Casa Grande Ruin: Thirteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1891-92, Government Printing Office, Washington, 1896, pages 289-318Mindeleff, Cosmos
History
Casa Grande Ruin: Thirteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1891-92, Government Printing Office, Washington, 1896, pages 289-318
Mindeleff, Cosmos
Arizona -- Antiquities; Casa Grande National Monument (Ariz.); Hohokam architecture; Indians of North America -- Arizona
So far as known to the writer no accurate plan of the Casa Grande ruin
proper has hitherto been made, although plans have been published; and
very few data concerning the group of which it forms a part are
available. It would seem, therefore, that a brief report presenting
accurate plans and careful descriptions may be of value, even though
no pretention to exhaustive treatment is made.
HISTORY AND LITERATURE.
The earlier writers on the Casa Grande generally state that it was in
ruins at the time of the first Spanish invasion of the country, in 1540,
and quote in support of this assertion Castaneda's description of a ruin
encountered on the march.[1] Castaneda remarks that, "The structure
was in ruins and without a roof." Elsewhere he says that the name
"Chichilticale" was given to the place where they stopped because the
monks found in the vicinity a house which had been inhabited by a people
who came from Cibola. He surmises that the ruin was formerly a fortress,
destroyed long before by the barbarous tribes which they found in the
country. His description of these tribes seems to apply to the Apache.
[Footnote 1: Castaneda in Ternaux-Compans. Voyage de Cibola. French
text, p. 1, pp. 41, 161-162. (The original text--Spanish--is in the
Lenox Library; no English translation has yet been published.)]
The geographic data furnished by Castaneda and the other chroniclers of
Coronado's expedition is very scanty, and the exact route followed has
not yet been determined and probably never will be. So far as these data
go, however, they are against the assumption that the Chichilticale of
Castaneda is the Casa Grande of today. Mr. A. F. Bandelier, whose
studies of the documentary history of the southwest are well known,
inclines to the opinion that the vicinity of Old Camp Grant, on the Rio
San Pedro, Arizona, more nearly fill the descriptions. Be this as it
may, however, the work of Castaneda was lost to sight, and it is not
until more than a century later that the authentic history of the ruin
commences.
In 1694 the Jesuit Father Kino heard of the ruin, and later in the same
year visited it and said mass within its walls. His secretary and usual
companion on his missionary journeys, Mange by name, was not with him on
this occasion, but in 1697 another visit was paid to the ruin and the
description recorded by Mange[1] in his diary heads the long list of
accounts extending down to the present time.[2] Mange describes the ruin
as consisting of--
A large edifice, the principal room in the center being four stories
high, and those adjoining it on its four sides three stories, with
walls 2 varas thick, of strong argamaso y baro (adobe) so smooth on
the inside that they resemble planed boards, and so polished that
they shine like Puebla pottery.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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