Outlines of Zuñi Creation Myths: Thirteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1891-1892, Government Printing Office, Washington, 1896, pages 321-448Cushing, Frank Hamilton
History
Outlines of Zuñi Creation Myths: Thirteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1891-1892, Government Printing Office, Washington, 1896, pages 321-448
Cushing, Frank Hamilton
Zuni mythology
The closeness of correspondence of all these features in the round
ruins to those in the cliff ruins (features which in the round ruins
appear less in place than in at least the older cliff ruins) would seem
to justify my conclusion, earlier stated, that the round towns were
simply outgrowths of the cliff villages, transplanted, as it were, into
the plains; for all of these features, as they occur in the old cliff
ruins, can, with but a single exception (that of the circular form of
the kivas or assembly chambers, which, as will presently be shown, were
survivals of a yet older phase of building), be accounted for as having
originated from necessity, whereas in the round ruins they could not
have originated even as possible expedients, since they were unsuitable
save by having become customary through long usage.
I have reasserted this fact because the theory that all cliff dwellings
were but outlying places of refuge or the hunting and farming stations
of larger pueblos in their neighborhood, strongly fortified by position
in order that the small parties occupying them now and then for
longer or shorter seasons might find safe retreat in them, has been
advanced quite successfully. As this theory is not unlikely to gain a
considerable hearing, it is necessary to demonstrate even more fully
the fact that at least the round towns did not give their structural
characteristics to such of the northern cliff ruins as resembled them
in plan, and that therefore the latter are to be regarded as actual
cliff-dweller remains. In the southern portions of New Mexico and
Arizona, as on the upper Salado and in canyons of the Sierra Madre,
still farther south, all the cliff dwellings and villages were built
without reference to the curved forms of the caverns in which they
occurred.[2] That is, they rigidly retained the rectangular pueblo form
of arrangement characteristic of the larger ruins in the valleys and
plains around them. Hence for this and for other reasons they may be
regarded as pueblos transferred to the cliffs, such outposts of the
larger pueblos of the plains as it is claimed all cliff dwellings were.
So, also, as hitherto intimated, many of the later cliff dwellings,
even of the north, have rectangular pueblo additions below them in
the canyons or above them on the mesas, and some of the village
ruins in the cave shelters themselves are almost faithful miniature
reproductions in general plan of the large pueblos of the plains near
at hand; but in the one case the pueblo additions above and below were
comparatively modern, and indicate either that the cliff dwellings they
are adjacent to continued to be occupied down to the time of later
true pueblo building, or that they were reoccupied from comparatively
modern pueblos and that all additions made were constructed according
to customary later forms of building. In the other case, that of the
rectangular structures in semicircular cave shelters, either a return
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