The Ancient Ones: Ancestral Puebloans & The Rise of the Kachinas

This is Thomas Wayne Riley, and you have found yourself, in the American Southwest:

In the late 1800s, in the far northern territories of the Dakotas, a man named Herbert Joseph Spinden was born, although he wouldn’t be long for that grassy land. After spending time in Washington state, he’d be lured north, even further north, like so many other hearty and adventurous men to Alaska in search of gold. Eventually though, his ultimate treasure awaited him back in the lower 45, and in 1902, Spinden would attend Harvard University where he’d receive his degree in anthropology and archaeology. But after gradating in 06, he’d begin his long journey of studying my original archaeological love, the Maya. His journey began by studying the art of those Mesoamerican peoples. He’d publish papers and resources and become quite familiar with his subject matter while also occasionally visiting Central and southern north America. But greener pastures were awaitin’ Spinden and in 1915, while working for the American Museum of Natural History, he received the green light for a five year project in Central America. There, he’d continue his many excavations and research over the Maya before being transferred to El Salvador and the Pacific Coast of Honduras and Nicaragua… and eventually Colombia and Panama. The man was an exceptional researcher… researcher and spy… because at the time, 1915 to 1920, while in the field for The American Museum of Natural History as an archaeologist, he was also working for the United States Office of Naval Intelligence.

At the time, WWI was in full swing and the fear of German espionage in the region and even more importantly, of U-Boat bases on the coasts, u-boat bases close enough to strike at America’s own ports and seaside cities, those fears were quite real. Spinden was working with a few other archaeologists, all with fantastic names and job histories and outfits that I cannot help but think inspired a certain famous archaeologist… who, in turn, inspired myself to pursue the field… well as awesome and as interesting as Spinden’s time excavating Maya sites while spying on Germans is, the real reason I bring up HJ Spinden is actually for his work at a place called Santa Clara Pueblo… a place near Santa Fe, in the Rio Grande Valley of New Mexico, in the American Southwest.

In the 1920s, Spinden visited the Tewa speaking Pueblo and was able to record a song that had been composed for something called the Turtle Dance. The Turtle Dance is pretty exciting to Puebloan outsiders because it is quite close to a kachina dance while not actually being one of those sacred masked occurrences. For the most part, outsiders are not allowed to view Kachina dances, and they’re certainly not supposed to record or later transcribe a kachina dance if they are privileged enough to witness one. So, the Turtle Dance, which one can still see today at the Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo, is an exciting peek into the practices of the people we are fixin’ to talk a good bit about. This Turtle Dance song’s lyrics are important to our episode and state:

Long ago in the north

lies the road of emergence!

Yonder our ancestors live,

Yonder we take our being.

Yet now we come southwards

For cloud flowers blossom here

Here the lightning flashes,

Rain water here is falling!

At that same Pueblo, Santa Clara, some twenty years or so before Spinden, another archaeologist named Jean Jeançon spoke with a puebloan named Aniceto Swaso who told him of his people, the Tewa speaking Puebloan people, Swaso told him this of their history:

We were a long time coming down to this country; sometimes we stop long time in one place, but all the time it was still too cold for us to stay, so we come on. After while some people get to what you call mesa verde, in Colorado… then they began to get restless again and some go west on the san juan river, some of them come by way of the Jicarilla apache country, some come the other way by way of cañon largo, Gallinas, and the Chama.

To quote myself from the last episode, we’ve talked about using oral traditions in archaeology and how it can be a slippery slope. Often helpful and sometimes useful and always important to take into account but to rely upon them… that can be tricky. In David Roberts In Search of the Old Ones, which talks about the Anasazi and Ancestral Puebloans and which is a book I have used quite a bit thus far for this series. Well David Roberts records a conversation he has with a veteran archaeologist, Jeffrey S Dean, who tells him of oral tradition, Hopi to be exact, but it’s a message quite a few researchers share, even if privately, quote: I don’t think the Hopi oral Traditions are worth the paper they’re written on. End quote.

Obviously oral traditions are not written down, but Dean knew that when he said the quip. The old archaeologist would go on to say he believes that because the Hopi are as far removed from the Anasazi as we Anglos are, it’s tough to take everything as true. Multiple massive things have happened in between the great migration that we talked about last time and will continue to talk about in this episode, but multiple fault lines as Dean calls them have occurred since the Anasazi Civil War. Those fault lines include the great migration itself, the introduction of something we will talk a lot about today, the Kachinas, the arrival of the Navajo and apache, the Spanish arrival and conquest and their introduction of an equally disruptive belief system, Christianity, and then the Mexicans, before the Americans, and now globalism. A constant onslaught has made it difficult to trust the old Puebloan oral traditions that anthropologists used to claim as gospel. Yet there is still reason to always listen and learn from the stories and in this episode, we’re going to use a few ourselves as we try to find out what happened to the other group of Ancestral Puebloans after the Anasazi Civil War.

Author and adventurer David Roberts, towards the end of that same in search of the old ones book, admits that he has indeed come to doubt the Puebloans oral traditions. Especially after he had learned so much about the history and archaeology and anthropology of the people. Yet, as he put it, quote, now and then I had my own preconceptions jolted by some extraordinary story. End quote. He then goes on to describe how an archaeologist, John McGregor, working near Flagstaff in the 1940s, had uncovered quote, the richest burial ever reported in the southwest. End quote. This burial’s occupant became known as The Magician and he was buried around 1125 in a pretty unspectacular pueblo. But he was surrounded by an enormous cache of decorated pots, baskets, with one of them having been decorated with fifteen hundred pieces of turquoise and shaped orange rodent teeth, hundreds of projectile points, mosaic amulets made of seashell and turquoise, decorated lion claws and teeth, a beaded skullcap and most importantly for us, and I’ll quote Roberts: long wooden wands whose heads were carved in the shape of human hands, deer’s feet, and the like. End quote.

After finding these remarkable objects, McGregor took these staffs over to the Hopi to ask if they had any idea what they were all about. Here’s Roberts again, quote, Independently, several elders agreed that the artifacts pertained to a witchcraft ceremony aimed at giving power to a war leader: in a kind of sword-swallowing rite, the celebrants thrust the wooden sticks down their throats until only the figured handle could be seen. Most remarkably, McGregor’s informants, shown only a few of the grave goods, specified other objects the archaeologist should have found in the burial. These were precisely the artifacts McGregor had uncovered. Across eight hundred years, fault lines or no, the knowledge of a ceremony no longer performed had been kept intact in the Hopi consciousness. End quote.

I hope you’ve still got your walkin’ sandals on from the last episode, but if not, it’s time to strap ‘em to your six toed feet while we cover, roughly half of those eight hundred years that Roberts mentioned above as we follow the Rio Grande Valley, Hopi, Zuni, & Other Puebloans and their belief systems from before the Civil War to the eve of Spanish incursion.

I feel like, before we really dive into the history of the Rio Grande region’s pueblos and the people, we should get a sense of the layout of the pueblos and probably define the region. Not really a layout of the Pueblos of today because there’s been so much change, but a layout of the pueblos as the Spanish would have seen them in the mid 1500s. Our story really starts in the early 1300s during the Great Migration we mentioned last time, but as archaeologist Scott Ortman puts it in his fantastic and exhaustive breakdown of Puebloan Migration book called Winds from the North, in that veritable textbook of a work, Ortman says that, quote, by AD 1400, the Pueblo settlements and peoples that would be encountered by Spanish explorers 150 years later were essentially in place. End quote. So, a brief description of those Pueblos, at least the ones in the Rio Grande Valley, which is the area around modern day Santa Fe and Albuquerque, but a brief rundown of the Pueblos Coronado would have seen. I had wanted to quote from an author, because a few of them do give very descriptive yet… convoluted and hard to follow without the accompanying map on the page, breakdowns of the area. It is truly a complex and rich linguistic and cultural region that baffles todays researchers as much as it baffled the Spanish. And again, I apologize if even my rundown’s a little tangled but the other authors and researchers had a bundled web of a description with languages, basins, rivers, mountains, valley, pueblos… it was a lot. So here goes…

When the Spaniards came north from Mexico, the first people they would have interacted with were a group of Piro speaking Puebloans. That Piro language is now extinct. North of the Piro, near Albuquerque along that big river the Rio Grande were the Southern Tiwa speaking pueblos. They would have been neighbors to the now extinct Tompiro language speaking pueblos. North of Albuquerque, the puebloans lived not only on the rio grande but also along the rivers that flowed into it. To the west, near those beautiful Jemez Mountains where Bandelier National Monument and Longmire’s cabin is located in the Valles Caldera, along the Jemez mountains to the west were the Towa speaking pueblos. There were also a group of Keres speaking villages. To the east, north of Albuquerque and the Sandia, or Watermelon mountains, there were a group of Tewa speaking pueblos. A little further east, at the base of the beautiful Sangre de Christo, or blood of Christ mountains, was the Pecos Pueblo… we don’t know what they spoke. Finally, around Santa Fe and further north were the main group of Tewa speaking pueblos. And above them near Taos were the Tiwa speaking pueblos. Ortman says of all this, quote, the most vexing problem in the archaeology of the Rio Grande drainage is how this complex distribution came about. End quote. No joke… as jumbled as that was, most other descriptions aren’t much clearer.

When I say the Piro and the Tompiro languages are extinct, it’s because, as you’ll see next episode, those puebloans were more aligned with the Spanish during the Revolt so they fled south with the retreating New Mexico spaniards. The Puebloans that didn’t were absorbed into the other peoples and in the process, they would have adopted their languages. So as Ortman says there at the end, this complex distribution of people with different languages and cultures and backgrounds, sometimes separated by other completely different cultures and languages, languages that are not mutually intelligible, meaning, they can’t even understand each other… this tangled map of peoples is a truly interesting and unanswered enigma. Even Lekson admits this same puzzle. In Lost World of the Old Ones, David Roberts quotes Lekson when he writes, In short, the linguistic diversity of today's pueblos is deep and baffling. As Steve Lekson says, and he now quotes the great and amazing Lekson, It’s one of the most intractable problems in all of Southwestern prehistory. End quote.

If you couldn’t guess, the Tiwa, Towa, and Tewa languages are all related and all belong to a group of languages known as the Kiowa-Tanoan language family which seems to have its roots, as we will soon heavily discuss, but they have their roots north of the four corners and are even related to the distant Kiowa Indians.

There are essentially, depending on who you ask, 6 to 8 languages spoken in the Puebloan world of New Mexico and Arizona between the Hopi, Zuni, Keres, Tewa, and others, TODAY! There is no doubt that before the Spanish arrived with their diseases and suppression of language, even more were spoken like the aforementioned Piro. There’s even a slightly different version of Tewa spoken at the Hopi Mesas which the Hopi neighbors practically refuse to learn. I am not even including the Athabaskan speaking Navajo and Apache or the Uto-Aztecan Utes in this episode… as they are not included in the quote unquote Peubloan peoples of the American Southwest. Although, the Hopi language is one of the seven language families that makes up the Northern Uto-Aztecan so I guess I am including some Uto-Aztecan.

Also not included in that description above are the many pueblos that surround the Rio Grande Valley like the Jemez pueblo on the west side of the Jemez Mountains. There’s also the Acoma, Sky City, pueblo, you may have seen the Casino off the highway. It's 50 miles west of Albuquerque off of I-40. Then, further west, there’s the Zuni Pueblo on the other side of El Malpais near the border of Arizona. Finally, to round out the Puebloan world… in the northwest corner of Arizona, completely surrounded by the Navajo Nation Reservation, you’ve got the aforementioned Hopi Mesas.

Obviously, untangling this web of migration and movement and evolution of the peoples and their languages is indeed an intractable problem! But one worth attempting anyways. I hope you have kind of a gist of the Puebloan area as defined by modern archaeologists. You can also look at the website, the American southwest . Com and go to this episode’s page, and you’ll see a map.

A thousand years ago during the rise of Chaco to the west, when that southern influenced altepetl was accumulating immeasurable wealth and influence over the people and the region of the Four Corners, the Rio Grande Valley was surprisingly sparsely populated. Sure, there were people and small villages and scattered settlements and they definitely knew of Chaco and interacted with it but still, the area wasn’t inundated with settlements like the San Juan Basin was. That’s the area near Mesa Verde in southern Colorado. The Rio Grand Valley being sparsely populated though is kinda surprising because as the name suggests, the Rio Grande flows right through it, and for the most part, as in outside of legends and stories, that river has water running within its banks 365 days a year. Despite that river though, the area is a difficult one to grow maize in and rainfall is too low to support a large population. Not to mention the growing season is just a bit too short. While the people that lived there used every method available to them at the time to get that precious precious water to their fields, evidence left by the people and their burials show that sometimes, there just wasn’t enough water to grow the crops to feed the people.

Archaeological digs have shown that during the 1100s, and also later during the 1300s, there were times when the puebloans were starving to death. Evidence of cattails, cholla cactus, and grass seeds being eaten at one pueblo in particular, Pueblo Arroyo Hondo, but evidence of those kinds of foods being eaten have shown that the people were resorting to quote unquote starvation foods. And all of these starvation foods would have led to growth problems and deficiencies of all sorts. Not to mention infections… and bone fractures. According to Steven Plog this malnutrition would have led to 15% of the people having bowed long bones… like you see in the old cartoons of cowboys with their parenthesis shaped legs. At the same time, infant and child mortality was devastatingly high with 26 percent, 1 out of every 4 children… dying before reaching their first birthday…. And 45 percent, every other child… dying before the age of 5… Average life expectance at this particular pueblo Arroyo Hondo was at 16.6 years, or as Plog puts it, quote, the shortest period discovered for any group of prehistoric Southwestern peoples. Life expectancy was so low and infant mortality so high that it undoubtedly hindered the functioning of the community. End quote. Hindered the functioning of the community is putting it delicately I feel like it would have ripped the community apart, which is why the site was abandoned twice, about 100 years apart. But that growing and then evaporating of settlements is a theme in the region for a long time.

Even though living was tough in a lot of places in the Rio Grande region, there were still significant areas of growth and construction of pueblos and villages. Often these settlements existed in a boom and bust cycle where the pueblos wouldn’t be occupied but for more than a couple decades before being abandoned… and sometimes returned to again later. Like the aforementioned, Arroyo Hondo. That place had one thousand two hundred two story rooms and 13 large plazas as well as a ton of other features that would have made it quite the city. It was enormous. But only a couple decades after it was built in 1315, it was abandoned. Although, as with many boom and bust repeated pattern settlements, it was reoccupied in the 1380s. At least until 1410 after a devastating fire swept through the pueblo which incinerated racks of stored corn. And we know how hot and devastating burned corn can be…

At the San Marcos Pueblo, which was first built in the 1100s, there were 3,000 rooms and it was one of the largest pueblos ever built in the American Southwest. Unlike a lot of later construction to the west that we talked about, The San Marcos Pueblo doesn’t seem to have been built defensively as it sits in the open next to a cool and clean spring. Breaking the boom and bust cycle that is typical of most of the area, San Marcos was still a flourishing Pueblo 400 years later when Coronado arrived in the 1500s, even though he may or may not… have visited it.

And about those defensive structures… in the last episode and maybe even the one before it.. but very recently I said rather confidently that for the most part Ancestral Puebloan and Anasazi Ruins didn’t have walls, but… I was less right than I thought. In reality, I was kinda right about there not being walls… obviously, I mean I’m mostly right… okay, I made a mistake, but there weren’t walls… at first! At least in the Anasazi and Ancestral Puebloan world of the Four Corners and especially the San Juan Basin. They really weren’t an architectural feature during the height of Chaco, at least before Chaco moved to Aztec… and before the Civil War. Walls just… really WEREN’T that common but… by 1280, the year of the great migration out of the four corners, over 80% of settlements had walls in the Mesa Verde region. I know I said they began building them in the Mogollon and Hohokam at about this time and afterwards but I had no idea that they were so prominent in the Four Corners area… But that makes sense! Because these Mesa Verdean Anasazi were at war and in my opinion these Upper San Juan basin Ancestral Puebloans were the rebels, rebelling against Chaco. They were also, again this is my guess, but they were the home team. And this wall business I’m bringing up is only important because of the idea that the Tewa speaking people of the Upper San Juan, Mesa Verde Region I’m about to dive into believed their settlements and pueblos were the literal representation of pottery containers… with natural and man made walls around the plazas being the ceramic walls of pottery…

In the Rio Grande Valley, over the couple hundred years between AD 1100 and 1300, even though the population was steadily and predictably increasing, despite the hardship of the land, but even though the population was increasing steadily, the number of settlements on the landscape actually decreased as people came together from their little family communities and they grouped together into larger settlements… like the ones mentioned earlier such as San Marcos and Arroyo Hondo. And if you’ll remember, this happens all the time all over the place in the southwest since the archaic. This is basically the third or fourth time I’ve mentioned this phenomenon of coming together, and it won’t be the last. But in the Rio Grande Valley at this time, there were a ton of pueblos and villages and settlements and cities coalescing. And it’s important to know because when large groups of unrelated or distantly related people come together, the society can change… and that’s exactly what happens in the Rio Grande Valley around 1300 at the same time that the most important event in the region would occur. The most important, and to modern archaeologists and historians, the most controversial event would take place.

That event… the… most important thing to happen to the Rio Grande Valley and the Puebloan area, at least for us in this episode, was the Great Migration of the late 1200s out of the Four Corners area. We’ve discussed that in great detail already and we know a lot of the Anasazi went south… as discussed, but what about that Mesa Verde faction of the Civil War I kept mentioning and just mentioned moments ago?

Here’s Ortman: in AD 1200 the Mesa Verde region was the most densely populated portion of the ancestral pueblo world. A century later the region lay vacant, literally in ruins, and the northern Rio Grande had replaced it as the demographic center of gravity. Demographic, genetic, and linguistic evidence all suggest that population movement was involved in this dramatic reorganization of the pueblo world. End quote.

Beginning in the late 1200s and culminating in the mid 1300s, the Rio Grande area I outlined in the beginning had an influx of over 14,000 people. At first it was most likely a trickle but eventually it was a flood. Ortman’s Winds from the North is an impressively large and extremely thorough breakdown of linguistic, ethnographic, archaeological, genetic, and just about every possible measure and metric one can use to reinforce the theory that the Mesa Verde Ancestral Puebloans headed southeast to the Santa Fe area and populated the region.

This trickle would have been a slow recognition that the area to the east had something of value to the growingly cut off from the Chacoan world of Mesa Verde. Remember, that area of the Four Corners, especially the upper San Juan basin of southern Colorado surrounding Mesa Verde would slowly halt it’s importation of macaw feathers, which will be of interest later in the episode, but Chaco cut off the flow of colorful southern bird feathers, copper bells, and other goods from the wider Anasazi world south of Chaco… they would either halt or more likely, the Chaco Aztec Altepetl stopped trading with them. So some scouts or adventurers headed southeast towards this basin near modern day Santa Fe where a few other settlers were scraping by in small communities. No doubt some marriages occurred, some trading lines became established, and some cultural traits began going back and forth. Ortman suggests obsidian from the Santa Fe area made its way to Mesa Verde and farming techniques from Mesa Verde made their way to the Rio Grande area.

Another reason for the trickle of population southeastward would have been the slowly congregating peoples competing for the same farming land as the cliff dwellings were abandoned for larger pueblos and settlements at Mesa Verde. Settlements like Yucca House, Yellowjacket Pueblo, and others that we’ve talked about which were becoming filled with people who once inhabited the canyons on cedar mesa and the land of the bears ears. The Cliff dwellers of the Colorado Plateau that made the Anasazi famous, a lot of them were heading to the larger settlements during the civil war to avoid the violence. Once there, they had to contend with an already established population that may have been there for centuries, but definitely decades. When the newcomers were faced with suboptimal plots of land as they began crowding together, a few may have gone eastward to the place they’d been hearing rumors about to try their lot there. Essentially, they were homesteading.

But the truly motivating factor for the abandonment of the Four Corners and Mesa Verde was probably the Civil War and the violence that was spreading as the spiral began to unravel for the Anasazi world of Chaco and Aztec. We talked a lot about that a couple episodes ago but its impact cannot be overstated. There’s also the drought but it was just beginning and its impact may not be as severe as people previously made it out to be. By 1280 though, no more building occurred in the Upper San Juan area and by 1285, all of the people would have left with most of them going to the Rio Grande Valley. We’ll talk about where the others went soon but for now, despite some holdouts in the world of anthropology and archaeology, a lot of researchers, and also myself, believe the overwhelming evidence points overwhelmingly to the fact that these Mesa Verde Anasazi Ancestral Puebloans made their way southeastward and became the Tewa speaking peoples of the Pueblo World in the Upper Rio Grande Valley. And once there they would change the landscape and eventually be the catalyst for that all important Puebloan event in 1680.

Why is there a debate at all if the evidence is overwhelming? As Ortman puts it, the sheer population facts alone attest to the narrative that the 20,000 people or so of the San Juan Area disappeared moments before 14,000 new people show up in the Rio Grande Valley and the rest head to the Hopi and Jemez and other Pueblos we’ll talk about shortly. I mean, the area around Santa Fe experienced very rapidly a population increase of nearly ten fold while the Four Corners saw its land deserted. The debate exists though, because not only is there not a single site that suggests a bunch of immigrants came with their new stuff, but there’s also a surprising lack of physical evidence tying the two groups together, the Tewa of the Puebloan World and the Anasazi of the Four Corners… unless you’re Ortman and many other researchers who know just where, and how… to look.

As I mentioned earlier, Ortman’s book is a veritable textbook, I think it might actually BE a textbook, but it uses all the branches of anthropology including linguistics, biological anthropology, cultural anthropology, ethnology, archaeology, and even history to prove his theory and as much as I’d love to summarize his book… it’s huge and dense. And it’s filled with technical facts, background knowledge, and charts, so many charts. Great charts, really. If you’re into that sort of thing, you should absolutely check it out. I will though, go into a few things from it because they’re fascinating and they help us tell the story of the migration. This other migration out of the Chaco Aztec World.

First of all, the Mesa Verdeans didn’t bring over their physical and material culture and lord it over the people who were allowing them to move in because they were actively trying to forget about the past. These Tewa speaking people would have remembered a time when those southerners arrived to Chaco and turned it into their fiefdom and they didn’t want to perpetuate the same problem. Like other puebloan groups have the ceremony of forgetting I talked about a few episodes ago, the Tewa speaking people who moved to the Rio Grande Valley purposefully wanted to leave behind the violence and man corn that plagued the land they just left. Roberts in Lost World of the Old Ones quotes both the awesome Steve Lekson and Scott Ortman when he writes, quote, Lekson and others now believe, the collapse of chaco around ad 1125 led to a lasting repudiation of hierarchical, grandiose, empire building societies, then ancestral pueblos who turned their backs on mesa verde as a failure would have turned their backs on its material culture as well, adopting new styles, Ortman writes, “as a negative commentary on the society they had recently chosen to leave behind.” Coming to the rio grande, they would have assimilated with the folks they met there, not lorded their own culture over them. End quote.

Ortman further quotes archaeologist Andrew Duff’s 1998 paper The Process of Migration in the Late Prehistoric Southwest, when he explains how large groups of people migrating into already established areas would interact with the locals. Quote, when large groups move into already settled areas, one may initially see "intrusive" material culture traits, but these would be expected to fade rapidly, perhaps becoming archaeologically undetectable within a generation. End quote. There lies the problem… the evidence of a migration seems to be undetectable. Again, unless you’re Ortman and his army of sources and fellow researchers.

Of course this assimilation doesn’t happen everywhere all the time when large migrations occur but because of the reason for the migration, which was among other things, the civil war and violence during Chaco Aztec’s collapse, it appears, that the Tewa people of Mesa Verde wanted to start over. And this aligns with a belief system they may have already had.

I’m going to talk about it in greater detail in the next episode over the Pueblo Revolt but the Tewa speaking people we’ve been talking about who came from the Mesa Verde region have a belief about their mythical ancestral place of origin or as they call it Tewayó. At Tewayó, which is vaguely to the northwest, but at Tewayó there is a mythical body of water the Tewa people emerged from four times before they were whole enough to function as a society. After that fourth emergence from the Lake, sometimes called the lake of Copala, which, yes, may or may not have been confused into being pronounced Cibola but after emerging whole from the lake, the people were able to build their society. When they left the Mesa Verde region and headed towards the Rio Grande, they symbolically left their lake or ancestral homeland, now no longer vaguely but defined as being in the northwest, but when they left the Mesa Verde region, they left with the belief that they were emerging from their lake of origin and beginning a new civilization as a people that were more whole than they had been before.

I know I’ve talked about using oral tradition as gospel and I actually had a whole big thing about it written up for this episode which I took out because I’ve mentioned it too many times but even after all that, I’m going to use some oral tradition because as always, while it may not be hard facts and truth, there is so much that can be learned, appreciated, and understood in oral tradition.

Archaeologists as late as 1925 were recording Tewa speaking Rio Grande Pueblo people’s oral traditions of where they had migrated from 700 or so years before. One archaeologist, instrumental in mapping Anasazi and Ancestral Puebloan sites in Colorado, was Jean Jeançon. He was given such a vivid tradition and description that he accurately made a map from which he used to later find the site in southwestern Colorado that was described to him as being where the people’s ancestors had left from. That site that was recorded and later visited almost 100 years ago, by Jean Jeançon, that Tewa origin site, is now known as Yucca House and it sits at the base of Sleeping Ute Mountain. It’s an area I’ve talked about before, in this episode and in previous ones, but it’s a place that saw some significant violence during the Civil war. Violence and… man corn.

It’s a very old site though with the older construction beginning during the Chacoan phase but with the later construction dating to mere moments before the great migration around 1280. These Tewa people at Yucca House, were some of the very last holdouts of the Ancestral Puebloan world to leave the Four Corners. The final phases of construction at Yucca House even has echoes in the Rio Grande Region. Ortman successfully argues that the final construction at the site, which included a kiva in a plaza became the norm for construction in the Puebloan region beginning just a few decades later after the great depopulation. He calls this later Yucca House plaza kiva construction a prototype for the Rio Grande area.

Another belief of the Tewa speaking people that I found absolutely fascinating and this belief apparently had echoes in other Ancient Ones of the region, which means it no doubt came from Mexico like so many other things of the Ancient Ones, but the Tewa speaking peoples of the Rio Grande Valley who came from Mesa Verde and the Upper San Juan area, they believed that people were corn. The importance of corn is as strong as the importance of kin, as they were one and the same. In 1680, the leader of the Revolt, Popay, would force all Puebloans, after they kicked out the Spanish, Popay would tell the Puebloans to quit planting and harvesting the imported crops the Spanish brought and to ONLY plant Corn. Obviously, beans and squash as well but Corn had been either downplayed in favor of other crops during the Spanish occupation or the Spanish demanded the Puebloans turn over their literally sacred corn to them so they could eat. The replanting and refocus on corn was an essential part of the re-emerging from the lake after the Puebloans kicked out their conquerers, just like they’d emerged from the lake upon their arrival into the Rio Grande area in the 12 and 1300s.

If the people were corn though, then their pueblos were containers or more precisely, ceramic vessels, just like the very pots they created and used. And the center of the pot, that plain flat part without any decorations was exemplified within the pueblo as the plaza. So surrounding the plaza was either the man made structures of pueblo buildings or walls or sometimes cliff faces that symbolized the walls of a ceramic vessel. The village is literally a serving bowl. Again, plazas began to dominate the architecture of villages before the Great Migration of 1300, and these plazas with natural or manmade walls surrounding them not only represented serving bowls but feasts were held, obviously with an abundance of serving bowls, within the plaza. Ortman says, quote, The archaeological record of canyon-rim villages reflects this principle: many communities designed new villages, or modified existing ones, to express serving bowl imagery at the same time that communal feasting developed. End quote. I mentioned in previous episodes that as the years went on, that serving vessels grew larger and that feasting occurred more often throughout the Anasazi region as the people came together. The Tewa speaking upper Rio Grande peoples brought this idea with them. Even the paint which decorated the inside of kivas and structures that surrounded the plaza reflected the same style of paint that decorated serving bowls and other ceramic pottery. Because… buildings were imagined as containers for corn. And the people were the corn.

And as a quick aside to the painted designs, Ortman and others believe those designs, especially from Mesa Verde, the very famous black on white geometric forms… but those designs were meant to signify woven objects such as coiled baskets and for over two hundred years the people in the Mesa Verde Region, according to Ortman, quote, conceptualized pottery vessels as mirror images of woven objects. End quote. And what did those woven objects hold? Those woven objects that were in earlier times, just as important as the ceramic vessels to the people who archaeology named the Basketmakers… what was held in those woven baskets that they could boil water in? Those baskets that were everywhere in the southwest? Corn. Corn was held in those baskets, just like corn was held in the ceramic vessels. When the better technology of ceramics came up from the south the people held on to their love of baskets by painting their ceramics to look like, or harken back to, a time when they used woven baskets. Weaving baskets as tight and as beautifully as the people did back in the day would have taken considerable time and effort and I think the Ancient Ones wanted to remember that sacrifice once it became easier, so they designed their ceramics in remembrance of their ancestors hard work. The Tewa people of the Rio grand valley’s word for ceramic pottery is literally translated as clay basket. But… the Tewa people of the Rio Grande valley didn’t paint their ceramic vessels to look like baskets once they’d moved to the Rio Grande… yet they still called them clay baskets which, just, further helps support the idea that the mesa Verde people migrated to the Rio Grande area.

There’s so many more of these connections and incredible facts in Ortman’s over 400 page Winds from the North that if you’re interested in knowing, you should absolutely read his book. And Lekson’s not that much smaller A History of Southwestern Archaeology.

So… the Tewa speaking people, as well as others in the region and probably the Anasazi and Ancestral Puebloans of the Chaco and Aztec era, and probably even the people before that! But the Tewa speaking Puebloans believed that people are corn. Pottery holds corn and the villages hold people. Kivas hold people. The Pueblo holds people. The Pueblo was a ceramic vessel to hold the people of the Corn.

That was a lot of talk and facts and quotes to essentially say, the Anasazi of the Mesa Verde region, who should really be called Ancestral Puebloans at this point, but 14,000 of the 20,000 Ancestral puebloans of the Mesa Verde Region, in the 1280s headed to the sparsely populated non Chaco area of the Rio Grande Valley near modern day Santa Fe and once there they blended in with the local population who they’d been in contact with for a century probably. Once in the Rio Grande, the Tewa speaking Puebloan peoples who’d just migrated, evolved their own cultures and practices to fit into the local peoples whose culture they also adopted, as they created a narrative of emerging from their ancestral homeland to be a better people in a better society.

But what about those other 6,000 or so? As Ortman and Lekson puts it, quote, it would seem likely that Mesa Verde people migrated to a variety of destinations throughout the Pueblo world. End quote. Those other places, besides most certainly the many many other pueblos like Jemez and Zia that I mentioned, it seems the other Ancestral Puebloans may have gone to the Zuni or maybe the Hopi Mesas. I say maybe because, this would have been just after the Civil War and the Great Migration and as we talked about last time, the Hopi are Anasazi Ancestral Puebloans who stayed behind as the others headed south towards Paquime to create coal fired ceramics for their brothers to trade with as they followed the spiral to their center place. So if the Mesa Verdean rebel faction who spoke the indigenous language, Tewa, as opposed to the Hopi who speak an Uto Aztecan southern language, albeit the northern branch of Uto Aztecan… still, the Hopi would have most likely been seen as the enemy, truly, Anasazi, although that’s a Navajo word, but okay… if the Mesa Verde people joined the Hopi, it may have been a marriage of convenience instead of love. Or maybe, once the Anasazi had left, the Hopi forged their own identity and became more open to allowing outsiders, if the outsiders had something of value to offer. Which, as the host of the American Southwest Podcast said in the Anasazi Civil War Episode, quote, Plog points out that the Hopi have an oral tradition that states that the addition of entire clans or tribes that had migrated from quite far away, happened a lot historically… iffin’ the newcomers could bring something useful to the tribe that is, like rain. End quote. To help this integration of newer people the Hopi and others of the puebloan world may have adopted a new religion as well… but more on that and the Kachinas shortly.

I’m not going to dive too deep into either the Zuni or the Hopi because there’s just too much information and history and culture and I’ll actually touch on a bit of both peoples as this and then the next episodes proceed. I would love to and probably will do an episode on both of these Indigenous cultures in the future because they’re an awesome people in an awesome land.

As R.E. Burrillo puts it in his book, Behind the Bears Ears, the Pueblo of Hopi is comprised of twelve villages on what are called First, Second, and Third Mesas, representing most of the southern escarpment of Black Mesa in northeastern Arizona. End quote. But historically, there were a few more settlements on other mesas including Antelope that are no longer occupied or allowed to be visited by either outsiders or Hopis themselves… unless you know the right Hopi. On Antelope mesa was the pueblo of Awatovi which had actually been inhabited for 500 years before it was left to ruination. Awatovi will feature heavily in the next episode.

The Hopi claim many Anasazi sites as their ancestral homes or what they call resting places. They have accurately pointed out that when their ancestors left, they left seeds in buried ceramics or sealed granaries for later return travelers to use. Many clans still use the same symbols that were either etched or painted onto Anasazi Ancestral puebloan ruins.

Then, in the late 13th century, the Hopi saw a striking rise in the size of settlements and the number of settlements when large groups migrated into the area. These large groups are the aforementioned Sinagua, Anasazi, and probably a few Mesa Verde Upper San Juan Region Ancestral Puebloans. Steven Plog says of the Hopi settlements quote, some of the larger towns such as Awatovi and Oraibi housed as many as 500 to 1,000 people and, more importantly, some of them remained major settlements for several hundred years. Awatovi was a thriving community when the Spanish entered the Southwest in the 16th century and remained so until the first few years of the 18th century. The Hopi still inhabit Oraibi today, the longest continuously occupied settlement in the United States. End quote.

In Childs House of Rain, he tells a fantastic story of Kwaatoko, the Monster Eagle as tall as a man with a great wingspan that casts shadows all over the Painted Desert Land. Kwaatoko was so big and monstrous, he is known by the Hopi to have carried away children, women, and even men! Kwaatoko has been vanquished nowadays, thanks to the Hero Twins of Hopi mythology. Even still, the Monster man eagle has physical proof of his once not that long ago existence. In the sandstone Colorado Desert on the Arizona, Utah border at the Vermillion Cliffs there are tracks of the giant monster eagle and his big three toes that start near the steep ledge of the abrupt mesa wall and disappear right over the edge where he routinely began his soaring hunt for misbehaved children. Even today you can go see the prints of Kwaatoko who was so heavy and monstrous, he left them there for all eternity. And at the base of the cliff are petroglyphs from the Ancient Ones depicting humans turning into birds… humans becoming the monster eagle.

Alright, so it turns out Kwaatoko’s tracks were left by a Dilophosaurus and they have been there for seemingly all eternity. Or at least since the large dinosaur stepped on the wet sand ground tens of millions of years ago. Obviously, his track wouldn’t have been at the edge of a cliff like it is today but just a flat land of soft sand that turned into stone which the area is made of now.

I told you that story because… I wanted to. I think it’s neat.

So we’ve talked about the Rio Grande Puebloans and the Hopi, which leaves us with… The Zuni.

Burrillo yet again has a great summation of the Zuni in his Behind the Bears that I would be remiss not to just quote:

As for the Pueblo of Zuni, the area they currently occupy lies in western New Mexico, just west of the Continental Divide on the banks of-~not surprisingly-the Zuni River. The area traditionally used by the Zuni extended some thirty-five miles east and northeast into the high-rising and also appropriately named Zuni Mountains; and fifty miles west and south into lower, drier lands that make up the surrounding landscape. End quote.

Burrillo goes on to describe the Zuni belief of how they emerged onto this world, the fourth world, or womb… which, hold up, emerging into the fourth iteration of the world… sounds a little like Tewayó… Come to think of it, the Hopi also believe this is the fourth world… Nonetheless, the Zuni emerged onto this sphere from a hole in the ground at the banks of the Colorado river in the Grand Canyon! Which is a fantastic ancestral homeland, to be honest. Burrillo then says, quote, From there, he means the Colorado river, they went south to the San Francisco Peaks near Flagstaff and then east to Canyon Diablo, following the Little Colorado River toward their current home. Somewhere along the Little Colorado River, the Zuni split into four groups: one went north, which is why the Zuni are affiliated with Capitol Reef and Grand Staircase-Escalante; one went south and never returned; one went straight to Zuni; and the last went southeast to Escudilla Peak, then northeast to the El Morro Valley, and finally arrived at Zuni from the northeast. Throughout their migrations-sometimes splitting into groups, sometimes accommodating others- the Zuni ancestors were always searching and heading for their "middle place, or the center of their world.” End quote.

So not to be too blithe or… I can’t find the word… trivial maybe? Anyways, after researching the Puebloans and Acomans and Zuni and Hopi and Anasazi… I’ve found that there are so many similarities in their belief systems and cultures and myths… it’s amazing. Because at the same time, their languages are unintelligible from each other… they are often times, despite what pueblo mystique suggests, killing each other, eating each other, tearing hearts out, forcing captives off cliffsides, scalping each other, and genuinely not getting along. Especially when you add the non Puebloan Navajo, Apache, Comanche, Utes, Shoshones, and others… Still… the American Indians of the American Southwest have so many similarities. While, conversely, even though they share the same landscape, so many differences. But…

The more I learn and study and think about these amazing people, who… are our neighbors, who are… the original, Indigenous people of this continent… the more I learn about these Americans, North Americans, Central, South Americans… the more I learn about them, the more I see incredible similarities and bonds and ties that bring them all together. From the tip of Peru to the top of the arctic. The spirals, the Hero Twins, the emergence, the rain god… the more I see these themes, the more I realize how amazingly connected these great and amazing runners and travelers and adventurers were. I hesitate to say are… but maybe still are… definitely were though. How connected they used to be. 

I mentioned in my Mammoth Eaters episode, the importance of movement and how the people, as I’ve now said multiple times, these original Americans that crossed over the Pacific, these Americans summered in Wisconsin and wintered in Florida. Much like todays Wisconsintes… except, they would have used their feet… not their big pickups with the Harley in tow… but the people of the americas are literally made of different stuff than most of the world.

And by that, I mean, the people of the Americas have more of the dopamine receptor D4, which is correlated with restless behavior or as Craig Child’s puts it in Atlas of a Lost World, the novelty seeking receptor. And Childs has the science to back this up. Just listen to this awesome excerpt from that book and try and understand what I mean when I say the American Indians are the most adventurous people on the planet… and that adventurous spirit connects the peoples of the Americas together like no other peoples on the earth that share a similar geographical area, especially one as big as the entirety of this hemisphere, but no other enormous area filled with so many different peoples share so many similarities:

The popular version of the first American colonization is people on their way here… like immigrants on their way to Ellis Island bustling to see ahead. But people weren’t on their way to North America, because nobody even knew North America existed, and so their arrival was an exploration every foot of the way.

He goes on to describe the effects of the D4:

The increased genetic presence of the dopamine receptor known as D4 is correlated with restless behavior and what is known as quote unquote novelty-seeking.

And now… for the most important info on the D4 and our discussion:

A genetic study of more than two thousand prehistoric individuals worldwide, ranging between one thousand to thirty thousand years old, found that this pronounced D4 marker is more prevalent among those who migrated as compared to those who maintained a long genetic history in one place. Among Native American genomes and those of their ancestors, the presence of D4 is correlated with an individual's distance from the land bridge. North America, with the closest access to the land bridge, shows 32 percent of samples with D4 elongation. Central America comes in ahead with 42 percent, and South America reaches an average 69 percent, as if people needed that much more umph to reach that far south.

Too high in D4, though, you'd never be seen again, a seed blown beyond all horizons. End quote.

So the people who left Africa and kept going and going and going until they reached the new world and then continued to go all the way down to the Southwestern United States, these people are truly different. I will say though, that the people who left Africa and travelled up and then as far north or west as they could on the European continent were also pretty adventurous and if the Solutrean culture made it over here, that would be further proof. But for this episode, as we are wrapping up the entire prehistory of the people who make up the American Southwest, I felt like I should revisit and reinforce the main theme of: migration, migration, migration. But more than just migration… the idea of constant movement and adventure is important. And I feel like Childs puts it best when he says, quote, perhaps people had more verve than we do today; they may have picked up the pace, felt compelled to move, pouring into empty spaces. End quote.

I like to think I have more D4 receptors than the average American or even person on earth but… compared to my Indigenous neighbors who’ve been here for much longer, I will be found severely lacking.

But of course, all of those similarities, all of that connection, all of that desire to see what’s out there, all of this over representation of the D4 receptor among the original Americans… it doesn’t mean you’re always going to get ALONG with your very similar and adventurous neighbor. I mean, siblings and families today and… throughout human history have had their squabbles. Look at the English Royals, which I love pointing out are just German, by the way, but look at the Royals that are for some reason all over the media right now. Look at the Corleones. Look at Cain and Able!

Families have their issues, despite their connectedness, peoples have their issues, spouses have their issues, nations have their issues. Which is why civil wars exist. The Anasazi Ancestral Puebloans even had a civil war. And… the Ancestral Puebloans of the Rio Grande Valley, the Hopis on their mesas, and the Zuni, all had their violent squabbles with themselves, each other, and their non Puebloan neighbors, in-between the end of the Anasazi Civil War and the arrival and the Spanish. And truthfully, as you’ll see at the end of the next episode, they even had their squabbles after the Spanish left AND reconquered.

What I’m about to describe is very non Pueblo Mystique… and very non celebrated or accepted among Puebloans themselves. Some of this is, admittedly, privileged information that’s been passed down to us by unscrupulous anthropologists and historians but… sometimes, to tell the truth, you’ve got to hurt some feelings.

In Ancient Peoples of the American Southwest, Plog says quote, Archaeological evidence supports the case for conflict in prehispanic times. In the late 13th and early I4th centuries village plans were increasingly designed in terms of defense… he goes on to say… Narrow passages restricted access to the plazas. Ground-floor rooms could be entered only using ladders placed in openings in the roof. An individual standing outside the pueblo was thus confronted with solid masonry walls several feet in height. Even if one gained entry to the plaza, the ladders required for further access could be quickly raised from above, providing an additional barrier. End quote. Part of that construction is again, because many of the puebloan peoples believed their village was a ceramic vessel, even down to entering the rooms from the roof, like a jar. But the way the pueblos were constructed may have been for duel purposes.

Besides the ladders, small passageways, and large walls, the puebloans also began building settlements around springs, with the water being in the middle of the Plaza instead of the spring being nearby in unprotected territory. The protection of resources became vital during this post civil war, pre Spanish epoch. Plog further says:

Skeletal remains show an increase in trauma and violent deaths during this period, including evidence of scalping. Some sites, such as Arroyo Hondo and Casas Grandes in northern Mexico, were severely burnt. End quote. We discussed in great detail, Paquime aka Casas Grandes last episode and I even mentioned earlier that Arroyo Hondo had a devastating fire with… burned corn, which would not have been an accident.

As I’ve hammered home and as I will talk about in the next episode again, the Pueblo Mystique of the Native Americans of the Rio Grande Valley and beyond dictates that the people were unique in their egalitarian non-violent ways. I was reading a paper from the late 80s while researching Kachinas for this episode and the paper basically states that in the opening paragraph… that was over 30 years ago and a lot has surfaced and come out now, but the information that disproves Pueblo Mystique has been around for ages… 100 years before that paper was published. As Roberts puts it in Pueblo Revolt, quote, Countless old stories, many collected at the end of the nineteenth century, tell of one pueblo making war upon another. The persistence well into the twentieth century and, in some cases, up to the present of war and scalp societies among the pueblos gives credence to the idea that armed conflict has always been a central feature of Puebloan life and thought. End quote. More on the scalp societies in a minute.

The Maya, I recently learned, and I thought I knew a lot about the Maya, my first true archaeological love, but learned people and researchers once thought of the Maya, up until the 1950s, as being mostly non-violent. It was thought they didn’t have kings and they were egalitarian. Archaeologists thought their warfare, if it existed at all, was more ritualistic and more for obtaining ransoms or subjugating rival dynasties with little impact on the surrounding population. Well we now know that is absolutely bogus. The Maya fed the sun countless captive hearts from still living bodies. The Ancestral Puebloans, who would have known a lot about those people who came after the Maya and would have known a lot about those people, the Chacoans that many of them had just left behind…. Well the Ancestral Puebloans would have dabbled in the same rituals and warfare that seems to be part of the Pan-American, or really, Pan -Human, culture of violence. The Ancestral Puebloans were not immune.

In a place called Llaves Valley, on the west side of the Jemez Mountains, about 75 miles from Chaco and Pueblo Bonito, there are some settlements, some rather old settlements, built by a people called the Gallina culture. They’re right at the edge of the Puebloan world, not far north of Jemez, and a little ways north of Acoma. The Gallina culture built quite a few massive pueblos. They also built 9 foot tall walls with guard towers as well as Snake towers, just like the Chacoans and later Paquime people. The Gallina culture people were also adept at making baskets, firing black on white ceramics, and had quite a few artistic and cultural themes in common with the Chacoans… especially what’s called the lambdoid cranial modification, or the elongation of the skull. There are Peruvian cultures who also practice this, as well as the Maya probably most famously, but absolutely, the Chacoan Anasazi were heavy practitioners of cranial modification.

In Lekson’s email to me, he even said that cranial modification exists right before the Spanish arrived in the people around Culiacan, which I mentioned last episode and which he thinks proves the connection of the Anasazi Chacoans to those Acaxee and other peoples. But in Gallina, they also shaped the skulls of the men and women… 100% of the recovered people found during archaeological digs have cranial deformation… 100%. After reading more and more about the Gallina people, I’m becoming convinced that they were the original people who came together with the Mesoamericans and built Chaco. It’s quite possible, the original matriarch of Chaco Canyon and more specifically Pueblo Bonito, is from this Gallina culture. Maybe not the founding but a very important Pueblo Bonito matriarch came from this area that’s north of the Jemez mountains on the periphery of the Anasazi world. They’re a similar distance from Pueblo Bonito as that important site I described a few episodes ago in southern Colorado known as Chimney Rock, that sacred landscape site. AND motifs that appear on murals, pottery, basketry, and more of the Gallina culture can also be found at Chimney Rock, Pueblo Bonito, Aztec, and a few other key Anasazi areas. The Gallina culture were also adept at watching the sun, stars, and the sky in general, much like those Sun Dagger solstice people of Chaco. Not to mention, found among the ruins of the Gallina culture are what’s known as the Jog-Toed Sandal, a distinctly Chacoan form of footwear.

The Jog-Toed sandal is a typical Anasazi sandal that’s decorated on the bottom with the typical designs of the Southwest but with a twist… it’s probably a sandal worn by the Ancient Ones as an accommodation to polydactyly… as in, having six toes. I know I covered the importance to the Chacoans of six toes a couple episodes back but the Gallina people appear to have had a lot of folks with six toes. That being said, the Jog-toed sandal doesn’t 100% mean all of their wearers had 6 toes… truthfully, I read so much and it’s all so awesome and interesting and then I also get so excited and assume things, remember, golden retriever, and sometimes I don’t get everything right as I’ve mentioned before… remember, I’m just guessin’.

But clearly the Gallina people were heavily connected to Chaco and especially Pueblo Bonito, but also, they have some connection with the Keres speaking Pueblos because they probably spoke Keres themselves. But they also worked with the Zuni and Hopi. Researchers know that because of the rituals that they seem to have participated in. Rituals involving the Snake which can probably be traced to the Pan-American belief of the creator deity, the plumed serpent, or Quetzalcoatl in nahuatl. The deity that can ascend to the heavens but also walk among the living. They also had a close association with Mountain Lions and probably were responsible for the amazing carved stone lions near Bandelier National Monument. Also their association with trees and fire brings them into closer connection with the Acoma puebloans as well. Truthfully, it is hard to keep anything straight about the Puebloans as all the previous writers like Ortman and Lekson and Roberts and Childs points out but I hope y'all are finding this all as fascinating as I do.

The last thing I’ll mention about the Gallina people before I get into why I’m mentioning them is something called an Eagle Trap. For the US Forest Services Passport in Time Program, a volunteer named Chris Reed wrote about his time with Forest Service archaeologists to re-locate, as in find again, the Gallina sites that were last mapped in the 1970s. He claimed, the highlight of his time was when they documented the mesa top site known as the Eagle Trap. Reed says, quote, The trap is a small alcove in which a person could hide, cover the opening with brush, and tie a rabbit down. When an eagle flew down to catch the rabbit, a man would spring up to catch the eagle. Knowing the size and strength of an eagle being captured, I cannot imagine a brave soul trying to wrestle with this special bird. Directly below the trap on the eastern side of the sandstone, there was a panel of petroglyphs depicting human figures. End quote.

I’ve heard of these traps with the plains Indians but I was totally unaware the Ancestral Puebloans and Anasazi also caught that great predator in this totally hardcore way. The Jemez people do apparently have a society called the Eagle Catchers though… which, I just think that’s neat. And speaking of the Jemez…

Around 1275 give or take a few years, The Gallina culture ceases to exist. Unlike the Anasazi and Ancestral Puebloans, it doesn’t seem like too many of the Gallina made it out alive to migrate either. Besides a few tenuous connections to the Hopi and Zuni I mentioned earlier, which tenuous connections include way too many deep and awesome things that I cannot go into because this episode would never end… but things like Lightning, the hero twins, a war god, the Lions, and the Snake just to name a few… But besides those few religious and ceremonial connections, the Gallina don’t seem to be related to any modern day Puebloans of the area. The closest pueblo to where they were, the Jemez, have zero stories pertaining to Gallina… well, that’s not entirely true as you’ll see. But the Jemez people have no HISTORY that suggests they were ever the Gallina nor are they descended form them. It seems, the Gallina may have met a terrible and violent end.

Roberts, in In Search of the Old Ones says, quote, In 1937 Frank Hibben dug the Cerritos site, The Cerritos Site is a Gallina Culture site, finding burned rooms and towers and eighteen bushels of burned corn. Two of the towers contained human skeletons: one still had three arrows embedded in its chest, another two arrows in the hip, yet another a severe wound above one eye. Hibben also found the skeleton of a female still holding a bow and some arrows. From Hibben's time to the present day, no part of the Anasazi domain has produced as much evidence of prehistoric violence as Gallina. More than half the excavated sites contain the remains of murdered men, women, and children. End quote.

That, and subsequent digs revealed a people that were fearful of outsiders. And a people that guarded themselves strictly against them, or at least attempted to… as those, 9 foot very thick walls with lookout and guard towers attest. And their ultimate fate may prove why they were so protective.

In 2005, a year after the volunteer Chris Reed would get to see the awesome Eagle Trap, but in 2005, Forest Service archaeologist Tony Largaespada uncovered remarkable evidence of genocide. Tony told National Geographic, quote, Almost all of [the Gallina ever found] were murdered,” he said. “[Someone] was just killing them, case after case, every single time. End quote. The Nat Geo article then goes on to say, quote, Greg Nelson, a physical anthropologist at the University of Oregon, studied the newly unearthed skeletons and said they paint a macabre picture of violence inflicted on both sexes and all age groups. “It’s pretty obvious that they were killed—they’re people who were wiped out,” he said. End quotes. At the Gallina site, tons of skeletons, with some of the skeleton’s bones having been shattered, some of them are disarticulated, as in the extreme processing events discussed before… but these remains were found around the ruins both buried and unburied. Evidence of Man Corn has also been found among the ruins of Gallina. The place is the site of a massacre.

Roberts sits down and talks with the Jemez Pueblo tribal archaeologist, a white man named William Whatley who explains to Roberts the story of Gallina and how it fits in with the Jemez Puebloan World. Whatley was probably the first Anglo to ever hear this story:

Over the years, the elders have given me pieces of the migration story. The whole thing takes twelve hours to tell. But the gist is this.

The people came from the Four Corners area, somewhere near Sand Canyon. As they migrated south and east, they left markers. I've actually found some of these on the ground, just from the elders' descriptions- -markers that no living Jemez have ever seen.

On their way here, an advance party of Jemez came through the Gallina area. At first they were treated hospitably by the people living there; then the Gallina turned around and killed the Jemez. The Gallina people didn't realize that the large main body of Jemez was coming right behind. That main body eliminated all of Gallina, maybe in only a few days. End quote.

If what I speculated earlier is true, and the people of Gallina were very connected and powerful rulers who helped the founding of Chaco and especially Pueblo Bonito, and those people used cannibalism, the taking of slaves, the taking of hearts, and the taking apart bone by bone of their political enemies… if the people of Gallina are related and involved in that, and the Jemez people, the Towa speaking Jemez, who were a part of those 20,000 or more migrants who fled the San Juan area of Mesa Verde, whom I have been calling the rebel faction of the Civil War against the Chacoan Elites… if the Jemez people were fleeing the Civil War only to run into an isolated and HEAVILY defended group of Chacoan elites on their way to emerging into the new world… I believe, just like Popay will command the Puebloans four hundred years later as you’ll learn in the next episode… but I believe this massacre and destruction of the Gallina people by the Jemez was just a continuation of the Civil War and the cleansing of the land for the people’s true emergence from Tewayó.

By 1325, near the present Jemez Pueblo, after the massacre at Gallina of the remnant Anasazi, the Jemez built the first of their cities post migration. It’s all ruins today but it’s known as Kwanstiyukwa. The pueblo… was massive. There may have been 2 or 3 thousand rooms of four stories, possibly five stories, with a height of 21 feet. William Whatley told Roberts the site is so big, quote, we need two-way radios to survey it. End quote. This was the early 90s so no cell phones of usable size or reliable service yet. There probably isn’t reliable service up on the mesa top today. Although I have been surprised… at Skeleton point in the grand canyon, well below the rim, I have service, it’s insane.

When John Gregory Bourke was 16, he lied about his age and joined the Yankee Cavalry. The year was 1862. By the end of the war though, the man had won the Medal of Honor and an Appointment to the US Military Academy at West Point. After graduating, Captain Bourke was sent out west to fight the Apaches as aid to General Crook. While out there in faraway Arizona, Bourke would keep extensive and detailed journals that would go on to become one of the best firsthand accounts of frontier army life during the post war and Indian war period. Paul Andrew Hutton, in his book The Apache Wars says this of Bourke:

Few military officers could match Bourke’s keen intellect and powers of observation. His wide-ranging interests led him to become a student of the land and its native peoples, as well as a master chronicler of the history he participated in. End quote. He not only kept vast and historically rich details of the American soldiers though, he also wrote equally of the Native Americans. Here’s Hutton again:

The main occupation of many officers was to drink themselves into oblivion, but not Bourke. He studied the nearby Indians, the plants, the animals… Hutton then writes of Bourke: He decorated his quarters with Indian artifacts. A scout gave him an apache scalp with ears attached, much like Kirker’s men would have taken, and Bourke used it as a mat for his reading lamp. When a visiting friend saw his ghastly trophy and was sickened, Bourke realized just how brutalized he had become by his life at Camp Grant. He promptly buried the scalp. End quote.

Kirker was James Kirker, an Irishman employed by the governor of Chihuahua to do questionable things to the Mexican Indians but that’s not important right now. What’s important is how fascinating Bourke is to learn about. And as I mentioned in my Buffalo Soldiers episodes, I will be doing a series, one day in the future, over the Apache Wars, and Bourke will feature heavily in it. I bring up Bourke in this episode though, because in 1881, while on tour in the American Southwest, the intelligent and curious man was invited to the Zuni Pueblo to witness the Zuni Clown known as Newekwe. Later, after the wars, he would come home and publish his experience under the title… I kid you not, The use of human odure and human urine in rites of a religious or semi religious character among various nations. 3 years after that, he would go on to publish his magnum opus: Scatalogic Rites of All Nations: A Dissertation upon the Employment of Excrementicious Remedial Agents in Religion, Therapeutics, Divination, Witch-Craft, Love-Philters, etc. in all part of the Globe. So yeah, Bourke was into some weird poop and pee stuff, but whatever, let’s move past that. More importantly for this story of ours, he was able to, while he was visiting the Zunis, talk to the governor… who, in Spanish told him this, which he judiciously wrote down for posterity… probably the one and only time an Anglo has been told this story:

In the days of long ago (en el tiempo de cuanto hay) all the Pueblos, Moquis [Hopis], Zuni, Acoma, Laguna, Jemez, and others had the religion of human sacrifice (el oficio de matar los hombres) at the time of the Feast of Fire, when the days are shortest. The victim had his throat cut and his breast opened, and his heart taken out by one of the Cochinos (priests); this was their" oficio" (religion), their method of asking good fortune (pedir la suerte). End. Quote.

So… the Puebloans took hearts… just like the Chacoans… even after the Anasazi civil war. If there really was such a repudiation away from the violence of Chaco and their elites, why did the Puebloans continue the practice of carving out prisoner’s hearts and asking for good fortune with the bloody sacrifice? I can understand it among the Hopi and Acoma and Laguna whose ancestors, if I am correct, were the Anasazi of Chaco and Mesoamerica but the Jemez? This was specifically about the Zuni taking hearts but the Jemez also had human sacrifice and they were the ones who had fled the Mesa Verde Region, which means they’re the rebels fighting against Chaco… Why did the Jemez slaughter and possibly man corn the people at Gallina, but definitely disarticulate some of them bone by bone, why did they do that to the people at Gallina if they were running away from that type of behavior and trying to forget the evil past of the Chacoan Aztec Altepetl? Why is it that the eastern Puebloans near the Rio Grande Valley, especially of Tewa origin, again those are the Mesa Verdeans, why were they described as having a tight and very authoritative control over the pueblo… whereas the western puebloans of Hopi and even the eastern Keresan speaking puebloans that live between the Tanoan ones from Mesa Verde… why did the western Pueblos of Hopi and Acoma have much looser governmental control over the people if they are the remnants of the Chacoan Aztec Anasazi Atlepetl who headed south to remake Chaco at Paquime? Why are the eastern Puebloans who came from Mesa Verde, the people I have been calling the rebels who supposedly rebelled against Chaco, why were they so seemingly authoritarian and violent? The Hopi claim they’ve been in the region of the Colorado Plateau and the Colorado river, especially the little Colorado river, forever. They claim archaic Indian ancestry. Yet… they seem so heavily influenced by the southern Mesoamericans. Then there’s the Zuni, who have no known linguistic relatives and who seem like they may actually have been there forever… You know… I could spend my entire life studying this and these people and their history and.. even if I waved a magic wand and was given all the knowledge of the puelboans, all the secret, guarded, amnesia riddled knowledge of the Peubloans… I still wouldn’t understand a damn thing. Pardon my French… But you know what, I actually don’t mind not being able to wrap my mind around it all. Learning about it and thinking about these people and their world has been a blast and I will not ever stop learning about the Puebloan peoples and their cultures and history… even the gnarly stuff. Like…. The Scalp Society I mentioned earlier.

From Roberts, In Search of the Old Ones:

In the 1950s, an ethnographer named Florence Hawley Elis had closely studied the Jemez. Her monograph A Reconstruction of the Basic Jemez Pattern of Social Organization insisted that the Eagle and Arrow Societies, whose duties adumbrated a war cult, stood at the center of Jemez social life. Formerly, claimed Ellis, the Opi, or Scalp, Society had been equally important, and at one time a man had to take a scalp (usually that of a Navajo) to become a member; but Ellis thought the Opi Society had gone extinct. Her report offered many details about the purging of witches and the practice of human sacrifice in former times. End quote.

I too had no idea what adumbrated meant but it looks like Roberts was using it as quote unquote to indicate faintly. Therefore, the Jemez had a war cult called the Opi Society that had as a qualification for entry, the taking of an enemy, aka Navajo, scalp. Roberts would bring this up with the aforementioned Jemez Pueblo Anglo archaeologist William Whatley who was, as would absolutely be expected, Whatley was kind of uncomfortable with the question, although he would tell Roberts, quote, The Jemez people tell me that Ellis got it sixty percent right, forty percent wrong. But they won’t say which sixty percent is right! End quote.

The next paragraph after that quote from Whatley says:

Later, as I sat talking quietly with a Jemez elder on the porch of the visitor center, to my astonishment he admitted to me that the Opi society still flourished. He’s now quoting the elder, The Opi take care of everything for us, the man said cryptically.

Then I pushed too hard, as Whatley and Bradley never would. “Do they still keep scalps?” I asked.

“I don’t think so,” the elder said, edging away from my impertinence. End quote.

And then you’ve got the Zuni Scalp Ceremony… Between 1916 and 1939, American Anthropologist, noted old school feminist, and progressive, and married to a congressmen, Elsie Clews Parsons visited many a Pueblo to write about what she witnessed, saw, and experienced. Although she was a woman which means she probably wouldn’t have been invited to these ceremonies… but, you never know. Although she was a woman and despite her methods being called into question today as unethical with the cultural theft and her misleading the Puebloan peoples… which, I don’t know if any of that happened but, despite all of that, what Parsons recorded, if it is indeed true, what she recorded is a pretty devastating collapse of the Pueblo Mystique. Here’s Roberts to expertly sum it up:

Parsons's 1924 study of the Zuni Scalp Ceremonial, parts of which she was allowed to witness three years earlier, makes harrowing reading. According to her, the importance of scalps for the Zuni lies in the control that enemy dead have over rainmaking: the ceremony is in essence a rain dance. During the twelve-day ritual, a female scalp kicker kicks the scalp across the ground into the village; scalp washers, on the way to the river, imitate wild animals and bite the scalp; finally the scalp is hoisted atop a tall pole around which

the whole village dances. End quote.

Another female anthropologist also wrote about the Zuni Scalp ceremony, Mrs. Matilda Coxe Stevenson and in her writings she did say the scalp came from a jar filled with old enough scalps to have had no more hair on them. So maybe unlike the Jemez, allegedly, the Zuni scalps weren’t… fresh.

You also have the aforementioned Florence Hawley Ellis’s work, Patterns of Aggression and the War Cult in Southwestern Pueblos which, from the vantage point of the 1950s, describes the belief that substantial success or standing out amongst your friends and relatives in the Pueblo, or gaining perceived, wether right or wrong, but gaining influence, wealth, or power over your puebloan neighbors, it may mean you are involved with witchcraft and it may call for your expulsion from the Pueblo. Expulsion, or worse. It has happened. It’s happened even recently with Puebloan writers like Joe Sando who left his people, went to college, then wrote delicately and lovingly about the Pueblo, its people, and the Pueblo’s history, the author’s own history, mind you, but he told all of that in a protective way, only to… be ridiculed and reviled back home. Many puebloans thought he grew rich off his obscure scientific book. Joe seemingly, as well as the other puebloan anthropologists who published or dared speak about their world, but Sando seemingly betrayed and took advantage of the Puebloans when he wrote about that sacred and privileged knowledge. In reality, Sando was very careful and the idea that he betrayed anyone is unfortunate but prevalent among Puebloans, especially the Jemez. When Roberts brought up that he’d even talked to Joe Sando among the Jemez elite, he was summarily dismissed.

But, Ellis’ 1951 study explained the dangers of standing out in Pueblo culture the way that Sando did in going away to college and publishing his work. Ellis talks about how a Puebloan man who buys a new truck may be resented by his neighbors and in danger of disappearing. She says, quote, it is admitted that even recently an unusually beautiful woman or successful hunter might be killed… quietly, and accidentally, or someone’s exceptionally fine horse be found dead or his big house despoiled. End quote.

But finally… besides the scalp ceremony, the insistence on staying humble, the taking of hearts, the warrior societies, and the decimation of Anasazi cities, the Puebloans also prove that their non-violent ways are purely Pueblo Mystique from artworks within the kivas themselves. The kivas, if you’ll remember were those gathering places for families, large and small that were mostly round, sometimes rectangular. As I mentioned earlier, they were mostly painted with the same designs that decorated ceramic vessels but… that began to change around the time of the Great Migration, or shortly afterwards. The kivas, in the 1300s began to be decorated with murals, and many of these murals showed hostile encounters with beings wearing shields and bearing weapons. Other murals have been known to show people pierced with multiple arrows at the feet of the warriors. And those warriors? They represent the thing that binds the Puebloan societies and world together… The Kachinas.

From Plog:

The particular kachinas most likely depicted in early kachina murals and rock art are also associated with warfare in modern Pueblo ritual, often sanctifying warfare (in some oral traditions kachinas assist Pueblo groups during conflicts, for example) or commemorating important encounters. Thus, kachinas initially may have had a dual role as warriors as well as rainmakers. End quote.

So exactly what, or who, is a Kachina?

In archaeologist E Charles Adams, The Origin and Development of the Pueblo Katsina Cult, Adams says: Katsinas are not gods, they are spirits. They are ancestors who act as messengers between the people and their gods. They are also rainmakers, coming as clouds to the villages to which they are annually summoned. End quote. So rainmakers, and heavenly mercenaries to help the Puebloans in their wars as those kiva murals have shown. To the Hopi, the Kachinas are only around for about half the year from the Winter Solstice to the Summer Solstice, after which they return to the underworld where all humans came from via a hole in the ground called a sipapu. Which, is the same name for the hole in the bottom of a kiva. The Kachina beings get to that underground through that hole using a ladder at the top of the San Francisco Peaks, which are the mountains you can see from forever all around the Painted Desert area of northern Arizona near Flagstaff. I say Hopi because, honestly, each group of puebloans have differing beliefs and rituals when it comes to the Kachinas, if they even have them at all. The Kachinas importance vary greatly from pueblo to pueblo. Roberts in Pueblo Revolt says, quote, at Hopi and Zuni, the kachinas are all-important; at Taos and Picuris, virtually nonexistent. Yet there is abundant archaeological evidence that a kachina-based religion prevailed among all the pueblos in the Southwest at the time of Spanish contact. End quote. So things definitely changed when the Spanish arrived, which is to be expected but we’ll talk about that next time. Most of the information im going to be giving about the Kachinas pertains to the western pueblos of Zuni, Acoma, & Hopi. The Eastern pueblos do not allow outsiders to visit the ceremonies nor do they talk about them. They’re much more secretive.

When the Kachinas are visiting the people during that first half of the year, men from the pueblo don masks and impersonate the kachinas while performing a variety of group dances. Plog says, quote, The Hopi believe that when the impersonator wears the kachina masks, he (and it is always a male) becomes empowered with the characteristics of the spirit being represented and should therefore be regarded as sacred. End quote. These dances and mask wearing ceremonies are conducted in the plazas in the center of the pueblo. That plaza at the center of the pueblo that represented the flat bottom surface of the ceramic vessel which the pueblo itself, represented. But again these important dances would disappear at the time of the Spanish, only to reemerge afterwards. Also during these dances, it’s imperative that the children do not understand that this is a representative dance done by people in the pueblo but rather that it is actually the kachinas who have come down from the mountains. It would not go over well if the child, especially the young boys were to find out his father or uncle were the ones in the masks, dancing, and representing the kachinas who will deliver the pueblos messages to their gods.

If you’ve travelled through the Southwest and stopped at parks, or monuments, or museums you’ve no doubt seen the representation of the kachinas at the gift shops. Or maybe you’ve got a family member who has a small collection of them. My grandmother who passed away last year and who piqued my curiosity about the American West and Southwest at an early age had a few in her house in northern Georgia. And growing up, my family would make the short drive north at least once a month and I still remember seeing them. I now have 4 Kachinas which I cherish and add to almost yearly… which I am now realizing will be unsustainable in the long run. They’re usually made of cottonwood these days. The smaller ones are affordable and almost mass produced, but by hand, mind you. While the larger and more complex ones are quite pricey, and worth every penny. These Kachina dolls which are sold all over the southwest, including at the Navajo Nation, despite the Navajo prescribing no significance to kachinas whatsoever, but these dolls may have gotten their start with helping the children learn the many kachinas their belief system surrounds them with. Roberts says in Pueblo Revolt of their origin, quote, the dolls may have had their origins as instructional toys for young girls, who by playing with them might learn to recognize the identities of the semi-supernatural beings they represent. No mean feat, since as many as 400 different kachinas exist. End quote.

Four Hundred Kachinas seems like an awful lot of kachinas… but one of the very ways it has been so successful since its inception is because the Kachina cult is able to adapt and incorporate new beliefs from other religions and other pueblos quite easily. From later Christian motifs introduced by the Spanish, to quite possibly Chacoan beliefs much earlier in the 1100s. Although… the earliest evidence, at least in the archaeological record, but the earliest evidence for the Kachina culture is AD 1325, although it wouldn’t appear in the Rio Grande area until 1375. That’s well after the Chaco era and even after the Civil War and the migrations of the people from the Chaco Aztec and Mesa Verde Four Corners. It is probably not a coincidence that the Kachina culture comes about around this time. As Lekson writes in A Study of Southwestern Archaeology, something very big happened around 1300 that involves not only religion but the community. Quote, Pueblo people, after 1300, rejected the un-Pueblo social structures of the old Chaco-Aztec polity, and they deliberately and literally reinvented themselves as Pueblos. End quote. This first came up with the Plaza building in the late 1280s I talked about but really took off after the Great Migration around 1300 and involved a slew of other aspects. It’s a quote I’ve used before, but Lekson says of that date, 1300, that quote, almost every aspect of iconography- pottery, rock art, murals, everything - changed dramatically. We don’t know the details- we can NEVER know the details- but from its material expression it seems clear that religion changed. End quote. That religious change seems to have heavily involved Kachinas.

That Great Migration would have been finished, for the most part, although migration in the Southwest is constant, but by 1325, the puebloans would have been settling into their new digs. And it’s this reason that many archaeologists say the Kachina culture exists at all. Plog says it well when he wrote: Some scholars believe that kachina ritual provided a sort of social glue, bonding together people within a pueblo because everyone must cooperate for the ceremonies to be conducted properly, and membership in kachina societies crosscuts the discrete and potentially divisive clans and lineages. Certainly the public nature of the kachina dances in the open plazas suggests an increased emphasis on public affirmation of conventions for proper behavior. Kachina rituals helped reinforce the norms of social behavior. Such an emphasis in these late preHispanic times would not be surprising given the concurrent evolution of larger and socially more diverse villages where increased tensions and conflicts were likely and where cooperative behavior was needed for the village to survive. End quote.

In other words, a whole bunch of people who weren’t used to living together are now stacked like corn cobs in ceramic vessel pueblos as the drought rages and the nomadic tribes arrive in the region right after the Puebloan world went into upheaval from the Civil War. The people had abandoned the ruling class Chaco Aztec Altepetl and were adopting a less heavy handed manner of social control in the form of the Kachina culture and rituals… at least that’s the way it appears on the surface. Certainly with the Hopi this seems to be the case. In The Origin and Development of the Pueblo Kachina cult, Adams sums it up by saying, a constellation of activities led by or involving the kachinas is used to bind the village. End quote. The Kachinas are the glue that keeps each pueblo from breaking out into another mini civil war. It doesn’t always work, mind you. But it’s better than what had happened earlier with Chaco, I assume.

And speaking of Chaco, I’ll mention more on this in a little bit but the Kachina culture may have surfaced there after the fall of the importance of Chaco and Aztec when the puebloans began reusing older Great Houses. There was a time before the civil war, or maybe during it, but there was a time when the people around Chaco and Aztec began to use the Great Houses again but this time as residential places for multiple families, instead of palaces and store houses for alternating rulers. When they moved back in, they may have used this new burgeoning Kachina culture to help solidify the different groups into a more cohesive unit that was able to stop from disarticulating each other or cooking up the occasional man corn.

But after the Great migration and time of societal change, the kachina culture absolutely seems to have begun to flourish, although it wasn’t the only cultural change. As I mentioned earlier, the kivas began to be painted with murals and the plazas began to show up, full stop on that one really. The plazas appear in nearly every pueblo! They really weren’t there before those prototype plazas near Mesa Verde in the late 1200s. But burial practices also change at the same time. Oh, and the painting of the ceramic vessels also morph into something new. I mentioned this change in the previous episode but the puebloans began to use more anthropomorphic, and animalistic, and… kachina based designs on their ceramic vessels. Although, there is an effigy vessel itself that’s been found at Chaco which could have been, maybe, possibly an early or proto-kachina representation… not sure about that one though.

And at Hopi, where the kachina cult is strongest, it sprang up at the same time that the Hopi pueblos and mesas began extensive cultivation of cotton. This Hopi cotton has been found as far away as the California coast and even, quite surprisingly, the Mississippi River Valley! So the Puebloans were trading with the post-Mississippian peoples. Or at the very least the great plains tribes. Plog says of the cotton and the kachinas, quote, the kiva murals from Awatovi and Kawaika-a depict bolls of cotton in ceramic bowls and intricate kilts and sashes almost certainly made from cotton. When the Hopi prepare a corpse for burial, a cotton mask is placed on their face to make the body light; the cotton has been referred to as a cloud mask which 'plainly identifies the dead with the Kachina… Cotton, clouds, and kachinas seem to be linked conceptually. End quote.

No kachina dolls from before the Spanish, wearing that cotton has survived the test of time. Nor has any of the aforementioned kilts and sashes. Actually only a handful of masks that predate Coronado in the mid 1500s have ever been found. Hence, the lack of archaeological evidence for the kachina culture. Beyond the whole masks there are a few snippets of kachina masks and beings have been found painted on the sides of pottery or on kiva walls after the civil war and great migration. Like those kiva walls I just mentioned. And of course, in rock art, petroglyphs, and pictographs of the Southwest. So where did this Kachina cult, which has no record of being of any significance before 1325, where did the Kachinas really descend from?

Well, like seemingly everything else in the Southwest, except the Navajo and Apache peoples, but every major belief and innovation seems to come up… from the south, Mexico or mesoamerica.

In Winds from the North, Ortman writes: Even within archaeology, there are major differences of opinion about where and when the kachina religion originated… he goes on to say, almost all non-Indian authorities look ultimately to Mesoamerica for fundamental iconographic and cosmologic aspects of kachina ceremonialism. However, the time and place where Mesoamerican and Southwestern ideas combined- the emergence of recognizable Puebloan kachina ceremonialism is hotly debated. End quote. Ortman then goes on to describe some of these theories. Like the author of the definitive Kachina cult book, Adams, who believes that a 14th century west-central Arizona origin for the kachinas fits. But Adams does suggest that the roots of the system may be traced to earlier Mogollon and or Salado groups. We talked about the Mogollon and Salado… and how the Salado were a blending of the Mogollon with the Chacoan Anasazi. Poly Schaafsma, a woman I have read a lot about and a woman whom I’ve seen quoted so very often in the sources but someone who I have barely quoted myself surprisingly, but Poly Schaafsma is the go to person for petroglyphs and pictographs and Southwestern symbols. She is the pre-imminent scholar when it comes to the things I love very much and so often go out of my way to visit. Well Schaafsma argues, that kachina iconography originated much earlier in the Mimbres region in southwestern New Mexico, perhaps by 1000 and certainly no later than 1100. The Mimbres are south of the Mogollon and partially ARE the Mogollon in Southern New Mexico and Arizona I thought.

Then again, I had just mentioned the fact that people moved back into Great Houses at Chaco and the people may have began the kachina cult there… but in a place known as room 38, in Chaco Canyon at Pueblo Bonito, a ceramic vessel in the form of a human who looks an awful lot like a kachina has been uncovered from the 1100s. Other Chaco Canyon Great House outliers also have been found to have human effigy, that’s what that’s called when the ceramic vessel looks like something else, an effigy. But Chaco Great Houses around the area have also been found to have human effigy pots that resemble more modern kachinas. Those same vessels have been found at Paquime in Mexico and of course the Mesoamericans from down south loved to make human effigy ceramics. 

Then there’s my theory… and I am truly just guessing… but I think the beginning of the kachina cult really was brought up with the mesoamericans but the spiritual messenger part was a lasting holdout of the ones who were in the region of the southwest before Chaco. The ancient ones who etched the spirit beings into the walls all over the Colorado plateau. Those figures cease to be represented for the most part as petroglyphs once Chaco rises and that may be because they switch to a ceramic form until the ceramic making expertise heads south to Paquime. What’s left is the culture but the only way to represent it now is through the murals and the dolls and the dances and the masks. Which, probably all existed during Chaco but slowly evolved over time to what we’d recognize today.

The Anasazi and Ancestral Puebloans themselves venerated their own ancestors. Especially the Basketmakers. They call their ceramics woven pots and they paint them to mimic basketry. The people who built the cliff dwellings and the Great House Pueblos and large centers often built them within site of basketmaker and even earlier petroglyphs! They would then create viewing holes in their own architecture in order to be able to see the artwork of the ancient ones from their own then modern homes. Even as they ripped up their old pit houses to create their own buildings and even though they would sometimes chip newer petroglyphs over older ones, there was an immense amount of respect for their ancestors. They would even use older spear points as trinkets that the Anasazi would place into their own medicine bag, seemingly carrying around their ancestors power. They may have believed something totally different than their ancestors after they adopted whatever the Mesoamericans from Mexico brought up but they still venerated their own past and part of their past were the figures, what I called ghostly figures a long time ago in this series. What if those ghostly figures eventually blended and evolved and became the later kachina culture? In reality, my theory isn’t much different from the others in that something Indigenous to the Southwest mixed with something mesoamerican. But, as you know… I’m just guessin’.

The consensus though, is that it came up from Mesoamerica. As Adams says, There is almost total consensus that iconographic influence from northern Mexico affected the expression of the katsina cult. End quote. Part of that sure assumption is the use of those beautiful birds I’ve mentioned so often, the Macaws, and their feathers. The pueblo peoples of Arizona, after the great migration, just like we talked about last time, but the pueblo peoples continued to raise macaws just for their feathers alone. The Pima Indians of southern Arizona were seen using Macaws in the 1500s. Even the plains Indians of Texas traded for Macaw feathers. They were valuable to Chaco and they were valuable to the Puebloans as well. Esteban, you’ll learn all about him in the next episode, but Esteban may have been welcomed into the Zuni Pueblo before they killed him despite the Zuni not wanting him there, but he may have been welcomed inside because he had macaw feathers with him.

Just last December, days before Christmas, my wife and I headed to Petroglyph National Monument outside of Albuquerque on our way to Wisconsin. We didn’t have a lot of time but we wanted to do a few small hikes and one of them was the appropriately named Macaw Trail, in Boca Negra Canyon, where on the black volcanic rocks is carved, a short distance from the parking lot, a beautiful unmistakable macaw. Even as far east as the Rio Grande Valley, the importance of the bird and its feathers was worthy of the time and effort it takes to carve one into a rock. These birds were seemingly so important because of their use with the kachinas. And these bird’s usage, at least, as far back as the 900s, was tightly controlled for use in ceremonies by the great houses.

By the 1400s though, the depiction of macaws and their feathers, and also other parrots, but the use of their image on kiva mural walls explodes. At Rio Puerco, a Pueblo south of Albuquerque that was no longer occupied after around 1500, but at Rio Puerco, around 300 macaws or parrots are depicted in the many kiva murals. And all over the pottery of the Puebloan world, the birds take off. And it can all possibly, well this macaw connection at least, but this bird and feather usage can probably be traced back to that feathered serpent of the American world, aka, Quetzalcoatl. Even some kachinas resemble the feathered serpent deity. Which would help reinforce the theory that kachinas came from Mexico…

But… I do want to throw in there that before the southwesterners were eating turkeys, because remember, there’s little to no evidence of turkey’s being eaten before Chaco time, but the ancient ones were raising them for their feathers. And it is now believed that they independently domesticated turkeys. It used to be assumed that the domestication of turkeys came UP from Mexico, like everything else… So maybe before Macaws became so widespread, still highly controlled, but before macaws became a more widespread ceremonial feather, the people of the American Southwest, the ancient ones, Anasazi, Ancestral Puebloans, they could have been performing the same, or protokachina culture rituals with turkey feathers. Regardless, it does appear there are a ton of connections to Mesoamerica when it comes to the Kachina culture.

Including the curious fact that up north in the San Juan Basin, near Mesa Verde, there is almost no evidence of the kachinas at all. The evidence is already kinda sparse in Chaco but it is practically nonexistent in the mesa verde area. Which makes sense if you remember that the upper San Juan area of Mesa Verde was cut off from trade to Chaco and the south. Wouldn’t it also make sense that they were cut off culturally and religiously as well? If the kachinas began as a mix of southern mesoamerican influences with Indigenous beliefs from Chaco, or the Mimbres region, or very interestingly, the Gallina culture… if the kachinas began as a mix at around the time of the split, then it would make sense that it didn’t go north.

But it’s here that I have to mention, I at one time… I think, I may have taken it out but I at one time thought it was the opposite, and the mesa Verdean ancestral puebloans were the ones practicing the kachina culture which may have helped spark the civil war. But it seems I was very wrong and the Chacoans, Gallina culture, and Ancestral Hopi and typically the southern Anasazi and Ancestral Puebloans were the ones who were creating or integrating the kachina culture into society. Which yeah, that makes sense when I remember what happened as the Mesa Verde Jemez travelled south towards the Rio Grande and what they did to the Gallina culture, who would have probably also been using some sort of kachinas. Remember the eagle trap to catch the eagles? That trap existed so that the Gallina people could catch the birds to take the feathers to use in their ceremonies.

Honestly though, it gets extremely confusing, even after parsing through all of that and trying to connect the dots and tying to incorporate the learned history, even after everything I just said… the Tewa speaking people, and the Keres, but the Tewa speaking people of the Rio Grande Pueblos, who were the ones, like the Jemez, from Mesa Verde… they claim that the kachina culture, which isn’t as important to them but maybe was before? I don’t know… but the Tewa and Keres speaking peoples of the upper Rio Grande Valley, according to Lekson, say that they learned the kachina dances and how to make the masks. They learned the stories of the kachinas… at the White House. They say the Kachina spirits left the people at White House which is why they have to dance to communicate to them now. If you’ll remember from previous episodes, the White House may or may not be Chaco? Then there’s the Hopi who definitely say that Chaco was the point of origin for the Kachina. And to the Zuni, Chaco is of great importance as well although it doesn’t appear the Zuni began the use of Kachinas until after 1375…

To sum it all up, Ortman argues that, quote, kachina ceremonialism had a developmental history, as mesoamerican ideologies melded with native southwestern practices, first in mimbres district, slightly later at chaco, and finally by the late 14th and 15th centuries, in east central Arizona and the rio grande. End quote. But regardless of where the kachina culture came from, it is seemingly foundational to pueblo life, wether they still use them or not. As Roberts wrote: A religion introduced or invented some 700 years ago still by and large organizes Puebloan life today. And it was the suppression of the kachina rituals by Franciscan priests in the seventeenth century that blew the smoldering embers of a conquered people into the conflagration of the Pueblo Revolt. End quote.

And with that, comes the end of the episode. I look forward to seeing you next time, In the American Southwest where you’ll hear about the Puebloans interactions with the newest group of people to come up from Mexico and rule over them, the Spanish, before they too flee back south like the Anasazi after that awesome and great First American Revolution that is the Pueblo Revolt of 1680.

Winds from the North, Tewa Origins and Historical Anthropology by Scott Ortman

The Lost World of the Old Ones by David Roberts

The Pueblo Revolt by David Roberts

In Search of the Old Ones by David Roberts

House of Rain by Craig Childs

Atlas of a Lost World by Craig Childs

Ancient Peoples of the American Southwest by Steven Plog

A Study of Southwestern Archaeology by Stephen Lekson

Behind the Bears Ears by RL Burrillo

A Note on a Rare Cranial Vault Modification Shared by Ancestral Puebloans in the American Southwest, Mesoamericans on Mexico’s Gulf coast, and Peruvians from Norte Chico in the Context of Twisted Gourd Symbolism; the Gallina case by Kathryn Devereaux, PhD

Pope, Pose-yemu, and Naranjo: A New Look at Leadership in the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 by Stefanie Beninato

Ordinary, yet Distinct: The Allure of Gallina by J. Michael Bremer

Sandals as Icons: Representations in Ancestral Pueblo Rock Art and Effigies in Stone and Wood by Polly Schaafsma

The Abandonment of Chaco Canyon, the Mesa Verde Migrations, and the Reorganization of the Pueblo World by Stephen H Lekson and Catherine M Cameron

Authoritative Control and the Society System in Jemez Pueblo by Florence Hawley Ellis

The Zuni Scalp Ceremonial by Mrs. Matilda Coxe Stevenson

The 1992 Turtle Dance (Oekuu Shadeh) of San Juan Pueblo: Lessons with the Composer, Peter Garcia by Hao Huang

https://www.archaeologybulletin.org/articles/10.5334/bha.2123/print/

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/08/190805143527.htm

http://www.passportintime.com/gallina-site.html

Cannibals of the Canyon by Douglas Preston, The New Yorker, November 30, 1998

Prehistoric Warfare in the American Southwest by Steven A Leblanc