Kachina and the Cross (6 page)

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Authors: Carroll L Riley

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Page 18
there was a slow growth, though this area remained somewhat of a backwater through the Pueblo III period. About the time that the great pueblos of the Chaco region were beginning to fade, there was some quickening in the Rio Grande Valley, and populations became somewhat larger in what is called the
Coalition period.
In the lower portion of the upper Rio Grande, the Early and Late Elmendorf Indians, probably ancestral to the historic Piro, built fairly large masonry pueblos, some of them on fortified sites.
During the eleventh century, people from the region north of the San Juan River, the
McElmo phase
groups, moved into Chaco, where they seem to have intermixed with the Bonito peoples. For reasons not entirely clear, but probably including drought and overuse of scarce resources, the Chaco towns were in a state of decline after about A.D. 1100, and the dominant Bonito phase was largely gone by mid-century. Some of the McElmo phase peoples may have continued on to A.D. 1200 or later.
As mentioned above, the region along and north of the San Juan, the Four Corners, had a flourishing Pueblo III culture at Mesa Verde and in the McElmo and Montezuma Valleys and the Hovenweep region. This area did not share in the widespread Mesoamerican trade but was still prosperous. The Mesa Verde people maintained themselves for more than a century after Chaco, not deserting their cliff dwellings until around A.D. 1300. During the latter part of the thirteenth century, people were moving out of the San Juan. Some migrated to the west, but the major population probably settled in the upper Rio Grande Basin (see discussion below). Why this happened is not clear, though a drought period of more than two decades was likely one factor. Again, overuse of the land and stripping of forest cover, especially in the highlands of Mesa Verde, were surely other reasons for desertion.
The Hopi country also saw dramatic changes during the thirteenth century. At the beginning of that century there were small Pueblo III settlements on Black Mesa and in the region both to the north and to the south. The people made traditional Anasazi black-on-white pottery and had small round kivas. Though distinctive in some ways, the culture was basically related to the San Juan region to the north and east. By around A.D. 1300 there had been a drastic consolidation, with only eleven large pueblos remaining. These Pueblo IV towns, ancestral to the historic Hopi, were built around central plazas containing rectangular kivas, usually oriented to the northwest. The pottery quickly evolved into a series of brilliant orange and yellow-based bichromes and then polychromes. One reason for the fine pottery was the utilization of seams of rather poor grade, but perfectly serviceable, coal that can be found along the southern edge of Black Mesa in the region of the Hopi mesas. This coal, which
Page 19
was employed for cooking and heating, was also introduced for firing pottery early in Pueblo IV times.
Generally speaking, the Pueblo IV peoples of southern Black Mesa seem to represent a mixture of cultural influences combining a basic Anasazi with an influx from the Mogollon region to the south, something that many archaeologists call
Western Pueblo.
The same thing was true of Zuni. The earlier period saw an intrusion of Chacoan culture with its large structures and Great Kivas onto an Anasazi-Mogollon base. After about A.D. 1300, however, even stronger influences from the Mogollon entered the Zuni region, bringing square kivas, a southern ceramic tradition, and the idea of cremation burial. By the early 1300s there were at least fifteen stone pueblos in the upper and middle Zuni River region.
It seems likely that in the Hopi region the Hopi language, a member of the
Shoshonean
branch of the Uto-Aztecan language family, was already established by A.D. 1300. Indeed, this language may have been spoken well before that time. It is also probable that the Zuni language was being used by at least the fourteenth century. Zuni may have been spoken in the area of the Zuni River from early, possibly Archaic, times. Alternatively, it may have been a part of the Mogollon intrusion in the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century. Zuni is a language isolate, related to other Southwestern languages only on a very distant level. Recent studies suggest that it is a member of a group called
Penutian
, which has a generally western distribution
In a previous book I suggested that the language of the Chaco region, going back into Archaic times, was
Keresan
, another rather isolated tongue but one with a more eastern series of relationships. Keresan languages spread to the Rio Grande Basin sometime in late prehistory. It also seems to me that the San Juan region and the Rio Grande had speakers of
Tanoan
languages, another of the Uto-Aztecan subgroups, dating back at least to late Archaic times. In the historic period, Tanoan languages were spread all along the upper and middle Rio Grande. (For further discussion of Southwestern languages, see chapter 3.)
Another factor that led to great changes in the Southwestand probably indicated by the spread of the
kachina
cult, discussed belowwas the rise of a series of large and small settlements in what is now Chihuahua and in extreme southwestern New Mexico. The best-known of these was the extensive center of Casas Grandes in modern west-central Chihuahua. The Casas Grandes towns rose partly from Mogollon roots but with dramatic influences from western Mexico, appearing within a matter of a few years around A.D. 1200 and creating a new Mesoamerican-Southwestern synthesis. This "Casas Grandes Interaction Sphere" influenced the last phase of the Jornada Mogollon of southern New Mexico and western Texas and, at further remove, the Pueblo world as well.
Page 20
The area that gained the most Pueblo population in Pueblo IV times was the Rio Grande. The rise in population brought large pueblos, some with two thousand or even three thousand rooms. Most of these continued to be built of stone and mud mortar, but beginning in the twelfth century a second tradition emerged, likely from the Jornada Mogollon region to the south, of using coursed adobe in building housesa building technique that also penetrated the Casas Grandes area and marked the Classic period of the Hohokam. This period in the Pueblo region has been called its golden age because of its vigor and growth, especially in the Rio Grande Basin, but also at Zuni and Hopi.
The food eaten in the Pueblo IV period was about the same as that available to the Pueblos for centuries. The premier crops were maize, the brown bean, and varieties of squash. By this time cotton was probably mainly used in weaving, but the eating of cotton seedswith their rich oil contentwas an ancient practice. The bottle gourd was used primarily as a container. These plants represented the basic agricultural component of Southwestern life. Although corn was paramount in the diet, wild foods were collected and eaten, including the chenopod goosefoot, whose seeds were ground and treated somewhat like maize in cooking. Purslane and clammy-weed likely were eaten, as were piñon nuts, wild chiles, and wild sunflower seed. The people also used medicinal plants including ephedra (Mormon tea) and the powerful hallucinogen datura. Yucca fruit was also consumed, and threads from the plant itself were used in weaving, as were the strands of black hemp, or apocynum.
Two animals were domesticated, the dog and the turkey, the latter valuable for both feathers and food. The dog was probably used mainly as a hunting companion. Seasonally, the diet of the Pueblos had a considerable amount of animal protein. The bow had been in use since Basketmaker times, and the Indians hunted a variety of game animals including deer and antelope. Bison were also hunted by organized groups that went out onto the Plains, but bison products may have been mostly received in trade with Plains Indians, the Apache Querecho, and the Teya (see below). The Pueblos harvested rabbits, probably the most common wild animal food, by surrounding an area and killing the various cottontails and jackrabbits with clubs or digging sticks, a technique that went back at least to Archaic times.
In the earlier centuries there was a tradition of black-on-white pottery that had been considerably influenced by the San Juan area, especially in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; however, new types of ceramics were beginning to appear. Originating in the White Mountains of Arizona, west and south of Zuni, a series of red wares and then polychrome or multicolored wares spread eastward. One of these, St. Johns Polychrome (black and white on a red base) was widely copied
Page 21
well before A.D. 1300. Certain White Mountain wares began to be treated with metallic paste which, when fired, made a glaze over portions of the vessel's surface. Glazes were popular at Zuni and by around A.D. 1300 had begun their diffusion eastward into the Rio Grande Valley, where they continued well into the Spanish colonial period. At Hopi, the magnificent Jeddito pottery, bichrome and polychrome on a yellow base, began to be made around the same time.
The catastrophe(s) that forced the desertion of the San Juan Valley and other parts of the Southwest in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries led to new social, political, and religious ideas. Pressures of rising populations and the new large towns created a need for novel ways to integrate the pueblos and groups of pueblos. New modalities that crosscut the old kin-based structures began to appear around A.D. 1300. War, hunt, and medicine societies may have developed at this time, and the
kachina cult
certainly did.
Kachinas are masked figures that represent ancestors and which also bring rain. The modern name
kachina
(in Spanish orthography,
katsina
or
catzina
) itself is somewhat of a mystery. Scholars have generally considered it to have been Hopi and to have spread from Hopi to the more eastern Pueblos. However,
kachina
clearly seems to be a loan word into the Hopi language. As Charles Adams points out, there is no initial syllable
ka
in Hopi. Colorful kachina ceremonies, likely with the name attached, spread into the Pueblo area, quite probably from the Casas Grandes region, sometime around A.D. 1300. The word
kachina
as well as aspects of the ceremonies were extensively documented by the seventeenth-century Spanish missionaries. These Franciscans primarily identified kachina dances among the Rio Grande groups, and the actual term may have appeared among the eastern Pueblos before being picked up at Hopi. Kachinas are basically Mesoamerican in nature, representing Tlaloc, a widespread and ancient deity of Mexico. Even such esoteric aspects of the cult as the sacrifice of children to produce rain has an echo in Pueblo mythology. The cult bonded pueblos and groups of related pueblos, and it was found everywhere in the Pueblo area. Today, the kachinas are more important in the Western Pueblo world of Hopi and Zuni than they are in the east, but this is because in the seventeenth century there was a powerful and sustained attempt by the Franciscans to wipe out ''diabolical'' masked dances, the centerpieces of the kachina cult. The drive against the cult was more successful in the heartland of Spanish control, the Rio Grande Valley, than among the more isolated western Pueblos.
The changes in the Southwest that took place around A.D. 1300 were so drastic that it might be best to use new names. The Hohokam Classic period collapsed at about this time. A century or so earlier, southern and eastern portions of the Mogollon had become part of a larger Casas Grandes-dominated region.
Page 22
In the Pueblo world, a name other than Anasazi or even Pueblo IV, with its idea of simple continuity, might better be used for this post-1300 period. Perhaps a distinctive term should be introduced. One possibility would be to extend the term
Classic Pueblo
, used primarily for the Rio Grande, to all the old Anasazi region. This does, however, lead to a certain confusion since so many Southwestern and Mesoamerican cultures have their "classic" periods. I suggest the phrase
Protohistoric Pueblo
or, in a wider context, the
Protohistoric Southwest.
The term
Protohistoric
is already rather widely used, though different scholars give different beginning and ending dates for it. It may stretch the chronology a bit to think of the fourteenth century as being protohistoric, but in fact a major wave of Mexican influence began a few decades after A.D. 1300 and continued unabated until it merged with the massive intrusion of the Spaniards. This Protohistoric period can be said to end with the Pueblo Revolt, the last attempt to assert political and cultural "Pueblo-ness."
To go back to the older chronology, the Pueblo IV period or, as it is sometimes called, the Golden Age in the Rio Grande was a rich mixture of San Juan and southern (Mogollon or Mogollon-derived) traits. The San Juan-type round kivas were found as well as the southern and western square kivas. A great deal of the iconography, especially that relating to the kachina cult, came from Mesoamerica. For example, a complex relating to the twin war-godswith deer-sun and rabbit-moon associations, and fish to human transformations that are found as far south and east as Yucatán and Guatemalanow appears in the Southwest.
Some of these religious features came up a series of trails that also brought trade items to the Southwest. One of these originated at Casas Grandes and flourished from around A.D. 1200 for two and a half centuries. A major prehistoric road may have run northeast from the Casas Grandes Valley into the lower Rio Carmen near present-day Villa Ahumada, then directly north to the Rio Grande near modern El Paso. However, the Casas Grandes trade was gradually taken over by a series of small entities in northeast Sonora that I have elsewhere called "statelets." These began operating around A.D. 1300 and were still functioning at the time of Coronado in 1540. They traded Gulf of California shell and coral, parrots and macaws and their brightly colored plumage, and copper objects into the Southwest while receiving Southwestern turquoise, bison products (trans-shipped from the Great Plains), garnets, peridots, and other semi-jewel stones, probably salt, and possibly slaves into the Sonoran region. Another series of trade routes ran from the Pacific Coast via the Lower Colorado Patayan (Yuman) population, bringing Pacific and Gulf shell to exchange for turquoise, cloth, and other goods. Still other trails ran eastward from the Pueblo

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