decade earlier, Fulton, whose family fortune came from the manufacture of mining equipment, had discovered in that dry cave a mummy and assorted artifacts that included a painted basket.

Tuthill, during early World War II, doubled as Dragoon's air-raid warden, a post in which he was not overworked.

The young scientist left in 1947, Di Peso, by then a graduate student at the University of Arizona, replaced him. His first job was the unearthing of Babocomari, a prehistoric village north of the Huachuca Mountains.

At Babocomari, bison bones were turned up in a cooking pit, "a stunning find" he says because both biologists and archeologists had assumed the shaggy beasts did not roam west of the Pecos River in New Mexico. Half a dozen other sites subsequently were exposed in southern Arizona by the Amerind trowels. But it was at one, long abandoned, known as Quiburi Di Peso was able to prove the practicality of historical reconstruction.

Native Sobaipuris still occupied Quiburi when the Spaniards came. Thus, written European accounts could be compared with the relics revealed by the archeologists. Locations the conquerors mentioned could be verified on modern maps.

Still, in archeology, the resolution of one riddle tends to compound others.

Researchers had long wanted to know more about how the pre-Columbian peoples of the American Southwest related to those of what now is Mexico.

There obviously were profound influences from the south in such areas as arts and architecture. But when and how were these cultural traits transmitted? Questions of this sort led to the largest-scale Amerind odyssey into the past.

"Part of the answer was thought to lay in Mexico." Di Peso reflected recently, "in the northwestern corner of the state of Chihuahua, in the foothills of the Sierra Madre Mountains."

The great wasted city of Paquime, there beside the Casas Grandes River, near the modern-day town of Nueva Casas Grandes, had tempted generations of archeologists. Although Paquime indeed had been declared a mexican national monument, its secrets remained mainly buried.

A joint Amerind-Mexican assault took shape. For over three years, from 1958 to 1962, Di Peso directed a team that numbered up to 60 people. They sifted and sorted out 40 acres of the great pueblo.

Planned with the precision of a military operation, the project nonetheless suffered a setback. Mexican red tape delayed the Americans and their equip-ment for 18 days at the border.

The wait was worthwhile, Paquime proved to have been, 400 years before the first Spaniards, a spoke of an enormous network. Ornaments, ceramics, and other items were made in the city and then trans-ported over many hundreds of miles in exchange for such things as torque, which is rare in Mexico, and metals.

There was a vast market for the brightly-hued, long-tailed parrots called macaws, imported from the jungles of Tampico on the east coast of Mexico, and bred by the hundreds in Paquime.

Besides those extricated with the young man whose floor caved in, hundreds of macaw skeletons were found among the ruins.

"The Casas project," said Dr. Di Peso, "changed the concept of people developing in a vacuum to the idea that people coming in from the outside had a tremendous impact for economic reasons. "Of course, most archeologists don't want to dirty their Native Americans with

Amerind Foundation

crass economics. But economics was one of the strongest motivations that changed the history of this area.

"Culture changed only when people came in and could make a buck," he says.

"I have tried to impose the concept of a New World mercantile system that was at work affecting cultures here in prehistoric times-just as there was a mercantile system in the Old World."

All of this also would mean, he contends, that this huge prehistoric region-most of Mexico and much of the western United States-was not comprised of isolated pockets of disparate tribes.

Rather, it must have been what he envisions as "one vast cultural area undivided by political boundaries." Di Peso calls this "Gran Chichimeca."

The people of Paquime constructed multi-storied structures and a water-control system, including walk-in wells, that present-day engineers would envy.

Somehow, this urban spirit dwindled. By around A. D. 1260, roadways and drains had become neglected and in disrepair. In 1340, intruders sacked the city, razing the temples and other edifices.

The city was never completely aban-doned, however. Eleven families had to be relocated before the excavation could commence in 1958. Most of the men were hired as helpers by the Amerind archeologists.

Once the fieldwork ended, several more years were required for analysis of the artifacts (later returned to the Mexican government) and to write the reports, a phase financed by the U. S. National Science Foundation.

The research finally was published in 1974 in eight thick, handsome volumes by Northland Press in Flagstaff. Fulton, unhappily, never saw them. He died in 1964, three days before his 84th birthday.

Di Peso, 62 now, decries the decline of basic archeology of this kind, pointing out that "99 percent of our archeology now is not research oriented but is 'culturalresource management,' to inventory and surface-check ruins.

"We're one of the few outfits in the United States still doing traditional archeology." Cultural-resource management, mandated by environmental considerations, usually is supported by government or industry. Generally, it involves simply a cursory cataloging of prehistoric materials in the path of such developments as highways or power lines.

"Most archeologists are now doing things called 'overviews' that the government likes," Di Peso complains. "They've become federalized."

Again, the baring of Paquime resolved some mysteries-and opened others. Evidence suggests the Paquimeans scattered satellite villages through much of the Gran Chichimeca, providing technicians who ultimately became the leaders of groups already there."

"They were the ones who had ideas, and they were absorbed into the local population as leaders," Di Peso proposes.

"They would keep those places going for a couple of hundred years and, in turn, set up other exploitative prehistoric mining towns.

"This was the basis for all our cultures in the Southwest and other ancient cities to the north."

Because the turquoise at Paquime appeared to come from the Azure Mine, near Silver City in western New Mexico, Di Peso believes one such satellite settlement existed there.

So, between 1977 and 1979, once more with National Science Foundation funds, he dug into a site there on Wind Mountain, a settlement once occupied by a people called Mogollon.

Di Peso thinks Wind Mountain was "on a trade route, a stopping place between Mexico and Chaco Canyon and Mesa Verde.

"It was very nice because it has given us a nice long sequence, from about 215 B. C. to about A. D. 1200," he says.

"The question was, were the people of Casas Grandes sophisticated enough to send out satellite mining villages to exploit the turquoise in the Mogollon Mountains?

"Right now, I'd say yes. We have a village of surface houses established around 1100 which probably was inspired by the Casas Grandeans. The pottery types were basically Casas Grandean."

Proof could come from the laboratory analysis, now being completed of the turquoise from both Wind Mountain and Paquime.

When turquoise is made radioactive, it produces a spectrum of trace elements unique to the mine from which it was derived.

Already, Di Peso is pondering his next quest. Once all the Wind Mountain material has been documented, late this year, he hopes to turn to the Gila River Valley in extreme eastern Arizona. The land there around Safford is virtually virgin to the spades of archeologists.

When the Spaniard Marcos de Niza trudged into the Southeast in 1539, he was beguiled by his Indian guides with tales of three great ancient empires: Cibola, Tusuyan, and Totoniac.

Prehistorians learned long ago that Tusuyan was in fact the Hopi country, and Cibola, the pueblo of Zuni.

But Totoniac, depicted to de Niza as a kingdom that built big houses and wove wool from the hair of "an animal the size of a greyhound," has eluded them.

Di Peso breaks into the smile of a man who believes he may hold a winning lottery ticket. "I have a sneaking suspicion," he offers, "that Totoniac was the Safford area."