by Craig Childs
METATE A metate is a stone surface on which food, pigments, or medicines are ground. Metates range from deep, well-worn troughs to simple slabs that have been cursorily scratched to make them more abrasive.
MOGOLLON CULTURE Occupying a mountainous region of central Arizona and southwest New Mexico, Mogollon is, along with Hohokam and Anasazi, one of the core cultural groups that existed in the prehistoric Southwest. Although Mogollon people farmed, they relied more on wild plants and game than did neighboring Hohokam and Anasazi groups. They did not engage in trade as extensively as did other people of the time. The Mimbres people, a New Mexico branch of the Mogollon, stand out for their extensive trade and elaborately painted ceramics. Like other names used in Southwest archaeology, Mogollon refers to a cultural group identified by certain archaeological traits, not a single, easily defined people.
MOGOLLON RIM The Mogollon Rim is a geographic brink that drops off sharply along its southern edge. It stretches across 350 miles of Arizona, dividing the state in half from east to west and also dividing the whole geographic and ecological Southwest. The southern Colorado Plateau and its desert ends at the rim. Although the Mogollon Rim is most visually abrupt between Milk Ranch Point and Forestdale Valley in east--central Arizona, it is part of a much larger geographic trend of rough terrain that begins around the Mogollon and San Francisco mountains in New Mexico and continues west by northwest to the Grand Wash Cliffs and the end of the Grand Canyon near the Nevada border. To the north of the rim lies a gradual fifty-mile slope rising out of the desert, its rock surface incised as if by a laser into long and isolated canyons. All the water from that side feeds into the half-dry floor of the Little Colorado River. South of the rim the land falls steeply into forested chasms, where creeks run clear and cold, draining through deep and numerous canyons toward the Salt River. Water heading south eventually flows into the low Sonoran Desert, to the city of Phoenix and beyond.
NAVAJO The Navajo left their Athabascan homeland of southeast Alaska and British Columbia around the eighth century A.D. but probably did not arrive in the Southwest until around the fifteenth century, a couple of hundred years before the Spanish. An early tree-ring-dated Navajo site near La Plata, New Mexico, is from 1541. They now occupy one of the largest reservations in the United States and are one of the faster-growing ethnic populations in the Western Hemisphere.
NORTHEAST ARIZONA Ecologically and geologically diverse, northeast Arizona meets New Mexico along a linear series of 8,000- to 9,000-foot peaks on the Defiance Plateau. It also runs along the Utah border around Monument Valley and the convoluted stone landscape of the Rainbow Plateau. Its western boundary is formed by the Echo Cliffs and Marble Canyon at the upper reaches of the Grand Canyon. The southern delin-eation is the Little Colorado River from St. Johns through the Painted Desert.
NORTHWEST NEW MEXICO Northwest New Mexico, made up mostly of Tertiary shales and fluvial sandstones, is an easily defined basin that drains into the San Juan River. This basin is encircled by the Chuska Mountains and the Arizona border to the west, the Zuni Mountains and Mount Taylor to the south, the procession of the Sierra Nacimiento and Nacimiento Peak to the east, and the Colorado border, where elevation rises sharply, to the north. In the middle of this basin is Chaco, the wealthiest and most influential center ever built on the Colorado Plateau.
PAHANA This is a Hopi term for a white person or Anglo.
PIKI BREAD Best known among the Hopi, this corn-based bread consists mainly of cornmeal and wood ash. (If the ash is pure, it has a clean taste of grain and stone.) The bread is baked in thin sheets that resemble fine pastry.
PIT-HOUSE This type of structure was used for both dwellings and public spaces at different times throughout the settlement of the Southwest. Semi-subterranean pit-houses are round, square, or rectangular, with thatched, mud, or timbered roofs. Often the features inside, such as hearths, deflector stones, benches, and entryways, are arranged according to a strict plan. Oversize pit-houses from the early centuries A.D. are thought to be the precursors of ceremonial kivas.
POLYCHROME POTTERY Polychrome (multicolored) pottery first appeared in the Southwest in the form of black-and-white designs painted on a red or orange background, thus making three colors. Examples of this style include St. Johns Polychrome, Kayenta Polychrome, and Salado Polychrome. Farther south, in New Mexico, Texas, and Mexico, wares, such as Ramos Polychrome, were painted with red, black, and even yellow designs. Polychrome pottery came late to the Southwest, not making a strong appearance until the end of the thirteenth and beginning of the fourteenth cen-turies. Within a decade or less, this kind of pottery became the dominant decorated form in the Southwest, entirely replacing the seven-hundred-year-old tradition of black-on-white ceramics.
PRE-COLUMBIAN The cultural era of the Americas prior to 1492, and the arrival of Christopher Columbus under the flag of Castile, is considered pre-Columbian. A reliable alternative used in the Southwest is pre-Hispanic. Precontact has also been widely used, referring to contact between European and American civilizations, placing it prior to the very late fifteenth century.
PREHISTORY In the Americas, prehistory and pre-Columbian are generally synonymous, referring to the era before European contact. However, the division between history and prehistory is usually defined not by cultural contact, but by the advent of writing and the detailed recording of history. The Maya had a complete written language that has been exhaustively deciphered by modern researchers, putting into question the ubiquitous use of the word prehistory regarding the pre-Columbian Americas. In the Southwest, history was kept in a variety of ways besides written language. Highly complex oral traditions developed, and stories were printed in rock art or on decorated vessels. People had history even if they did not have writing.
PUBLIC ARCHITECTURE A piece of public architecture is a building or space constructed for use by groups larger than households. Their presence implies organized labor and perhaps some form of corporate governance. Archaeological remains of public architecture in the Southwest include great kivas, plazas, great houses, platform mounds, ball courts, and roads, which were used in public ceremonies, games, markets, meetings, festivals, and pilgrimages. Modern analogues are churches, concert halls, schools, government buildings, and sports arenas.
PUEBLO The Spanish word for town, Pueblo is used in capitalized form to describe a native people now centered in northern Arizona and northern New Mexico. You would say that a person is Pueblo or that he or she is from Cochiti Pueblo or Zuni Pueblo. Pueblo people derive mainly from a farming culture that has existed in the Southwest since at least the fourth century B.C. Corn domesticated in Mexico reached Arizona 4,500 years ago, then northern New Mexico 4,000 years ago, and became big in the Mesa Verde region of southwest Colorado in the fourth and fifth centuries B.C. Many Pueblo people have local roots going this far back. When not capitalized, pueblo refers to compact adobe and stonework towns in which Pueblo people have occasionally lived for the past thousand years.
RED WARE POTTERY This ceramic type was originally manufactured on the western half of the Colorado Plateau (in northern Arizona and southeast Utah) as far back as the eighth century A.D. Red ware vessels are made with iron-rich clay that is fired in an oxidizing kiln and often swabbed with a dark red slip for luster. True red ware will appear saturated all the way through with color when a potsherd is viewed edge-on. Imitation red ware, of which there were many types in the ancient Southwest, was merely painted with a red clay slip before firing, and its interior is gray or white.
ROCK ART In the Southwest rock art comes in two forms: petroglyphs and pictographs. Petroglyphs are cut, scratched, ground, or pecked into rock surfaces. Pictographs are painted, using rich pigments such as rust red hematite or bright ones such as kaolin clay or copper. Archaeological references to Southwest rock art often regard the work as either a suite of widely recognized symbols or simply ornamental, graffiti-like images. Some Pueblo people say that some rock art expresses in detail their ancestra
l clan symbols and ancient allegories.
SALADO Salado is what became of the old-guard cultural groups of Hohokam, Anasazi, and Mogollon when they were thrust together in the southern Southwest in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries by mass migrations and escalating trade. It is a cultural phenomenon identified by Salado Polychrome pottery—namely, Gila Polychrome—and heavily aggregated settlements that in some cases lasted into the early sixteenth century.
SALADO POLYCHROME This style of pottery became fashionable throughout the Southwest in the fourteenth century A.D. It was made in low-heat kilns using whatever fuel was available, generally wood that burned to ash while the vessels were still being fired. Because of this economical manufacturing technique, Salado Polychrome could be made quickly and in great amounts. It represented a revolution in artistry, with its rich, painted symbology and huge urn shapes. Salado Polychrome was made by just about everybody in the Southwest during the fourteenth century. Far more widespread than any previous pottery, it was a traveling billboard, the iconic images painted on its surfaces seen from Arizona to Texas, from northern New Mexico to Chihuahua, Mexico. Because of its cheap manufacture, Salado Polychrome vessels were not the sturdiest or finest of the time. Their weaker construction can be strongly contrasted with yellow wares and White Mountain Red ware, both of which resulted from long, hot, well-timed firings. If you tap a piece of Salado Polychrome, it will make a heavy sound, but if you tap a piece of yellow ware or White Mountain Red ware, it will sound like a bell.
SHIELD FIGURE Appearing as both pictographs and petroglyphs, shield figures are circular rock art images that began appearing in the thirteenth century A.D., often representing a decorated round shield hiding a person who is sometimes holding a spear or bow. Most of these images have been found in the desert of southeast Utah, pecked into cliffs along the Green River and painted in caves in the Needles near the Colorado River, and many are to the east in the upper Rio Grande area. A chain of rock art shields continues south out of Canyonlands into Arizona and into the cliff dwellings of Kayenta. The last of these figures have been found at a few sites below the Mogollon Rim. It has long been thought that these images are indicative of violence and conflict. They appeared at the same time that the entire Southwest was embroiled in cultural and climatic instability.
SIITÁLPU This is a Hopi word referring to the Flower World, a luminously colored spirit realm that exists alongside this one. Symbology depicting such a world appeared most frequently in the fourteenth century as migration peaked in the Southwest. It was painted on clay vessels; carved or painted on stone, wood, or bone; and in one case made into an enormous earthen effigy. Some see the rise of siitálpu imagery as a sign that philosophies were changing. They believe that it represents a shift from stern ideologies harking back to Chaco, where ancestors were worshipped and territorial claims were secured. New siitálpu stars, clouds, animals, serpents, and faces lead some researchers to believe that a new ideology was loosening ties to the past and former lands. It allowed ancestors to move out of the ground in which they were buried and into clouds, flowers, and stars, where they were free to follow their children on long migrations.
SIPAPU A shallow dish or hole purposefully built into the floor of a kiva, the sipapu symbolizes a passage from one world to the next. Traveling through the sipapu into the present world—the Fourth World, at least by Hopi accounts—people were said to encounter Maa’saw, a terrifying human-like visage with gaping eyes and a burned, skeletal head. Maa’saw, wearing two burdensome necklaces of turquoise and bones, is Caretaker of the Place of the Dead and was the first to have control of fire. This figure was a dreaded and revered god who now rules the Hopi’s current reality. There are many versions of this story, most of which are imperfectly written down, their meanings obscured as they were translated from varied and nuanced oral traditions into Anglo written traditions.
SOUTHEAST UTAH This region, often known as Canyon Country, is made mostly of massive, red Jurassic and Triassic sandstones exposed around the Green, Colorado, San Juan, and Dirty Devil rivers. It is bounded in the north by the Book Cliffs, in the west by the Aquarius Plateau (above the Waterpocket Fold and Capitol Reef), and in the east by the state of Colorado. The combination of deep, solid sandstone and four vital rivers has resulted in a convoluted realm of canyons that continues south about twenty miles into Arizona, around Glen Canyon.
SOUTHWEST The geographic extent of the Southwest has been defined in numerous different ways. Perhaps the clearest is that it runs north to south from Durango, Colorado, to Durango, Mexico, and east to west from Las Vegas, New Mexico, to Las Vegas, Nevada. This is only a gross designation, however, and does not take into account the Southwest’s regional subtleties, such as Canyonlands and the Uncompahgre Plateau, or the long arc of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. Dry but diverse country, the Southwest ranges from more than 14,000 feet in the San Juan Mountains to basins that lie below sea level near the Sea of Cortés in Mexico. It encompasses the high Great Basin desert of the Colorado Plateau; the low Sonoran Desert in southwest Arizona and northwest Mexico; the Mojave Desert in the west; and the mid-level Chihuahuan Desert, centered on the International Four Corners, where New Mexico, Arizona, and Sonora and Chihuahua, Mexico, more or less come together. Along with numerous isolated mountains, the Southwest includes three central alpine regions: the southern Rocky Mountains in the north, the Mogollon Highlands and Sky Islands in the middle, and the subtropical, northernmost Sierra Madre Occidental in the south. The Southwest’s surface is crisscrossed with global geological trends: a narrow chain of mountains winding sinuously for five hundred miles from Colorado to Mexico and the Colorado River, cutting a flawless southwesterly course of gorges through the Rocky Mountains, across the Utah desert, and into Arizona, where it jostles through the Grand Canyon, then falls into a due north-south trend straight to the Sea of Cortés. Above that an exclamation mark runs along the Wasatch Plateau in Utah, leading into the crest of the Kaibab Plateau in northern Arizona and ending in a single, punctuated heap at the San Francisco Mountains outside Flagstaff. All of these large-scale features are formed by vast geological structures, massive faults and continental fractures in the earth’s crust. This occurs within a space about a quarter the size of Australia, resulting in a compact puzzle of landforms and environments.
SOUTHWEST COLORADO A highland region generally above 5,000 to 6,000 feet in elevation, southwest Colorado is primarily gray Cretaceous shales and sandstone. It is bounded in the north by the Dolores River and the Uncompahgre Plateau, in the west and south by Utah and New Mexico, and in the east by the massive complex of the San Juan Mountains. The area is lifted like a podium over much of the upper Southwest. From here one can peer easily across distant regions—fifty miles into the basin of Chaco (in New Mexico) and eighty miles across the spangled horizon of Monument Valley (in Utah and Arizona).
T SHAPE Primarily found in the form of certain prehistoric Pueblo doorways, the T shape is also seen in stone carvings, wall niches, and designs in basketry, textiles, and painted pottery. It is painted on walls and is stamped into ceramic mug handles. It comes in a variety of forms from a keyhole shape to a truncated crucifix. The T shape appears sporadically outside the Southwest in other parts of the Americas such as Peru and southern Mexico, where it can be found in pre-Columbian architecture, art, and jewelry. In Mayan hieroglyphs it is ik’, which means breath, wind, and vital essence.
TLALOC Tlaloc imagery in Mexico dates back to 800 B.C., making it the oldest recognizable religious complex in the Americas. The deity Tlaloc encompasses a variety of related themes: mountains, clouds, mist, rain, drought, caves, springs, a watery underworld, crops, fertility, and renewal. In essense Tlaloc is a rain god and has long been the focus of mountaintop and cave offerings and sacrifices, including human sac-rifices, especially that of children. Tlaloc iconography is abundant in Mesoamerica and is also prevalent in prehistoric rock art and pottery decoration in the southern Southwest, especially among the Mimbres
and Jornada Mogollon (there are seventeen Tlaloc rock art figures at Hueco Tanks, in the desert near El Paso, Texas, a rock outcrop marked by caves, shaded alcoves, and natural depressions where rainwater gathers). Both the symbolic and the practical aspects of Tlaloc religion are very similar to those of the Pueblo katsina religion still practiced in the Southwest.
WHITE WARE POTTERY This type of pottery, best known from the Colorado Plateau, often is made from gray Cretaceous clay and the vessels are coated in slips of white kaolin clay, from which porcelain also is made. The clean white cast of these vessels is achieved by reducing the oxygen inside a kiln, which prevents the iron in the clay from oxidizing, or turning the vessel brown, gray, or even red.
ZUNI This Pueblo tribe has a reservation of just over 700 square miles in northern New Mexico and an isolated 12,000-acre reservation in northeast Arizona near the Little Colorado River. The Zuni language appears to be unrelated to any other language in the world, although one researcher has argued that its cognitive structure is similar to that of Japanese.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Adams, E. Charles. Homol’ovi: An Ancient Hopi Settlement Cluster. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2002.
Adams, E. Charles, and Andrew I. Duff, eds. The Protohistoric Pueblo World, a.d. 1275–1600. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2004.