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
In times of great danger small children were not infrequently bestowed
for safe-keeping in the larger of these little granary rooms in the
deepest recesses at the rear of the earliest cave villages, as the
finding of their remains without burial token in such situation has
attested; and thus the folk tales which modern Pueblos tell of children
left in the granary rooms and surviving the destruction or flight
of their elders by subsisting on the scant store remaining therein
(later to emerge--so the stories run--as great warrior-magicians and
deliver their captive elders), are not wholly without foundation in
the actual past of their ancestry. It was thus that these first cliff
dwellers learned to build walls of stone with mud mortar, and thus, as
their numbers increased (through immunity from destruction which, ever
better, these cliff holds afforded), the women, who from the beginning
had built and owned the granaries, learned also to build contiguously
to them, in the depths of the caverns, other granary-like cells
somewhat larger, not as places of abode, at first, but as retreats for
themselves and their children.
It is not needful to trace farther the development of the cliff village
proper into a home for the women and children, which first led to the
tucking of storerooms far back in the midst of the houses; nor is it
necessary to seek outside of such simple beginnings the causes which
first led to the construction of the kivas, always by the men for
themselves, and nearly always out in front of the house cells, which
led to the retention for ages of the circular form in these kivas and
to the survival in them for a long time (as chambers of council and
mystery, where the souls of the ancients of men communed in these
houses of old with the souls of their children's grandchildren) of
the cross-laid upper courses of logs and even the roofings of thatch.
Indeed, it is only in some way like this, as survival through slow
evolution of archaic structures for worship, that the persistence
of all these strange features--the retention for use of the men,
the position in front of the houses, the converging hexagonal log
wall caps, the unplastered roofing of thatch--until long after the
building of houses for everyday use by the women, with walls continuous
from floor to ceiling, with flat and mud-plastered roofs and smooth
finishing inside and out, manifest themselves.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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