Part 2

OTOWI. The smaller section of Bandelier National Monument, lying some 15 miles from the headquarters area, takes its name from the Otowi ruin, the largest pueblo on the monument. Although not so impressive as the Tyuonyi ruin at first glance, the great spread and complexity of the rubble mounds surely dwarf all other ruined dwellings of the vicinity. Probably 450 ground-floor rooms were here, with an indeterminate number of upper-floor rooms—perhaps 600 rooms altogether is a reasonable estimate. The Otowi rooms have not been excavated to any great extent, but two burial mounds south of the building group have been investigated with spectacular results—over 150 interments were found in a space about 80 by 100 feet. With these burials was found a great variety of offerings to the dead, ranging from food bowls to bone awls and ceremonial pipes. Specimens of these handicrafts may be seen at the National Park Service museum at monument headquarters and at the Museum of New Mexico in Santa Fe.

TSANKAWI. The Otowi house-group occupies a site atop a low ridge walled in by the cliffsides of steep Pueblo Canyon. Its nearest neighbor, Tsankawi, is sited on a very different terrain: Tsankawi is very near to being a “sky-city” in the style of the modern Acoma in western New Mexico. Not as large as Otowi, this ruin has equal majesty by reason of its commanding position on top of a cliff-ringed island mesa overlooking a vast north-south sweep of the Rio Grande and the Sangre de Cristo Mountains beyond. The location and the ground plan suggest defense as a first consideration. Of masonry construction in a rough hollow square, Tsankawi would have presented a serious problem to enemy besiegers. On the other hand, a siege would have cut off the defenders from their water supply, far in the canyon below. There is, however, some evidence of a rain-catchment basin close outside the eastern walls, and excavation may in future confirm the existence of an ingenious water-storage system.

The most memorable sight at Tsankawi lies along the trail that climbs from the end of the access road to the mesa-top. Here for 100 yards the path, crossing a bald slope of soft gray tuff, is worn down for almost 18 inches by the climbing and descending feet of thousands of Indian passersby. Granted that the rock is extremely porous and soft, it is nonetheless almost beyond the scope of imagination to conceive the vast traffic required to so entrench the path. Today, when you climb this trail, you cannot but visualize a procession of Indian farmers over several generations traveling to and from their fields, their sandaled feet scuffing each year a fractional inch deeper into the calendar of the rock.

_Origins of the People_

The great number of Indian ruins in the Bandelier vicinity, some of which have been described, give evidence of the presence and labor of thousands of prehistoric people. Who were these people? Whence did they come, and where have they gone? A myriad of questions is inspired by the far-flung ruins—and in the ruins, of course, are the answers to these questions, answers which have been gradually unearthed by scientists over the past 75 years. Beginning with Adolph Bandelier, the Swiss-American ethnologist for whom the monument is named, a succession of scientists has brought to light many facts once buried beneath the rubble of the ruins.

WORK OF THE ARCHEOLOGISTS. Before entering upon a description of the life and times of the early Bandelier dwellers, it may be well to discuss briefly the efforts of the archeologists and others who have built up the picture of this long-lost culture. The work of the archeologist is essentially historical detective work—in his digging and searching he must find, assemble, and interpret clues. Some of these clues will be tangible, like pottery fragments. Other clues will be intangible—the very absence of pottery fragments in an ancient dwelling tells a story. The correct evaluation and interpretation of multitudinous clues by many experts over two generations have at last given us a very considerable knowledge of Southwestern prehistory—and the knowledge is being added to daily. H. M. Wormington, in _Prehistoric Indians of the Southwest_, wrote “... the development of archaeology in the Southwest may be compared to the putting together of a great jig-saw puzzle. First came a period of general examination of the pieces, then a concentration on the larger and more highly colored pieces, and finally a carefully planned approach to the puzzle as a whole with serious attempts to fill in specific blank areas.”

THE BASKETMAKERS AND THE DEVELOPMENTAL PUEBLO PERIOD. As a result of such concerted study and deduction, there exists today a fairly solid understanding of the general course of human events in the Southwest for the past 2,000 years. Many details are still missing, and some will always be, but the general outline of Indian life and customs is established back to the early centuries of the Christian era; beyond that, the picture becomes hazy. Those earlier years were seemingly times of a seminomadic, hunting-gathering existence for the early Southwesterners; only from about 3,000 years ago is there clear evidence of the advent of intensive farming and a settled life.

As soon as agriculture became their primary sustenance, the people began to live more or less permanently in one place. From certain early cave-shelters are derived the clues which begin to formulate the story of the days before history. Human burials have been found in the earth floors of shallow caves scattered through the San Juan river drainage; and in these same caves are found storage chambers prepared to protect the foodstuffs, principally corn. Their outstanding handicraft was basketry, as far as remaining evidence shows. Because of the great numbers of skilfully worked baskets found in their homesites, archeologists have named these people Basketmakers. It is now quite certain that the Indians who came much later to live in the Bandelier vicinity can claim as ancestors the Basketmaker people of the area to the west.

The life of these ancestral farmers was a primitive one, even by the standards which prevailed in Frijoles Canyon 1,000 years later. For one thing, no permanent dwellings appear to have been constructed until late in Basketmaker times, and even then dwellings were of crude pithouse type—an excavation some 3 feet into the ground, walled up and roofed with logs, brush, and earth. Further, the bow and arrow was not used by these people until perhaps A. D. 600; the early weapon of hunting and warfare was the spear and spear-thrower (atlatl). For the greater part of Basketmaker times, pottery was unknown; only after A. D. 400 was true fired pottery introduced in the northern Southwest.

The production of decorated pottery late in Basketmaker times began a development which has had the greatest archeological significance. The long-enduring fragments of painted pottery found in subsequent housesites have been a principal tool by which students have pieced together the relative chronology of ruins and the migrations of the pottery-makers.

With successive introduction of pottery, the bow and arrow, and other new traits in the approximate period A. D. 450 to 750, the character of Basketmaker life became so modified that a new name—the Pueblos—was applied to the subsequent peoples. Presently they began to move from the Basketmaker pithouse into masonry chambers above ground, perhaps with several rooms connected, the old pithouse surviving in use as the ceremonial kiva. Cotton came under cultivation and was woven into garments. Hoes and axes of stone with serviceable handles came into use. Turkeys and dogs were by this time commonly domesticated, the former being valued primarily for feathers which served to make warm robes and ceremonial garb.

GREAT PUEBLO PERIOD. The stage was now set for the great flowering of the Pueblo people; the way of life which had taken rough shape from A. D. 450 to 1050 now reached culmination in the Great Pueblo period. For about 200 years, or until around A. D. 1250, fortune smiled on the farming towns of the Four Corners country. The population grew and spread, and the handicraft arts reached a stage of impressive proficiency. The centers of this classic period which are today best known lie in three different States: Mesa Verde (in Mesa Verde National Park, Colo.), Chaco Canyon (in Chaco Canyon National Monument, N. Mex.), and the vicinity of Betatakin and Keet Seel (in Navajo National Monument, Ariz.) These three areas, all now under the jurisdiction of the National Park Service, contain the great cliff dwellings and communal houses which mark the highest development of prehistoric Indian attainments in the northern Southwest.

It is beyond the scope of this handbook to present an adequate description of the Great Pueblo towns and their inhabitants. Although almost contemporaneous, the three largest centers differed greatly in development, so that the total story becomes most complex. In general it may be said that the skills of farming and production of foodstuffs became highly efficient, allowing the people more leisure in which to experiment with and improve their arts and crafts and their ceremonial rituals. Much elaboration and refinement of the potter’s craft, for example, is traceable to these years; some of the world’s finest ceramic art, ancient or modern, comes from Chaco Canyon and the Mesa Verde. Again, in the field of jewelry-making and personal adornment, the craftsman of the 1100’s produced shell- and turquoise-inlay work which would have earned the admiration of Cellini. Finally, a multiplicity of kivas is to be found in all the great houses of the period, as well as a number of Great Kivas embodying various elaborate altar features. This expenditure of effort to crowd the towns with ceremonial rooms would seem to indicate something of a preoccupation with religion. The numerous discoveries of carved stone fetishes and other ceremonial objects serve to bear out a concept of elaborate ritual and unending dedication to the service of their gods.

DROUGHT AND MIGRATIONS. It seems, however, that the gods were fickle. Some two centuries of growth and prosperity were all that were to be allowed the farmers of the Great Pueblo centers. In the last quarter of the 13th century, a period of drought came to the high plateaus of the Pueblo people. From the evidence of the tree rings of the time, the majority of the years between A. D. 1276 and 1299 were so deficient in rainfall that the Indian corn crops could not have matured. Although this drought was not actually continuous, and varied between regions, there was undoubtedly much starvation, and a decimation of the inhabitants of the great towns, perhaps from enemy raids as well as hunger. There were undoubtedly numerous migrations from the drought-stricken areas into places with reliable streams.

These troubled times in the western centers and emigrations therefrom were responsible in large part for the settling of the Pajarito Plateau and the canyons of what is now Bandelier National Monument. The streams of the Jemez Mountains continued to flow during the dry time, apparently, for large-scale colonization of well-watered canyons such as Frijoles appears to date from the end of the 13th century. The drift of the emigrants from the western areas is impossible to trace in detail, continuing as it did for several generations and originating from many sources. The Bandelier region may have been something of a melting pot, assimilating migrants from various distant places. A study of the pottery types produced in the early days of residence here affords the best clue to possible origins. Among these types are found precise copies of decoration styles from a number of the western centers, indicating that the women potters carried on their respective traditional decorations upon arrival in their new homes. One particular kind of black-on-white pottery can hardly be distinguished even by microscopic examination from a similar ware made in the Mesa Verde country.

LATE PUEBLO PERIOD. The upsurge of population and the main construction activity in Bandelier began after A. D. 1300. Large towns grew up and down the Rio Grande drainage, and their people achieved in most respects as high a standard of living as their forebears had known in the Great Pueblo centers of 200 years earlier. Very possibly the Rio Grande pueblos might have gone ahead to a new peak of cultural development if they had not been interrupted and demoralized by the coming of the Spanish. In 1598, some 400 farmers and soldiers led by Don Juan de Onate, the first permanent Spanish settlers, came from Mexico, and with the entry of these land-seekers the ascendancy of the Pueblos was finished.

_Life of the Early People at Bandelier_

The typical male inhabitant of Frijoles Canyon in the early 1300’s, then, was a newcomer to the area. He was a man of Mongoloid cast of countenance, about 5 feet 4 or 5 inches in height, with medium red-brown skin and black hair. His wife measured 5 feet or perhaps a little less, and was inclined to a stout build. A few children and a dog or two completed the family circle. These newcomers had arrived in their chosen valley with only such belongings as they could carry on their backs, and were immediately faced with the problems of wresting a livelihood from a somewhat grudging environment. In the pattern of all mankind before and since, this Indian migrant’s first requirements were food, water, shelter, and clothing for himself and his family.

FOOD. As a practicing farmer, the man’s chief reliance for food had been the crops of corn, beans, and squash that he knew how to raise. Perhaps the family had managed to bring some remnants of their most recent harvests with them to Frijoles; but these remnants had to be saved for seed, to insure crops for the coming year. What did the family eat meanwhile? In the warm season, a diet of sorts could have been pieced together by gathering various plants and fruit and nut crops. Spring brought out of the ground several annuals such as the mustard and bee plants which can be boiled for vegetable-greens while young. A bit later the local berry crop came into fruit—currants, gooseberries, chokecherries, and a few raspberries. The ever-present yucca offered its bananalike pod of fruit toward August. When fall arrived, the countryside, in good years, abounded with wild produce: pinyon-nuts and juniper berries, the staples, with trimmings of prickly pears, acorns, and many other seed and nut crops. The ingenuity of the modern Pueblo Indian in coaxing sustenance out of his familiar native plants is extraordinary; very few things that grow are not of some use to him as food or medicine. It may surely be assumed that the Pueblo ancestor of 600 years ago was equally resourceful.

Fortunately, however, this ancient Frijoles resident was not restricted to the collection of wild crops to feed his family. He was a hunter as well as a gatherer. He was armed with bow and arrow, and was undoubtedly an expert shot. Other tools were snares and nets for small game and birds. If he did not bring cordage with him on his migration he promptly wove it from the useful yucca plant, and set out a trapline. Many small animals which moderns would disdain were important food items to the early Pueblos: the once-common prairie dog and the still-common pack rat were eaten in great numbers, if the evidence of bones in ancient trash heaps can be believed. Perhaps only the skunk escaped the designs of the early food-seeker, for a reason which was as valid then as it is today. Of larger animals, the deer was most taken, although elk and antelope were not immune. The remains of game pits, dug into the soft bedrock to entrap larger beasts, have been found in several places in the monument. One of these pits is 15 feet deep with a bottom diameter of 8 feet, narrowing to a smaller bottleneck opening above. The preparation of such a trap as this was obviously a laborious community enterprise, and suggests an occasional community deer-drive to herd the victims across the concealed mouth of the pit.

All this work of hunting and gathering was secondary to planting and tending crops, once the growing season arrived. The Pueblos had discovered, many centuries before, that their best defense against hunger was in growing corn—so the Frijoles hunter became a farmer in late May or June. With digging stick and stone hoe, he prepared the ground to grow his corn, beans, and squash. Not only were the moist canyon bottoms thus cultivated, but also the mesa-tops wherever a sufficient depth of soil had accumulated. This agriculture was not assisted by irrigation systems of any sort that have been discovered here, although irrigation was practiced on the Mesa Verde a century earlier. Apparently the local rains in summer were adequate in Frijoles to bring a crop to maturity. Climatologists believe that there was a little more precipitation over most of the Southwest 500 years ago than there is today, and possibly the ancient corn was more drought-resistant. In any case, in good years the local farmer managed to harvest enough of his three crops in September to tide his family over the privations of winter—if no human marauders descended to loot the granary.

The harvesting of the corn by no means concluded the labors concerned with it. A place of storage safe from rodents was a first requisite, bringing about the building of tight-walled chambers both in the cliffs and in the pueblo understory; then long grinding with stone metate and mano on the part of the housewife was called for to convert the kernels to cornmeal. One ancient use of this cornmeal no doubt is duplicated in the modern Pueblo cooking of Piki—a thin crisp paperlike bread baked on a hot stone griddle. Traces of such griddle-stoves are to be found in some of the ancient pueblos.

SHELTER. With his food needs taken care of, the new Frijoles resident thought next of shelter from the weather. Either he organized with some of his neighbors to construct a masonry dwelling in the traditional style of the west country, or he took shelter in a natural cave of the tuff cliff. In the latter case, a few days of scraping and chipping at the soft rock would normally suffice to level off the floor and raise the ceiling; final trimmings, such as fireplace and rocked-up doorway, could be completed at leisure. As years passed and the family grew, it may be assumed that the sooty cave became crowded and was supplemented with rooms in front, built up from rock fragments lying close by, mortared together with adobe from down the slope. For ceiling beams, pinyons and junipers were large enough, since the span needed to be only 6 or 8 feet; even these small timbers were hard enough to cut and trim with a stone axe. Above the beams, small sticks, mostly willow, were tightly laid, then grass or bark was spread to take the final layer of earth which weatherproofed the ceiling, or which made the floor for the room above. The design of the ceilings in the modern buildings at monument headquarters is of this type, a style of Pueblo architecture, largely derived from ancient Indian models, which is commonly seen throughout the Southwest.

It is uncertain which type of construction is the older—the talus house or the open pueblo on the canyon floor. But one thing is evident—a building of the size of Tyuonyi, previously described, was worked on and occupied by scores of families. In troubled times, this massive structure would have served better for mutual defense than scattered or smaller houses.

The rock of which the Bandelier masonry walls were made is not an easy material to build with. Unlike sandstone or even limestone, it refuses to fracture into clean straight lines or right angles. To employ it as building stone, the Indians had to find small miscellaneous blocks and chip these odd pieces into some semblance of usable shape. This chipping or pecking was done with hammerstones and axes of harder lava. The work required to fashion the walls of Tyuonyi, crude though they are, must have been prodigious.

CLOTHING. The third basic requirement of the Frijoles newcomer was clothing, particularly warm clothing to combat the winter. Traveling into this area in the warm months, presumably, he may or may not have been able to bring along a full cold-weather wardrobe. If he did not, the materials to contrive warm clothes were available here for the taking. Ingenuity and work would have produced the necessary garments.

The obvious coverings were skins and hides of the game animals which the hunters collected. A bear skin was a most desirable cold-weather protection—but there were certainly never enough bear in this part of the country to take care of all the Indian needs. Other long-haired animals, such as wolf, coyote, fox, and bobcat, no doubt played a minor part in the clothing schemes of the local people. But the real mainstay of fur-robe manufacture, of which there is fragmentary evidence in many ruins, was the lowly rabbit.

Rabbit skins apparently were not used in one piece, but rather were cut into long strips about one-quarter inch wide. These strips were then spirally wound about a core of yucca-fiber rope, the resulting fur cable being woven by loose twining into a pliant and comfortable blanket. The same technique was used with turkey feathers to produce an equally warm and much lighter-weight garment. The Bandelier people for many years domesticated the wild turkey in order to have an abundant supply of feathers, both for utilitarian and ceremonial garments.

Summer clothing was most conspicuous by its near absence. Since about A. D. 700, however, the Pueblo world had known cotton and had developed considerable skill in weaving it, so that the Frijoles dweller of the 1300’s was able to produce such fabric as he required from cotton, which could be obtained by trade with low-country people only 50 miles down the Rio Grande. Weaving techniques have apparently been passed down to the modern Pueblo people from their prehistoric ancestors. Present-day Pueblo men, particularly in the Hopi towns of Arizona, produce cotton blankets, belts, and ceremonial clothing of a very high standard, on looms of the ancient type.