Electrifying Arizona

In the 11th century, at about the time the Normans conquered England, Sunset Crater erupted in northern Arizona and layered an 800-square-mile area with volcanic debris. Some of the Indian farmers who labored in a world forever marked by this cataclysm lived at the pueblo now called Ridge Ruin, atop a windswept hill overlooking a valley carpeted with cinders. They were Sinaguas (pronounced Seen-ab-wahs, Spanish for "without water"), a people influenced by contact with Anasazis from cliff cities to the north and east, Mogollons from the southeast, and enterprising Hohokams who had first arrived in the Phoenix area from Mexico around 300 B.С.

Nearly a thousand years later, Ridge Ruin is a place of memories. Located about 20 miles east of Flagstaff, the ruin offers little to see beyond three rubble-choked pits perhaps six to eight feet deep. The 20-odd-room, two-story pueblo collapsed long ago into crumbled basalt boulders and sandstone masonry encrusted with lichens and overgrown with tangled vines and shrubs. The lake where Sinaguas fished has dried up. Fields where they planted corn, beans, and squash have reverted to wilderness. Silently and inexorably, this home of a people whose name for themselves will never be known is returning to the earth from which it rose. But there is something special about Ridge Ruin, where the sense of mystery associated with centers of ancient culture cuts especially deep. Perhaps that is only to be expected. It is here, after all, that the spirit of the Magician continues to work its spell. Spring of 1939 found Museum of Northern Arizona archeologist John C. McGre gor supervising the excavation of Ridge Ruin. The crew's foreman was Milton Wetherill, scion of the famed clan of cattlemen-traders who had brought the Anasazi cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde, Colorado, to public attention in the 1880s. Near Ridge Ruin's northernmost wall, diggers unearthed Room 13, a semisub erranean building dating to around 1125. One afternoon, as most of the crew dispersed to Flagstaff for the weekend, Wetherill investigated an irregular area on Room 13's earthen floor and found broken sticks painted blue, green, and red; miniature bows, like ceremonial objects still used by some Pueblo Indians. He excitedly dispatched a man into Flagstaff to inform McGregor a major discovery was imminent. Fearful of looters, Wetherill spent the night at Ridge Ruin. "It's amazing how many times the most significant finds come at the most incon venient times," recalls McGregor, who arrived the next day with food and an emergency crew of diggers. "We contin ually had to remind ourselves not to rush, for the temptation was great to get some thing out to see what was under it." Scraping away dirt, the archeologists came upon a yard-deep grave containing a man's skeleton and hundreds of objects that had accompanied him on his final journey. When McGregor tallied these items-pottery, basketry, arrowheads, jewelry, shells, pouches filled with min eral paint, and so on he came up with a treasure trove totaling 613 artifacts, many of them unique. Struck by the overwhelming quantity, exotic quality, and lavish decoration of so many pieces, McGregor christened their owner, this bearer of prehistory's legacy, the Magician.

BURIAL OF THE MAGICIAN

TEXT BY RON MCCOY ILLUSTRATIONS BY GARY BENNETT The legacy of the Magician of Ridge Ruin is a treasure trove of mysterious artifacts.

(OPPOSITE PAGE) Three sets of wooden wands with ornamental beads were found, with remnants of a fourth set. The largest wand of each complete set is represented bere. (ABOVE) Artist's conception of the Magician. His skullcap was of alternating bands of black and white beads. Shell and turquoise pendants bung from his ears. The nose plug is of argillite and turquoise. His wands may link him to a rite in which priests swallowed sticks while under the protection of fierce beasts.

Imagine the Magician of Ridge Ruin. He is 35 to 40 years of age and stands at least 5 feet 8 inches, perhaps even four or five inches more-maybe half a foot or so taller than the average Ridge Ruin adult male. He possesses the square jaw typical of his contemporaries, but his cheekbones are heavy, and his face and nose are noticeably longer than those of most of the people who occupy this region.The Magician wears a skullcap made with alternating bands of white and black beads, some so finely drilled that not even a slender sewing needle will pass through the holes. The dark beads are stone; the white ones are delicate tubular dentalium shells. He wears a pair of shell and turquoise ear pendants; inserted through his nose is a plug of dark red argillite with buttons of brilliant turquoise at either end. Encircling the upper part of one arm is a basketry band overlaid with an exquisite mosaic of bright blue turquoise, black stone, and red argillite dominated by a capital-T motif formed by orange rabbit teeth. A bracelet of turquoise beads encircles his right wrist; on his left are a pair of carved turquoise talismans, possibly locust heads-insects often associated in the Southwest's Indian milieu with the growth of crops at the onset of summer. He clutches a string of shell tinklers in his Right hand; loops and strands of identical tinklers are wrapped around his knees and attached to the sides of his kilt. Other items in the Magician's cachenow stored at the Museum of Northern Arizona-include more than 400 arrowheads; wooden tubes and gourds filled with green malachite and blue azurite; crystals of red cinnabar; a shell-turquoiseiron pyrite mosaic of an abstract bird mounted on a shell bracelet; an abalone shell and two shell fishhooks; a 4½-inchtall cup made from cottonwood root and painted red with blue stepped designs; and rattles made from the nests of trapdoor spiders, reminiscent of the Yaquis' cocoon rattles. Of all the Magician's possessions, his 12 wooden wands, ranging from 10% to 19 inches in length, are probably the most intriguing. They were arranged in four sets of three wands each, grouped in a smallmedium-large sequence. One set displays a carved deer hoof at the end of each shaft; the largest of these hooves is painted green. The second set is decorated with carvings of human hands; the 4½-inch-tall one on the largest stick is painted green with red trim.

The third set was likely decorated with a star and crescent or double-horn shape covered with a rich turquoise mosaic. Of the fourth set, only remnants were uncovered; the staffs of those wands were probably surmounted by green-and-red spikes with serrated edges.

The elated McGregor announced without exaggeration that this was “the richest burial ever reported in the Southwest.” Nearly half a century has passed since the Magician emerged from his era into ours. The magnificence of his burial remains unsurpassed in the annals of Southwestern archeology, and tantalizing questions remain unanswered.

Who was the Magician? What was his role within the vanished society that obviously had paid him high honor? Why was he buried with offerings of such number and exquisite quality as to make him the undisputed Tutankhamen of the American Southwest? Plainly, this was a man of prominence. To some investigators, the Magician's long nose, long face, and comparatively great height raise the possibility he was a foreigner.

Many of his belongings testify to the prehistoric Southwest's intricate trade network. Hardly any of the 25 bowls, jars, and pitchers buried with him are from Ridge Ruin. Some were crafted at Kayenta, Holbrook, and Black Mesa. The Magician's shells originated on the beaches of California and along the shores of Mexico's Sea of Cortes. Two macaws, whose bones may have been part of the burial, probably came from Mexico. His tur-quoise was likely dug from Los Cerillos mines of central New Mexico. Some of his mineral paint came from the Verde Valley, the Prescott area, the Painted Desert, and southern Arizona. A resinous varnish derived from an insect was used for gluing his mosaics. This substance, called lac, is non-existent near Ridge Ruin but could have been obtained around present-day Phoenix, then a Hohokam stronghold.John McGregor believes the Magician may have been a clan chief or priest who died without a successor, a circumstance that could cause the paraphernalia of his position to be buried with him. McGregor was impressed when some Hopi Indians identified the Magician's wands as impor-tant to a ritual in which men slipped sticks down their throats, linking him to a rite during which priests invoked the protec tion of fierce animals such as bears or mountain lions. (Interestingly, eight mountain lion claws and two lion teeth, drilled through and painted green, were found inside a coiled basket beside the Magician.) It has been suggested that some Sinaguas moved northeast and merged with the Hopis around 1400, three centuries after the time of the Magician.

Emil Haury, former director of the Arizona State Museum and the dean of Southwestern archeologists, recently said in an interview that although the Magician was not a Hopi, he could have been a “protoHopi.”Then again, he may have been an itinerant trader from Mexico. Extensive commerce was carried on between the Indians of the Southwest and those of northern Mexico. For example, turquoise was transported south in return for such Mexican goods as copper bells and the parrots and seashells found at Ridge Ruin. Some Mexican merchants could have been buried in the Southwest. Others might have established trading posts at such centers as the sprawling Anasazi complex at Chaco Canyon, New Mexico. Illinois State University anthropologist Jonathan E. Reyman, after compiling a list of 25 factors that might typify a Mexican trader's burial, concludes that two such sites have already been discovered in the inland Southwest: one at New Mexico's Pueblo Bonito and that of the Magician at Ridge Ruin.

“The Hopi identification of many of the Magician's belongings doesn't preclude a Mexican origin for them,” Reyman says of the Magician's wands. “In this context, it's important to remember the Hopi myth about Pala'tkwabi, the Red Land of the South, where some of their clans and ceremonial practices came from.” About midway between the proto-Hopi and Mexican-trader views of the Magician's identity lies the possibility that he was a Hohokam. Peter J. Pilles, Coconino National Forest archeologist, detects numerous Hohokam influences among the Sinaguas and has even suggested the presence of Hohokam trading posts among the Sinagua culture's southern branch in the nearby Verde Valley. Barton Wright, former curator at the Museum of Northern Arizona and author of numerous books and articles about the Hopis, sees some merit in this.

“Yes, the Magician might have been Hohokam,” Wright muses, preparing to unveil a startling and provocative suggestion. “But do you know what really fascinates me about the Magician? His possible role as a forerunner in Indian belief throughout the Southwest. Many tribes venerate the Twin War Gods, often simply called the Twins. They're a knowledgeable, powerful, mischievous pair. The oldest of the twins, Elder War God, wears-according to both Hopi and Zuni tradition-a cap very much like the Magician's. And as for the stick-swallowing, or sword-swallowing, that's a part of ritual history for Hopis, Zunis, and the people at Acoma and Jemez, too. Stick-swallowing tends to be linked to the War Society of a village, which is in turn intimately associated with the Elder War God, the fellow who wears the cap. Wouldn't it be fascinating if the Magician was an early priest of this Southwestern belief, or possibly the very individual around whom the belief came to be built?” Unfortunately, there are no clear-cut answers to questions about the Magician's identity. Overlapping of cultures and peoples was the rule in the prehistoric Southwest. This was a melting pot of mystery that has kept its secrets well. And if the burial of the Magician is any indication, enigma's continued reign in the region seems assured.

Ridge Ruin occupies a hillock, with slopes of medium grade on the south and west and sharper rises north and east. Gnarled juniper and sturdy scrub thrive on the volcanic soil. Eastward loom towering cinder mounds. Directly behind are the snow-capped San Francisco Peaks. All across the dramatic panorama, the countryside rushes up and sweeps away, spreading out like undulating waves. When one is gazing toward the rising sun, it is easy to envision this as some sort of natural stage at the very center of the world. And when the winter wind blows hard and cold off the icy San Francisco Peaks, as volcanic cinders swirl about wildly and twisted junipers sway-on such a day it requires no great leap of imagination to feel the Magician's enduring presence at Ridge Ruin.

Wherever the Magician came from, whoever he may have been, one fact about him strikes across the ages with powerful clarity: he reaches out from the impenetrable depths of nearly a millenium and commands our interest, demanding that we explore the possibilities of an unfamiliar terrain with our finite knowledge and the infinite resources of our imaginations. In so doing, the Magician, true to his name, still works his magic at Ridge Ruin.