The Book of the National ParksYard, Robert Sterling
History
The Book of the National Parks
Yard, Robert Sterling
National parks and reserves -- United States
Mummy Lake is not a lake and no mummies were ever found there. This
old-time designation applies to an artificial depression surrounded by a
low rude stone wall, much crumbled, which was evidently a storage
reservoir for an irrigation system of some size. A number of conspicuous
mounds in the neighborhood suggest the former existence of a village of
pueblos dependent upon the farms for which the irrigation system had
been built. One of these, from which a few stones protruded, was
excavated in 1916 by Doctor Fewkes, and has added a new and important
chapter to the history of this people. This pueblo has been named Far
View House. Its extensive vista includes four other groups of similar
mounds. Each cluster occurs in the fertile sage-brush clearings which
bloom in summer with asters and Indian paint-brush; there is no doubt
that good crops of Indian corn could still be raised from these sands
to-day by dry-farming methods.
Far View House is a pueblo, a hundred and thirteen feet long by more
than fifty feet wide, not including a full-length plaza about
thirty-five feet wide in which religious dances are supposed to have
taken place. The differences between this fine structure and the
cliff-cities are considerable. The most significant evidence of
progress, perhaps, is the modern regularity of the ground-plan. The
partitions separating the secular rooms are continuous through the
building, and the angles are generally accurately right angles.
The pueblo had three stories. It is oriented approximately to the
cardinal points and was terraced southward to secure a sunny exposure.
The study of the solar movements became an advanced science with these
people in the latter stages of their development. It must be remembered
that they had no compasses; knowing nothing of the north or any other
fixed point, nevertheless there is evidence that they successfully
worked out the solstices and planned their later buildings accurately
according to cardinal points of their own calculation.
Another difference indicating development is the decrease in the number
of kivas, and the construction of a single very large kiva in the middle
of the building. Its size suggests at once that the individual clan
organization of cliff-dwelling days had here given place to a single
priestly fraternity, sociologically a marked advance. Drawing parallels
with the better-known customs of other primitive people, we are at
liberty, if we please, to infer similar progress in other directions.
The original primitive communism was developing naturally, though
doubtless very slowly, into something akin to organized society,
probably involving more complicated economic relationships in all
departments of living.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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