  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 Ancient sandals, made from yucca leaves. 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 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. A modern Indian dance, with masked figures, as seen by a Pueblo artist. 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 Frijoles Canyon and the Jemez Mountains. 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 A pinyon-juniper woodland in winter. The items of wearing apparel most important to the early people, perhaps, were sandals. In the Southwest it is difficult, if not out of the question, to go barefoot outdoors; even the toughened Indian feet could not have been impervious to cactus spines. A great deal of time and skill was expended, therefore, in the devising of footgear. From the days of the Basketmakers, the sandal most in favor had been woven of yucca, the plant with slender swordlike leaves sometimes known as Spanish-bayonet. Yucca is to be found in one species or another throughout the one-time land of the Pueblos. Such intensive use was made of it by the early people that it is almost surprising that it could have survived. As mentioned previously, yucca was the favorite fiber for cordage, and essentially it was cordage which made up the best types of sandals. A twilled weave of small-diameter cords was carefully shaped to the foot, the edges were neatly bound, then lashings Mule deer. RELIGION.It has been said that “Man cannot live by bread alone.” Nowhere is the truth of this better illustrated than in the history of the Pueblo Indian who, in spite of appalling difficulties to achieve the physical sustenance of life, found much time to develop a spiritual life. The principal evidences of a widespread ancient religion are, of course, the remains of kivas, found in all the old communities. Although details of the use of prehistoric kivas cannot be established, some ideas of their use can be inferred from the part that kivas play in the modern Pueblo religion. The kiva rituals practiced today are traditional in the highest degree, and in all likelihood have descended in their basic form from centuries-old origins. Hence it is perhaps valid to assume that the following conditions prevailed here at Bandelier 600 years ago: The principal social and religious organization was a society or clan; each such organization had its own kiva; and in their kiva the men of the group conducted ceremonies to honor and propitiate many deities, which were personified in birds and beasts, the elements, and natural forces. Certain parts of these ceremonies were very likely performed outside the kiva, so that others of the village might also participate—and thus originated the spectacular public dance dramas which visitors nowadays so greatly enjoy at the modern pueblos. Indian dances, as the 20th-century Southwest knows them, are usually short-term public displays of long-term private rituals entailing days of prayer and chanting in the privacy of the kiva. The best known of these Pueblo ceremonies is chiefly a prayer for rain—The Hopi Snake Dance. Others may be prayers for success in the hunt, for productivity of crops, or for healing the sick. The complexity of the Pueblo religion is increased by the fact that it is indivisibly allied to social and family organization. In the Pueblo scheme of worship, there is not, and seemingly never was, any elite group of “medicine men” or chief practitioners of religion; each person has a part in religious observances, his respective role growing more important as he advances in seniority within a ceremonial organization. With responsibility for the conduct of worship thus placed on all the people, religion is an extremely pervasive force and enters into much of the daily life of each individual. Two hummingbirds on a nest at the end of a pine twig. Several species of these birds are common at Bandelier. A CAUTION.In the foregoing attempt to portray the origins and modes of life of the Bandelier dwellers, it has been necessary to generalize and abbreviate to a degree which may occasionally lead a reader astray. Particularly in the matter of dating periods of habitation and |
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