Part 5

We entered the room through the hole in the floor and passed through the open doorway into the northwest room. We broke a hole through the wall and entered the room to the northeast, and there we really did see things! I got into that room and stood, trying my best to take it all in and see everything I could, while that excited crowd were rummaging it, scattering and turning everything into a mess. There were thirteen skeletons ranging from infants to adults. The infants were two in number. The skulls had not knit together. One of them had two teeth. All were wrapped in matting similar to that around tea chests that come from China, and tied with strings made from fiber of the yucca plant. There were large pieces of cotton cloth. Most of it was plain, resembling our ten-ounce duck. It was in good state of preservation except that it was somewhat colored with age. Some of the cloth had a colored (red) design in stripes. There was also some feather cloth, and several pieces of matting of various types. There were several baskets, some of the best that I have ever seen, all well preserved. There were a lot of sandals, some very good, others showing considerable wear. There was a large quantity of pottery, all Mesa Verde. Some of the pottery was very pretty and new looking.

There were a great many beads and ornaments. I cannot give a description of these, as I had no opportunity to examine them closely. I remember seeing quite a lot of turquoise. There were a number of stone axes, polished, and much nicer in appearance than the average type found in this vicinity. There were also skinning knives, so-called, and sandal lasts; cushions or rings they wore on their heads for carrying burdens—some made of yucca, nicely woven or braided; some made very plain, in coils of yucca strips, tied in various places to hold the strips together; some were made of juniper bark wrapped with strings, and some were made of corn husks. These may have been used also as jar rests to support vessels with convex bottoms which would not stand upright very well without some kind of support.

Obviously, findings such as these could not long remain a secret, and for a considerable time it was a favorite weekend sport to hunt for old remains at this ruin and others in the immediate vicinity. A great quantity of invaluable archeological material must have been carried away in this manner and has long since been lost or scattered among private individuals. A little of it got into museum collections, but most of it was carried off by the people who found it and who then left it in obscure corners of their houses until it was broken or lost. As Howe himself said in his later days when he remembered these early findings:

When we had finished this work, the stuff was taken out and carried off by different members of the party, but where is it now? Nobody knows. Like most of the material from the smaller pueblos around the larger buildings, it is gone. I, being only a small kid, did not get my choice of artifacts, I had to take what was left, which made a nice little collection, at that. But it, too, is about all gone.

We went on with our work, opening all of the rooms that visitors now pass through with the guides, but we found nothing more. The holes that we made through the walls have been converted into doorways through which all visitors now pass from room to room.

For a number of years, rather indiscriminate looting by pothunters and others interested in these antiquities continued sporadically. Luckily, the pothunters did not get into the rooms which seemed to require a lot of hard work and digging, but merely broke into those rooms which were still more or less intact and in which readily accessible material was lying around on the floor or scattered through the debris.

In 1889, a patent covering the site of the Aztec ruins was issued to John R. Kuntz and continued in his possession until 1907, when it was transferred to H. D. Abrams. Due largely to the efforts of these gentlemen, the ruins were relatively protected against vandalism until it could be scientifically investigated by Morris in 1916.

The name of Earl H. Morris is well known in Southwestern archeology. Although he also did considerable archeological work in Central America, particularly at the Temple of the Warriors at Chichen Itza in Yucatan, trying to unravel the story of the prehistoric inhabitants of the American Southwest was always his first love. Morris was born on October 24, 1889, in Chama, N. Mex. His family had originally come west from the Pennsylvania oil fields in the mid-1870’s, and his father engaged in construction work such as building railway grades and roads, digging canals, and hauling freight. In 1891, the elder Morris moved his family to Farmington, N. Mex. There, he was able to rent out his teams on a canal construction project. This left him free to pursue his hobby—digging for Indian antiquities—the love of which he was able to impart to his son Earl.

When Earl was 3½ years old he actually excavated his first Indian pot. As he used to tell it:

One morning in March of 1893, Father handed me a worn-out pick, the handle of which he had shortened to my length, and said: “Go dig in that hole where I worked yesterday, and you will be out of my way.” At my first stroke there rolled down a roundish, gray object that looked like a cobblestone, but when I turned it over, it proved to be the bowl of a black-on-white dipper. I ran to show it to my mother. She grabbed the kitchen butcher knife and hastened to the pit to uncover the skeleton with which it had been buried. Thus, at three and a half years of age there had happened the clinching event that was to make of me an ardent pot hunter, who later on was to acquire the more creditable, and I hope earned, classification as an archaeologist.

Morris’ father was killed when he was 15, and he had to go to work to support his mother and to put himself through school and college as well. In 1908, he entered the University of Colorado, but he left temporarily to join an archeological expedition to the Maya country of Guatemala. Later he returned to college and received his B.A. in 1914 and his M.A. in 1916.

Having spent the winter of 1915 in New York City at Columbia University, Morris was well acquainted with the leading archeologists at the American Museum of Natural History. It was, therefore, upon Dr. Nelson’s recommendation that the ruins at Aztec would make an excellent subject for intensive study by the museum, that Morris was hired to conduct the investigations. He was in charge of the Aztec excavations from 1916-21, and sporadically through 1923, at which time the area became a National Monument. Morris was the first custodian, as they were called in those days, and was officially appointed on February 8, 1923, at the salary of $12 per annum.

He not only excavated the major part of the West Ruin very carefully, but also stabilized and repaired the walls as he went along, for the museum greatly desired that this ruin might be preserved as an outstanding monument. Later, in 1933-34, Morris’ services were loaned to the National Park Service by the Carnegie Institution so that he might accurately restore and reroof the Great Kiva at Aztec.

Morris dug in a number of other places throughout the Southwest in addition to Aztec and therefore was in a better position than any other man of his time to interpret and explain the development of the prehistoric cultures in the Four Corners country. He produced a number of valuable archeological reports, most of them under the auspices of the Carnegie Institution for which he worked for many years. With his death in 1956, Southwestern archeology suffered a severe loss, for there are not many scientific investigators with both his skill and motivation. As his lifelong friend A. V. Kidder has said about him:

Throughout his career, Morris was doubly motivated. First, of course, by the urge to trace the course and discern the causes of historical events and cultural developments. Secondly, by an exceptionally ardent wish to make evident to the world of today the achievements of the past. Back of this was his own admiration for and striving to preserve all ancient things that were beautifully and soundly made. I think he may also have felt, perhaps subconsciously, an obligation to repay, by rescuing their work from oblivion, the men and women of long ago whose artistry and manual skills gave him such keen and lasting pleasure.

Digging in ruins such as at Aztec, where a dry climate has helped preserve many perishable items normally lost to archeologists and where there was always the opportunity of suddenly discovering a fairly complete and undisturbed room, must have been a stimulating experience to a man of Morris’ capabilities. One has only to browse through his reports and articles, or to glance at the pictures therein, to get the feeling of intense excitement about each discovery that prevailed throughout the 5 years he was digging there. It would be impossible to describe everything that Morris excavated, but several of the burials that he uncovered were of exceptional interest.

One consists of what may be the only known case of prehistoric Pueblo surgery. In one of the rooms Morris found the remains of a young female 17 to 20 years of age accompanied by several bowls and a pottery mug. The body had been wrapped in an excellently woven cotton cloth, which in turn, had been covered by a mantle of feather cloth and finally, with a mat of plaited rushes. The young lady had been seriously injured, perhaps in a fall, for the hip had been severely fractured, several vertebrae cracked, and both bones of the left forearm badly broken. But what was of particular interest, was that an attempt had been made to treat the broken arm. Six wooden splints, each flat on one side and convex on the other, had been bound in longitudinal position around the arm. As Morris said, if the Indians who attempted to help this girl realized that her pelvis was also broken they were unable to do anything about that, but evidently they had attempted to set the arm and return it to normal. Unfortunately, death occurred before sufficient time had elapsed to permit the healing to begin, so we do not know how successful this sort of treatment might have been. Although the surgery may seem crude and bungling to us, at least it shows an awareness of what was wrong and an attempt to correct it.

Another fascinating burial was the one which Morris referred to as the “warrior’s grave”, in which he found an adult male buried in a grave-pit sunk into the floor of a room. A wrapping of feather cloth enveloped the entire body, and there had been an equally extensive outer covering of rush matting. Along with numerous other grave offerings of artifacts and pottery vessels, a large, ornate shield was laid over the body. It consisted of a flat piece of coiled basketry 36 inches long and 31 inches wide, and on one side was lashed a hardwood handle. The outermost 5 coils of the shield had been coated with pitch and thickly spangled with minute flakes of selenite; the next 5 were stained dark red, while the remaining 48 were greenish-blue. In addition to the shield there were axes of a form intermediate between axes and hammers, so that it would appear they were intended for use as weapons rather than tools. One is beautifully fashioned from a piece of hematite or similar iron ore, and both had wooden handles which lay near the right hand of the body. Near the left hand was a long knife of red quartzite, positioned so that it might have been inserted in a belt or girdle. Also beside the body was a long, thin, tapering wooden object which might have been interpreted as a digging stick but which Morris felt would also have been serviceable as a sword.

It is not often an archeologist has an opportunity to uncover spectacular remains of this sort, but these are only two of the fascinating burials which Morris recovered from the Aztec ruins. In all he found 186 interments. Strangely enough, only 6, with possibly 2 others, could be identified as belonging to the Chacoan phase at Aztec; 149 were definitely of the Mesa Verde period, 12 others probably so, and 17 were found in circumstances which made it impossible to tell to which period they belonged.

But burials were not the only things which Morris uncovered. He began his diggings in the southeast corner of the ruin, excavating the entire east wing from south to north. The problem of moving the dirt, debris, and fallen rocks was considerable, especially when he did not want merely to pile it off to one side where he might subsequently have to move it a second time. Furthermore, the ruin was to be stabilized as a permanent monument, so it was necessary to remove the debris well outside the ruin area. At one time he evidently considered building a sluiceway from an irrigation ditch which runs along a higher level on the north side of the ruin, thinking that most of the debris could be dumped in the sluice box and washed out to a lower area by the river. Perhaps this scheme did not prove to be feasible, for instead, during the first season’s excavations, he constructed a narrow-gage tramway on which the workmen ran dump cars. Unfortunately, this method of dirt removal did not work satisfactorily either, because the relatively light rails which were used would not support the weight of the loaded dump trucks. He also had difficulty with the size and quality of the wheels on the dumpcarts. Although excavators elsewhere have sometimes used this method of removing dirt, it frequently presents its own type of engineering problems. In the remaining years of the work at Aztec, Morris employed horse-drawn carts which could be loaded directly from the excavations and hauled to a vacant area to be dumped.

In many places the digging was extremely laborious, for over the centuries the dirt and debris had been packed into a consistency almost like that of concrete. In other places the rooms were full of all sorts of prehistoric rubbish, intermixed with broken artifacts which had to be carefully sorted out. In describing the excavations in one room Morris said:

The ceiling failed in the most unusual way, the supports having been broken first at the center, then at each end, where they entered the wall. The small poles seemed to have parted from the walls almost as soon as the center timbers gave way. Some were standing upright against the end walls, while the majority were mashed back against and along the east wall. The splints, bark, and adobe were in a grievous tangle, most difficult to excavate. Above the first ceiling were decayed, but unburned, timbers and lumps of charcoal and reddened earth representing, respectively, the second and third ceilings.

Morris completely excavated the east wing and the eastern half of the north wing. In addition he also excavated 29 rooms in the west wing and about two-thirds of the small cobblestone 1-story rooms which close off the southern third of the plaza area.

Besides excavating many of the kivas enclosed within the pueblo rooms, Morris also excavated the large Chaco-like kiva in front of the northeast corner, as well as the Great Kiva which is centrally located on the south side of the plaza. Later, in 1933 and 1934, Morris returned to Aztec and supervised the stabilization and reconstruction of this Great Kiva, so that today you see it as it supposedly existed when the Indians used it for ceremonial purposes.

Immediately to the west of the main ruin, where the brush had been cleared, Morris found a rather extensive low mound area.

The surface was an orderless succession of hummocks and depressions, the former thickly strewn with cobblestones, the whole presenting an appearance characteristic of most of the ruins in this end of the valley.

Thinking these might be the remains of an earlier structure, he excavated most of it. To his surprise, the reverse proved to be true. Although there had undoubtedly been an earlier Chaco-like sandstone structure at this point, most of it had been torn down and the debris carried elsewhere or utilized in building the great ruin itself. Morris said:

Overlying the earliest remains there are deposits of clean earth, some of it presumably laid down by the elements, but the bulk of it is excavated earth intentionally dumped where it lies.

At some later date, the Mesa Verde-like people had built cobblestone houses, pit rooms, and small kivas on top of this earlier debris. Today the outline of some of these cobblestone walls can be seen on the ground just to the left of the visitor trail as it proceeds northward to enter the main part of the West Ruin.

Since Morris’ excavations at Aztec, there has been sporadic digging, much of it in connection with the Service’s ruins stabilization program. To prevent soil moisture from seeping into the lower footings of these ancient walls, it is frequently necessary to dig down to their bases and cap them with concrete or preserve them by other suitable methods. In doing so, old refuse pits, broken fragments of pottery, or even a burial is occasionally turned up.

Recently, in making excavations in which to place dry barrels for drainage purposes in two rooms on the east side, two interesting ovenlike structures, each exactly centered in a room, were accidentally found. Their location in adjoining rooms, and their central position in the rooms, precludes the possibility that they were pit ovens from an earlier period before the pueblo was built. Doubtless they had been placed deliberately in these two rooms, and they may have been used for roasting large quantities of corn or preparing certain types of baked corn meal or cornbread.

Also since Morris’ time, the rooms through which you may now pass, and which lie between the plaza proper and the rooms with the intact ceilings, have been partially excavated in order to allow you easier access to the plaza. Finally, as part of the stabilization program, the remaining rooms in the south wing which enclosed the plaza, and which were largely composed of cobblestones, were cleared and stabilized.

Morris also excavated a few rooms in the East Ruin simply as a test to see if it belonged to the same general period as the larger ruin in the west. From his findings there he felt that the East Ruin was erected during the Mesa Verde phase of Aztec.

In recent years, one other major excavation has been undertaken at Aztec. This was the complete clearing and stabilization of the circular structure to the north of the ruin known as the Hubbard Mound—a massive, circular, triple-walled structure, with underlying scattered remains of earlier structures. Two heavy radial cobblestone walls now extend to the south of the main structure, and excavations revealed remnants of other heavy walls disappearing under the road to the west. This indicates that the building had originally been one corner of a group of structures. The main part of the Hubbard Mound consists of three concentric circular walls; the spaces between the outer two rings are partitioned into rooms. There are 8 rooms in the inner circle, including an entrance room on the south, and 14 in the outer, if you again count an open passageway on the south side.

Interestingly enough, the three circular walls are heavier and extend deeper into the underlying sand than do the partition walls, and therefore were constructed first as continuous circles. Within the innermost circle there is a standard, small-type kiva. Evidently the entire structure represents a building for the use of a highly specialized religious organization. Part of the construction is of sandstone blocks, part is cobblestone, and all of it seems to have been generously plastered with adobe mud.

There are other examples of tri-walled structures in the Southwest, but they are not very numerous and the exact uses to which they might have been put are unknown. An analysis of materials found during the excavation of the Hubbard Mound reveals that it belonged to the Mesa Verde phase.

When Morris first undertook the excavations at Aztec it was his intention, and that of the American Museum of Natural History, to excavate the ruins completely. However, the undertaking was a massive one. World War I intervened, with all its uncertainties, and funds frequently ran short. In the later days of the excavations, Morris realized there was an advantage to leaving parts of any ruin unexcavated so that better archeological techniques in the future might extract information of which he was unaware. At present, the National Park Service feels much the same way. Perhaps 25 or 50 years from now further excavations may be undertaken in this area, but for the present, the ruins will be left as they are, complete with their feeling of mystery.

_The Aztec Ruins Today_

Aztec Ruins National Monument consists of an enclosed area of 27 acres containing six major archeological complexes of rooms and structures, and at least seven or eight smaller mounds which may contain structures or may simply be trash and refuse mounds from the larger occupation zones. Two of these major complexes have been excavated: the West Ruin and the Hubbard Mound. Two of the others—the East Ruin and Mound F—have been tested. Mound F is evidently very similar to the Hubbard Mound.

The East Ruin, if excavated, might be similar in most respects to the West Ruin, both in appearance and time of occupation. As to whether the smaller mounds contain trash or house remains, only thorough archeological investigations can tell. Morris’ diggings and subsequent small tests have indicated there may be earlier (Developmental Pueblo) remains underlying the main prehistoric complexes. Also, such remains might still be found under the windblown sand in the flatter areas between the major ruins. No real archeological work has ever been done in the monument area to determine the possible extent of such earlier remains.

The two main sites seen by the visitor to the monument are, therefore, the West Ruin and the Hubbard Mound. The West Ruin was the one first entered by early settlers in the late 19th century. The profuse remains caused extensive digging and looting for about a decade. Then, under the ownership first of John R. Kuntz and later of H. D. Abrams, the area was given a certain amount of protection. During 1916-21, the American Museum of Natural History excavated extensively in the West Ruin under the guidance of Morris. Today, three-fourths of this ruin has been excavated, cleared, and stabilized so that you may gain a firsthand impression of its original appearance. The remaining one-fourth is largely unexcavated and, for all anyone knows, may contain archeological riches equal to any recovered in the early days or during the excavations by the American Museum of Natural History.