The Peabody’s permit was renewed for the following year, and on August 3, 1936, in the swale of the Great Depression, the first major season of excavation began across a full four months. During the course of the season Brew would employ twenty-seven Hopi crewmen, providing a welcome source of cash to their families. This season would focus almost exclusively on Awat’ovi Pueblo itself, especially what Brew called the “Western Mound,” a mass of architectural rubble towering some twenty-five feet above the bedrock of the mesa top. Brew surmised that “in this mound was to be found the oldest large structure on the site.”
The Western Mound proved to be a monumental excavation task. The initial tactic was to scrape the surface of windblown sand to expose the outlines of room walls “in a strip two to four rooms wide” to expose the general structure of the complex. “Attacking the core of the mound” to expose whole rooms in the sequence of their construction would follow. Working level-by-level, ninety cleared rooms revealed a stratigraphy several centuries old. When the Hopi laborers finally reached the ground surface bedrock of the mesa, it became clear that the room walls extended continuously to this preconstruction level, with the recovered ceramics indicating continuous occupation of the settlement from the late thirteenth century to the historic era. The mix of ceramic styles in these lowest levels attracted Brew’s attention. Two distinct types composed this lowest level, a geometric black-on-white tradition associated with Puebloan peoples of the Kayenta district to the north of the Hopi Mesas (in today’s Navajo National Monument), and a black-on-orange tradition associated with Puebloan peoples who lived along the Little Colorado River some sixty miles due south of the Hopi Mesas (in today’s Homolovi State Park).
Brew surmised that the founders of early Awat’ovi hailed from two regions some two hundred miles distant from one another, those from the Kayenta region probably arriving sometime between A.D. 1275 and 1300, since their homeland villages were depopulated by the latter date. They were probably refugees from the last years of the Great Drought that crippled the Four Corners region between 1276 and 1299. The peoples from the Little Colorado apparently arrived at the same time, or slightly later. Yet the mixed nature of the ceramic assemblage suggested that the peoples themselves mixed in the early years. The migrants from the Homolovi core communities, however, were probably drawn to Antelope Mesa, rather than pushed from their homelands, since those towns remained occupied well into the fourteenth century. Whether or not these very different ceramic traditions signaled peoples of different language or cultural identities was (and is) impossible to discern, yet the Peabody excavations seemed to highlight the heterogeneity of the peoples who established the great towns of Antelope Mesa.
Western Mound excavations, 1936.
By mid-season, more than 80,000 potsherds had been tabulated, and more than 5,000 each day went to the classifying tables. A long-term occupation of Western Mound was obvious, with clear changes in ceramic styles that seemed to indicate evolution, rather than replacements, in the peoples of the town. By the fourteenth century, a distinctive form appeared and was classified as Jeddito Black-on-Yellow, evolving gradually over the next century to a local form termed Awat’ovi Black-on-Yellow. In each case the styles were defined by the rich creamy yellow background color, a result of the makers employing coal as their fuel for firing the pottery. Only in the Antelope Mesa region did bituminous coal seams extrude beneath the hard sandstones of the mesa tops, allowing their mining and use in firing kilns that archaeologists found on the lower benches of the mesas. Brew later estimated that several thousand tons of coal had been mined from these seams over the centuries, a form of resourcing and manufacture unique to the Hopi country. Given the scarcity of firewood in the region, coal (for both cooking and ceramic firing) gave the settlers of Antelope Mesa an edge in the regional ceramic economy, and provided a valuable trade commodity. As the Homolovi villages to the south were the primary agricultural region for cotton growing and yarn production, it became clear, given the prevalence of yellow wares in the Homolovi cluster, that a lively trade existed in which pots and bowls produced on Antelope Mesa were exchanged for cotton yarns, blankets, and shawls from the south. By the sixteenth century, the local art of pottery production reached its apex in the style known as Sikyatki Polychrome, a splendid expression of artistry that would decline with the arrival of the Franciscan missions. Yet the style would reappear in the late nineteenth century in a revival inaugurated by the legendary potter Nampeyo, and come to be seen as the archetypical Hopi ceramic tradition today.
Whether or not these systems of exchange involved peoples related by blood and culture, or whether they bound together “multi-ethnic” networks through the transfer of unique resources remained (and remains) an unsettled issue in southwestern archaeology.
As the 1936 season drew to a close, attention of the excavators turned to the kivas located within the room blocks of the Western Mound. In 1901, archaeologist Walter Hough had tested the site of Kawaika’a about one mile north of Awat’ovi, and discovered in one kiva “a painted wall showing part of a human figure and a bird in tallow, green and white.” Nothing like these images had been discovered previously in the Southwest, and a portion of Brew’s research plan included investigation of similar phenomena at Awat’ovi. Fragments of painted plaster in room fill led the workers toward their first kiva, in which layers of wall plaster revealed, upon close examination of a cross-section, twenty-three such paintings layered upon one another. With this discovery hopes rose and found remarkable affirmation. Over the course of the last month’s work, painstaking work unveiled forty-one fragmentary murals, all but one located in kivas.
These images ranged “from pure geometric design, through formalized bird and animal representations often resembling elements on Sikyatki pottery, to apparent crude attempts at realism.” Brew recognized their significance immediately. These paintings, he thought, made for the possibility “that some of the figures represented can be identified with modern [Hopi] ceremony and story.” Furthermore, since they were almost exclusively associated with kivas, it seemed also possible that he “could obtain from them information as to the societies by whom the kivas were used.” They held the potential “signatures” by which Hopi sacred societies indicated their ownership of, and the practices within, spaces generally prohibited to non-Hopi eyes.
Watson Smith and team scraping Kiva murals at Awat’ovi Pueblo, with katsinam.
After photographing and creating scale color drawings of the mural art, the field session wrapped up with high hopes for the coming year. Primary among those goals would be a shift forward in time, toward “extensive excavation of the mission quadrangle and the town during the historic period.” Things were about to get even more interesting.
The 1937 excavation season began on July 12 and remained in the field until November 5, as winter bore down on Tusayán. Brew’s primary goals were “the complete clearing of the rooms of the Franciscan Friary and church and excavation of two sections of the contemporary town,” as well as test excavations in search of additional kiva murals in the sites of Kawaika’a and Chakpahu, the next major villages north on the rim of the mesa. The latter were designed to determine the extent of the kiva mural tradition on Antelope Mesa, and would find that to be extensive across both time and space. In these efforts a member of the team, Watson Smith, would pioneer new techniques for recording the artwork, then peeling each painted layer of plaster away from the underlying art, thereby permitting preservation of each image and the creation of an artistic record for the region.
It had become clear to Brew in 1936 that the Western Mound town was but lightly occupied by the time of the sixteenth-century Spanish entradas and the establishment of the mission in 1629. A substantial village had arisen just to the east of the Western Mound, which Brew referenced as a community “contemporary” with the Franciscan constructions. Yet it was also evident from the surface ceramic collections that the eastern community also predated the Spanish presence, es
pecially when excavations began in the mission and friary complex. As density of occupation in the Western Mound increased over the centuries and construction there reached three to four stories of roomblocks perched atop one another, the architecture had become unstable, and so the community had gradually expanded eastward on the mesa top. When the Franciscans began laying out their church and residential areas, therefore, they did so by occupying a living village. The fact that the church altar had been placed directly above the thoughtfully and ritually “closed,” or decommissioned, kiva, empty of artifacts and filled with clean sand, suggested some Hopi acquiescence in its location.
Ironically, after the revolt of 1680, once the priests were slain and the church itself burned and tumbled down, the people of Awat’ovi returned many of the rooms in the convento to an earlier purpose—modest residences. As Brew’s team probed into the rubble of the sprawling convento, they realized that the ruin represented two occupations—first, the friar’s presence between 1629 and 1680, and second, the remodeling and inhabitation of the convento by Hopis in the twenty years that preceded the annihilation of November 1700. This second occupation was unusual, since in most other post-Revolt missions the convento was destroyed at the same time as the church, neither restored nor reoccupied until after the Spanish reconquest, with buildings left to decay and collapse on their own. Yet in the convento of Mission San Bernardo, “the friary rooms . . . upon excavation were found to have been subdivided by narrow masonry walls of the kind found in the native Hopi houses of the 17th-century town.” The Hopis, it seemed, had “very sensibly moved into the friary after they had martyred its occupants.” In fact, the new occupants had much increased the residential potential of the convento, nearly quadrupling the number of rooms in the Franciscan building and adding more than a dozen masonry rooms to the exterior of the building. What had for fifty years served as a symbol of European notions of elite accommodation—a combination residence, office, school, and place of worship for perhaps a half dozen priests, neophytes, and native servants—became a bustling community building of more than one hundred rooms, housing perhaps forty or fifty residents. Ignoring the rebellion’s call for a rejection of all things Spanish and a return to the ways of the ancestors prior to 1540, the fill in these new rooms evidenced a fertile mix of material culture. Just three rooms held “fragments of [a] large bell . . . four metates, twenty-five manos, fragments of painted wooden prayer sticks, and . . . five hundred sixty-eight potsherds, including six . . . restorable jars.” The convento yard itself “was covered with sheep manure,” laid down after the rebellion. The violence of the revolt at Awat’ovi, at least, targeted Spanish priests and their attendants, and the church itself, but not the living and working quarters that the Hopis themselves had labored so hard to build. One faction, perhaps, had decided they felt so at ease in those surroundings that the setting became a new home.
Other discoveries marked Awat’ovi as unusual. The presence of the young European male interred in the makeshift “third” altar had been discovered during the search for the “superpositioned” altar-kiva relationship, yet evinced little discussion in the fieldnotes or publications on the 1937 season. In 1949, however, Ross Gordon Montgomery would address the interment in his architectural history of the mission, and concluded that the data “points with calculable sureness to the bundle of inarticulated skeletal material as an intrusive element.” The archaeology suggested that the “wrapped remains were apparently deposited under the altar mayor at a time when the mission premises were involuntarily surrendered. . . . This could have been accomplished only between 1680 and the early summer of 1700.” Montgomery, ever convinced that Hopis could not have harbored a reverence for the altar, conjectured wistfully that perhaps “several pious soldiers re-buried a comrade under the high altar on one of the several occasions when they were in the vicinity of Aguatubi during the Reconquista.” The very Hopi style of the interment—bundled, wrapped in native cotton, and bound by yucca cords, and laid upon a Hopi basket—failed to garner his interpretive attention. The mysterious body would, however, soon attract the notice of others.
Testing of the church nave multiplied many times over the number of burials, and the complexity of their removal, given the need to maintain stratigraphic control on their temporal deposition, pushed the excavations of the church and friary into the following field seasons. But the world outside “New Awatovi” and its ancient namesake was beginning to intrude.
In late August of 1937, prior to the discovery and exhumation of the young European from the church altar, a visitor arrived on Antelope Mesa. The Reverend Victor Rose Stoner was conducting rounds of Civilian Conservation Corps camps in Arizona. Having recently completed an M.A. degree in archaeology at the University of Arizona in Tucson with a thesis on the Jesuit missions of the Tucson Basin, Stoner, a secular priest of the Tucson Diocese, was an avid protoprofessional who mixed ardent Catholicism with an enthusiasm for the human sciences. Brew and his team were less than thrilled by his interest, however, since he proved a nuisance, interrupting work and eating more than an appropriate share of the camp’s “excellent cuisine.” Stoner insisted, as he received a tour of the mid-excavation mission, that—since he carried an altar stone and vestments with him on his rounds—he be permitted to conduct “the first and only Mass at that spot since mid-August, 1680.” Brew agreed grudgingly, if only to move their visitor along, and on September 5, 1937, Stoner did so, addressing a congregation of six members of the expedition “with the same Mass last said by a Spanish padre” at the mission, according to the Tucson Daily Citizen.
It would not be the last Brew would hear from Reverend Stoner, however. The following June he received a letter forwarded by the Peabody Museum from Stoner, who pointed out in a penned comment on the letterhead that he had “recently been elected president” of the Arizona Archaeological and Historical Society “for the third term.” After complaining that his work toward his doctorate had been slowed by the requirement that he have “reading knowledge” of German, he mentioned that in April he had heard news of “the discovery of the Padre’s body beneath the altar at Awatovi last fall. . . . A movement is afoot to have the martyrs of the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 declared saints—canonized, as the term is.” He wondered, “What steps would be necessary to take in order to get the body back here in Tucson?” A complete account of the discovery of the body was of essence, as the Catholic Church was “very, very careful in permitting the veneration of a relic when there is any doubt to its authenticity.” If the body were placed in the care of the Bishop of Tucson, it would “make the case stronger” when “canonization eventually takes place.” Surely, Stoner argued, “Harvard would be willing to let us have the body when Harvard’s interests are purely anthropological, while that of the Church reaches far deeper.”
Stoner’s tone was solicitous, but he had been working less sanguine angles since April. In July, Brew received a copy of a letter from Commissioner of Indian Affairs John Collier, addressed to the Bureau of Indian Affairs Superintendent to the Hopi, Seth Wilson, in which the commissioner raised an alarm. Collier reported that Arno Cammerer, director of the National Park Service, had recently been contacted by Arizona senator Carl Hayden who desired a reply to charges leveled by a certain Reverend Victor Stoner that “the first European settlement in Arizona” was being “destroyed by Harvard.” Most specifically, Stoner claimed that an act of desecration had been committed by Peabody’s archaeologists’ who “tore down the altar” and “removed the body of a Franciscan priest . . . undoubtedly either Padre Porras who was poisoned by the Hopis in 1633, or Padre Figueroa who was killed in the Pueblo Revolt of 1680.” Collier further alerted Superintendent Wilson that “a suggestion has been made to the Senator that the site should be established as a national monument,” and that his office had not found “a record of a permit under the provisions of the act for the preservation of American antiquities having been granted to Harvard University to make archaeological examinations o
f this place.”
Brew launched damage control. He wrote to Stoner that he would be “very glad to talk over . . . the whole question of the disposal of skeletal remains which may prove to be the remains of early Spanish friars or soldiers,” while cautioning that “Professor Hooten and Dr. Woodbury” were still undertaking examinations to “determine its racial affiliations.” He assured Stoner that “Harvard will be willing to cooperate with the Church in making the best disposal of any European skeletons we find,” but did not mention that as early as January 1938 he had received a preliminary report from the Peabody analysts that the individual from the altar burial “should be assigned to an individual of the European race.” To Superintendent Wilson he replied that all the skeletal remains uncovered at Awat’ovi would reside with the Peabody Museum “according to the terms of our permit” (he dodged the question of whether the permit had been renewed for 1938). He attempted to reassure the regional Park Service official, Dr. Jesse Numsbuam, superintendent of Mesa Verde National Park, that “Harvard is not interested in skeletons beyond the historical information that we may obtain from a study of them,” and pointed out that no desecration of the burial was intended, but the altar had to be excavated and removed in the quest for the superimposed kiva that they surmised lay beneath the church.
By January of 1939, Brew had decided that cooperation with the Archdiocese of Tucson might be the wisest political course, and began a correspondence with the Franciscan Fathers stationed at the Saint Joseph Indian Mission in Keams Canyon, Arizona, toward a “repatriation” of the body buried in the Awat’ovi altar. He cautioned, however, that “its youth (twenty-one years or younger) precludes the possibility of its being either Father Porras or Father Figueroa.” Yet, he went on, “since there were very few Spaniards at Awatovi who were not connected with your Order, and since a man buried beneath an altar would, I should think, almost certainly be closely associated with the Order, I am sending the skeleton to you.”
Mesa of Sorrows Page 9