In addition to Sáliko, Stephen spoke to Wi’ki, chief of the Antelope Society, and Si’mo, chief of the Flute society, both from Walpi. Sáliko’s version proved richest, however, and dominated Fewkes’s essay in the American Anthropologist in 1893. Fewkes cautioned in his article that while folk tales were capable of scientific treatment, “they are not mathematically exact,” suggesting that his archaeology would prove more empirically reliable. His purpose, he would write, was to “demonstrate by archaeological evidence the truth of a Tusayán [Hopi] legend” about how the site came to be “tragically destroyed.” He neglected to mention that he had never conducted excavations before.
Fewkes sketched the site in anticipation of adding excavation detail as he progressed. Among the largest of such ruined towns in the ancient Southwest, spectacularly situated on the high natural ramparts of Antelope Mesa, the site divided roughly between the west—where the massive mound of the main pueblo rose several stories high—and the east, where the Franciscan church still showed standing walls and a mound of rooms suggesting an Indian residential block in close association with the Spanish mission. Based on the accumulated masonry rubble and the presence of early ceramic sherds, the Western Mound seemed “to be the older” of the two habitation areas.
Employing Hopi men as his field crew, Fewkes sunk a series of eight test pits in locations within and around the ruins. Soon he could report that “in almost every room evidences of a fire or a great conflagration were brought to light.” Charred beams had collapsed and rarely did they find “a room without finding the beams and burnt fragments of wood upon the floor.” Storage rooms featured great piles of stacked corn, so many that “bushels of charred fragments were taken out.” Many rooms preserved items of daily life still in place. “Mealing troughs . . . and cooking pots and vessels of both smooth and coiled ware” were found in both the western and eastern precincts of the ruin. No looting had attended the end of Awat’ovi.
Jesse Walter Fewkes’s site map of Awat’ovi, 1892, rendered by Jessica Calzada.
He drilled in on one location, however, drawn by the presence of a shallow depression in a plaza area midway between the mission church complex and the Indian residential room-block to its northwest, which “the Indians employed in the excavation called . . . a kib-va. . . . The fact that the men were in the kib-va at the time of the destruction and that many were killed there” made him “anxious to identify this room.” His workmen sunk a trench “several feet in width, from corner to corner,” and then another in the center of the room “dug down to the floor,” which “was covered with flat stones.” Measuring fourteen feet by twenty-eight feet, the large room lay some five feet below the plaza’s surface.
Charred wood and ashes abounded in the fill his workmen removed. But most important was the discovery of “a human skull and other bones . . . four feet six inches below the surface in the middle of the chamber, directly under the place where the old sky-hole formerly opened, through which the relentless Hopi may have thrown down burning faggots and dried chiles upon their helpless victims.” The Hopi workmen refused to touch the bones with their hands, and that night, one of them, related by marriage to the Katsina chief at Walpi, returned to that pueblo ten miles distant. The next day, having received advice from Walpi, the workman laid several na-kwa’-ko-ci, “strings with feathers attached” in the trenches “as propitiatory offerings to Ma’sau’wuh, the Death God. . . .”
Even in his excitement at this discovery, Fewkes observed “the anxiety of the Hopi workmen” and decided to abandon the excavation, for he did not “wish the report to be circulated that I desired to find the skeletons of wizards, as it might prejudice them against me.” Noting that only “new excavations” could resolve whether additional bodies lay buried in the chamber, which was “great enough to cover many more,” he believed that he had indeed excavated the sorcerer’s kiva. As did his Hopi workmen.
Almost as an afterthought, Fewkes noted that a cemetery existed at Awat’ovi in “the sand-dunes somewhat back from the mesa and to the west of the ruin . . . and from it has been taken some of the best pottery found in Tusayán.” As sandstorms swept over the dunes, “skeletons of the dead and fragments of food vessels” were brought into view, but “many unbroken bowls” had “also been found there. The dead were buried in a sitting posture, the knees drawn up to the breast.” When, in 1895, Fewkes returned to dig more of these formal burials in hopes of obtaining additional perfect bowls, he was forced to “discontinue work” when his crew of Hopi laborers revolted and walked off the site.
Not all the bodies at Awat’ovi were buried with such attention to proper Hopi ritual. Some were not buried at all. Others found a quite different form of interment. But Fewkes is only a portion of that story. His “wizards and sorcerers” are themselves an enigma.
Accusations of witchcraft and sorcery are commonplace across human societies, past and present, especially in small communities when misfortune arrives from unseen sources. Medieval European witch-burnings, the antiheresy witch hunts of the Spanish Inquisition, and the Salem Witch Trials are familiar cases, but wizardry, sorcery, and the summoning of maleficent forces also appeared in the indigenous Americas. The “dark arts” have a deep history in the Puebloan Southwest.
Evidence for violence and community conflict in the ancient Puebloan world erupted in popular accounts in just the last decade. Long idealized as “classless” societies where so little opportunity (or desire) to acquire wealth existed that the rise of social elites was impossible, ancient Puebloan people were revered as symbols of a better, simpler way of organizing human affairs. At the dawn of the twentieth century scores of young (often wealthy) white women from New York and Boston relocated to New Mexico Territory in search of another imagined model: the existence among the Pueblos of societies in which women wielded real social power. With everyday life indistinguishable from the colorful and moving ritual dramas of the Pueblo ceremonial calendar, white Americans saw the Indians of the Southwest as living antidotes to the frightening transformations of industrialization and untrammeled modernization. The “peaceful Pueblos” stood as opposites to warlike tendencies in so many of their neighbors, the fearsome Apaches, Comanches, and Navajos.
Yet major archaeological salvage projects associated with modern coal-fired energy and southwestern utilities development in the twentieth century brought startling new evidence to light that the past millennium in the region featured moments of widespread and terrifying warfare, in which whole communities vanished in conflagrations of brutality and fire. To be sure, evidence also exists for truly remarkable swaths of time when virtually no violence swept the land—especially during the heyday of the Chaco Phenomenon (A.D. 900–1150)—but when that experiment came to an end, and when the great drought of the late thirteenth century withered regional crops, neighbors turned on neighbors with undeniable viciousness. As one archaeologist describes it, the period after 1250 became one of universal “crisis and catastrophe.” Dramatic population losses and consolidation of refugees into new aggregated villages crafted the landscape that early Spanish conquistadors would see, at a wishful and mistaken distance, as the “Seven Cities of Cibola” or the “Kingdom of Gran Teguayo.”
A good deal of the public furor about this new evidence circulates around various assertions of cannibalism as a central aspect of these conflagrations. While the jury remains out on these highly provocative charges, equally important questions have lain below the glare of the anthropophagic spotlights. What fear or loathing, we ask, could inspire people—who had for generations lived quiet lives and invested what surpluses they could muster toward community well-being—to suddenly take up hunting weapons and farming tools and wield them against nearby villages wherein slept in-laws and trading partners? How could these raiders—relatively unpracticed in the arts of war—obliterate victim villages in a matter of a day? And what of cases where it seems that no distant enemies brought destruction upon the villages, but instead that neighbor sle
w neighbor in astonishing displays of brutality?
Such questions would not seem so startling without the counter example that did so much to shape scholarly and popular conceptions about the ancient Puebloan world—the extraordinary centuries-long success of the Chacoan cultural system centered in the nine-mile-long canyon that bears its name in western New Mexico. A landscape today almost harrowing in its austerity, in its heyday across the eleventh and early twelfth centuries it bloomed with a cultural vitality never seen in the region before or since. The canyon was home to massive masonry “Great Houses” counting hundreds of rooms, expansive ceremonial spaces and platforms, ancillary residential villages, and sophisticated astronomical devices used to forecast planting and harvesting cycles. Beyond the canyon itself, the Chaco Phenomenon reached as far as Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, Chihuahua, and Arizona in the form of distant colonies or communities that emulated Chaco architecture and ceremonials. Massive seasonal pilgrimages from these “outliers” would fill Chaco Canyon itself, not unlike Mecca, with peoples of differing languages and local identities who shared a devotion to the power, perhaps priestly, that expressed itself in the ceremonial theater that was Chaco Canyon.
Far-traveling pilgrims seem also to have gathered at Chaco to build the Great Houses themselves. During the height of their construction between 1050 and 1125, hundreds of thousands of hours were dedicated to shaping stone, raising walls, transporting pine roof timbers from as far distant as the Chuska Mountains, sixty miles away, and the finer work of plastering and whitewashing the massive monuments to Chacoan cosmology.
Feeding and housing these willing—or perhaps unwilling—migrants proved yet another challenge to social organization. Opportunities for conflict, whether among migratory laborers of vastly different languages and identities, or between the small elite corps who controlled the canyon and the pilgrims, seem obvious, yet virtually no evidence of violence exists in the canyon (or throughout the regional southwestern community) during its peak. Just what kept “Pax Chaco” working so successfully for more than two centuries will provide gist for debate long into our own century. So too will the cruel and sudden collapse of that peace.
Artist’s reconstruction of Pueblo Bonito at Chaco, the largest Great House in the canyon, 1895.
When the complex social and ceremonial world of Chaco Canyon unraveled, swiftly and mysteriously, in the mid-twelfth century, violence erupted both within the stunning center-place and in its distant hinterlands. Archaeologists working at the canyon’s Great Houses like Pueblo Bonito or Chetro Ketl discovered few burials therein, nor did inhumations in the more modest residential hamlets throughout the canyon suggest major population at any time. Since the great canyon complex was often nearly empty of residents, filling with masses of pilgrims only during regional ceremonies conducted around the celestially driven agricultural calendar, the absence of cemeteries in the canyon is not surprising.
However few, some of the burials imply that Chaco’s end was not an easy one. Only two truly “high-status” burials have ever been found at Pueblo Bonito (the “capital” of the canyon), both entombed deep inside much earlier room construction, and beneath many additional bodies that one expert has called “retainers.” Rich burial goods of turquoise beads, pottery, prayer sticks, and exotic shells from the Pacific coast accompanied both men.
One man, however, exhibited signs of a violent end. Crippled first by a slash to his left leg, he died from blows that crushed both sides of his skull. Perhaps this is the end carried now in the memory of elders at Laguna Pueblo: “in our history we talk of things that occurred a long time ago [at Chaco], of people who wielded enormous amounts of power: spiritual power and power over people. . . . These people were causing changes that were never meant to occur.”
Harnessing spiritual power through ritual performance combines the invisible and supernatural with everyday political outcomes. One year, those who practice these arts may be revered as priests, bringers of rain and good harvests; the next year they might be viewed as bringers of flood, drought, or famine. Efficaciousness, either for a community’s well being or toward its degradation, represented the two faces of sorcery (powaqa in Hopi). Respect and awe might be replaced with fear, suspicion, and campaigns of persecution. Certainly, the decades after 1125—marked by deep declines in rainfall and signs of popular disaffection with the Chacoan ritual complex—hint that the high priests of Pueblo Bonito may have fallen suddenly from favor.
More than just a few ruling priests died during the fall of Chaco, however. Throughout the thousands of square miles of the Chacoan world lies evidence that the organizing power of “Pax Chaco” had begun to unravel. Beginning with isolated cases of household violence, and expanding over time to encompass whole valleys and regions—so much so that once-populous towns were emptied seemingly overnight—the strong sinews that had once bound the people of the Chacoan phenomenon together were severed.
Aerial view of Pueblo Bonito today.
Some one hundred miles northwest of the Chaco Canyon center, in what is now the Four Corners region of Utah, Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona, lay a disturbing illustration. Amid the sagebrush and cholla cactus along today’s southern piedmont of Sleeping Ute Mountain, a scattering of farming households suffered a catastrophic end around 1150. The members of four households, each comprising perhaps an extended family, were slaughtered and systemically mutilated in concentrated acts of violence that required real investment of time and effort by their perpetrators. At least twenty-four people from an estimated population of thirty-five died that day, both sexes and all ages, ranging from those newly born to the elderly. Many of the dead were butchered—limbs separated from limbs, flesh separated from bones—and in some cases it seems that the butchered portions were roasted over hearths in the pit-house dwellings. Genetic testing of one coprolite—feces—deposited in one hearth suggests that it was human and contained proteins from another human. The effort devoted to this climactic end suggests more than a swift and ephemeral raid by neighbors or wandering nomads. Something inspired the attackers to linger and systematically abuse the dead.
The piedmont community around Cowboy Wash would be abandoned that day, with dozens of valuable tools, ceramics, items of clothing, foodstuffs, and ceremonial objects left where they lay. Those who did not die—whether led away as captives or stealing away as perpetrators—left behind all material connections to their past. Among those were a noteworthy collection of “foreign” ceramics—a style associated with the Chuska Mountains along today’s New Mexico–Arizona border, evidence of either an immigrant community or one with more intimate ties to distant peoples in the Chuskas than with those closer to home. Whatever their origins, their material culture may have marked them as “outsiders.” Those who did not walk away from the massacre, voluntarily or otherwise, were literally stripped of their humanness, rendered animal prey in their last moments.
At Chaco Canyon, a high priest was slain, yet buried with ceremony deep in the architectural wonder he once ruled. Far distant in southwestern Colorado, a humble farming community was wiped out in a manner appalling for its balance of systematic killing process and brutal passion. In either case, we wonder about the identities of the kinsmen, neighbors, visitors, or raiders who either wreaked this violence or watched in horror as the events unfolded.
In other instances, women were sometimes singled out as victims. Even before the emptying of the Four Corners region, a fortified community of some 75 to 150 residents, known today as Castle Rock Pueblo, suffered total destruction in 1274. Men of fighting age comprised only 3 of the 41 bodies found during excavations of the site. Many of these skeletons exhibit perimortem violence (wounds delivered at the time of death, or shortly thereafter) visited upon their remains. Limbs were slashed from bodies, heads from torsos, and parts scattered or thrown into burned rooms. Castle Rock suffered a level of passion in the attack not unlike what would take place at Awat’ovi. Were annihilation of a community the sole aim, once the
inhabitants were slain, we would expect the attackers to pillage stored corn granaries and move on to new targets. To linger and desecrate the remains indicates an effort, like those in known witchcraft cases, to permanently incapacitate even the spirits of the dead. In other cases of even larger villages thus destroyed in the region, archaeologist Kristen Kuckelman noted “the remains of few men in their prime were found . . . the deaths of primarily women, children, the ill and incapacitated suggests that the able-bodied men were absent from the villages during the attacks.” Might the village men have been themselves perpetrators of the massacre?
Castle Rock Pueblo, 1874, William Henry Jackson.
A final example lies closer in time and location to Antelope Mesa. Along the Little Colorado River just north of Winslow, Arizona, is a chain of seven large towns closely associated with the migration tales of modern Hopi peoples. Dating from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the largest (some numbering more than 1,000 rooms) are organized in a settlement cluster known as the Homol’ovi (The Place of Small Buttes) Ruins. At the town known today as Homol’ovi II (dating from 1330 to 1400) archaeologists found a sequence of ritualized “kiva closures” that hint at combinations of both the Chaco and Cowboy Wash stories.
At least seven of the forty kivas in the enormous plazas of Homol’ovi II had been carefully and ceremoniously decommissioned at various times during the settlement’s history. At first glance, the burned and collapsed roofing suggested the trauma of warfare, but as archaeologists worked through the strata of debris, they realized a longer-term, systematic pattern was at work. In most cases, beneath the windblown sand that covered the depositions, careful sealing of ventilator shafts, positioning of unbroken ceramic vessels, and placing of ritual objects preceded the fires that burned the roofs—roofs which had seen their huge primary beams removed before the torches did their work. Almost certainly the work of the town’s residents rather than enemy outsiders, the site’s investigators puzzled over the find.
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