Aztec Ruins National Monument, New MexicoCorbett, John M. (John Maxwell)
History
Aztec Ruins National Monument, New Mexico
Corbett, John M. (John Maxwell)
Aztec Ruins National Monument (N.M.)
There were a great many beads and ornaments. I cannot give a
description of these, as I had no opportunity to examine them closely.
I remember seeing quite a lot of turquoise. There were a number of
stone axes, polished, and much nicer in appearance than the average
type found in this vicinity. There were also skinning knives,
so-called, and sandal lasts; cushions or rings they wore on their
heads for carrying burdens—some made of yucca, nicely woven or
braided; some made very plain, in coils of yucca strips, tied in
various places to hold the strips together; some were made of juniper
bark wrapped with strings, and some were made of corn husks. These may
have been used also as jar rests to support vessels with convex
bottoms which would not stand upright very well without some kind of
support.
[Illustration: Woven yucca sandals.]
[Illustration: Probable snowshoe made of willow, reeds, and yucca
fibers. Length 20″.]
Obviously, findings such as these could not long remain a secret, and
for a considerable time it was a favorite weekend sport to hunt for old
remains at this ruin and others in the immediate vicinity. A great
quantity of invaluable archeological material must have been carried
away in this manner and has long since been lost or scattered among
private individuals. A little of it got into museum collections, but
most of it was carried off by the people who found it and who then left
it in obscure corners of their houses until it was broken or lost. As
Howe himself said in his later days when he remembered these early
findings:
When we had finished this work, the stuff was taken out and carried
off by different members of the party, but where is it now? Nobody
knows. Like most of the material from the smaller pueblos around the
larger buildings, it is gone. I, being only a small kid, did not get
my choice of artifacts, I had to take what was left, which made a nice
little collection, at that. But it, too, is about all gone.
We went on with our work, opening all of the rooms that visitors now
pass through with the guides, but we found nothing more. The holes
that we made through the walls have been converted into doorways
through which all visitors now pass from room to room.
For a number of years, rather indiscriminate looting by pothunters and
others interested in these antiquities continued sporadically. Luckily,
the pothunters did not get into the rooms which seemed to require a lot
of hard work and digging, but merely broke into those rooms which were
still more or less intact and in which readily accessible material was
lying around on the floor or scattered through the debris.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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