Archeological Expedition to Arizona in 1895: Seventeenth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1895-1896, Government Printing Office, Washington, 1898, pages 519-744Fewkes, Jesse Walter
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Archeological Expedition to Arizona in 1895: Seventeenth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1895-1896, Government Printing Office, Washington, 1898, pages 519-744
Two centers of distribution of cliff houses occur in our Southwest:
those of the upper tributaries of the Colorado in the north and the
cliff houses of the affluents of the Salt and the Gila in the south.
The watershed of the Rio Grande is, so far as is known, destitute of
this kind of aboriginal dwellings. Between the two centers of
distribution lie the pueblos of the Little Colorado and its
tributaries, the home of the ancestors of the Hopi and the Zuñi. The
many resemblances between the cliff houses of the north and those of
the south indicate that the stage of culture of both was uniform, and
probably the same conditions of environment led both peoples to build
similar dwellings. All those likenesses which can be found between the
modern Zuñi and the Hopi to the former cliff peoples of the San Juan
region in the north, apply equally to those of the upper Salado and
the Gila and their tributaries to the south; and so far as arguments
of a northern origin of either, built on architectural or
technological resemblances, are concerned, they are not conclusive,
since they are also applicable to the cliff peoples of the south. The
one important difference between the northern and the southern tier of
cliff houses is the occurrence of the circular kiva, which has never
been reported south of the divide between the Little Colorado and the
Gila-Salado drainage. If a kiva was a feature in southern cliff
houses, which I doubt, it appears to have been a rectangular chamber
similar to a dwelling room. The circular kiva exists in neither the
modern Hopi nor the Zuñi pueblos, and it has not been found in
adjacent Tusayan ruins; therefore, if these habitations were
profoundly influenced by settlers from the north, it is strange that
such a radical change in the form of this room resulted. The arguments
advanced that one of the two component stocks of the Zuñi, and that
the aboriginal, came from the cliff peoples of the San Juan, are not
conclusive, although I have no doubt that the Zuñi may have received
increment from that direction.
Cushing has, I believe, furnished good evidence that some of the
ancestors of the Zuñi population came from the south and southwest;
and that some of these came from pueblos now in ruins on the Little
Colorado is indicated by the great similarity in the antiquities of
ancient Zuñi and the Colorado Chiquito ruins. Part of the Patki people
of the Hopi went to Zuñi and part to Tusayan, from the same abandoned
pueblo, and the descendants of this family in Walpi still recognize
this ancient kinship; but I do not know, and so far as can be seen
there is no way of determining, the relative antiquity of the pueblos
in Zuñi valley and those on the lower Colorado.
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