University of Virginia Library

FOREWORD

At its meeting of April 1, 1920, the Research Committee of the
National Geographic Society accepted the proposal of one of its members,
Dr. Sylvanus G. Morley, for an archeological reconnaissance of
the Chaco Canyon district, northwestern New Mexico. In response
to a request from the Society, the Smithsonian Institution lent my
services for a period of three months to direct that survey, the sole
purpose of which was to ascertain whether detailed examination of
a major Chaco Canyon ruin was advisable at that time and, if so,
which ruin might reasonably be expected to contribute most to then
existing knowledge of Pueblo civilization at its height. Tentative
conclusions reached on a preliminary trip through the Canyon were
reviewed a few weeks later when I had the privilege of the advice
and companionship of three long-time friends, Drs. Morley, A. V.
Kidder, and Earl H. Morris.

On November 17 I submitted a report recommending comprehensive
study of the two neighboring ruins, Pueblo Bonito and Pueblo
del Arroyo. Indorsed by an advisory committee consisting of Dr.
J. W. Fewkes, then Chief of the Bureau of American Ethnology;
Dr. W. H. Holmes, then Head Curator of the Department of Anthropology,
U. S. National Museum; and Dr. Morley, Associate in American
Archeology, Carnegie Institution of Washington, this report was
accepted by the National Geographic Society's Committee on Research,
and, after further consideration, plans were drawn for an
initial 5-year program of investigation that included inquiries into
such pertinent matters as the physiography of Chaco Canyon, the
relationship between its major and minor ruins, and the agricultural
practices probably followed by its ancient inhabitants. Mine was the
honor of having been invited to organize and direct the project, and
for this purpose the United States National Museum granted me leave
of absence for four months each year.

The first season's party pitched its tents on the adobe flat before
the famous ruin early in May 1921, improvised for its kitchen stove
an altogether inadequate shelter from spring sandstorms, dug a well
in the nearby arroyo, and went to work. We returned to the same
camp annually thereafter until conclusion of local field studies in the
autumn of 1927. Elsewhere, for two additional seasons, search continued
for prehistoric timbers that were to aid in determining the age
of Pueblo Bonito. Each summer's explorations were conducted under

authority of a permit from the Department of the Interior, and the
cultural material collected was, in accord with its previously announced
intention, donated by the National Geographic Society to
the American public, as represented by the United States National
Museum.

The National Geographic Society published, in its National Geographic
Magazine, four illustrated articles on these explorations, as
follows:

The Beam Expeditions of 1923, 1928, and 1929 were an outgrowth
of our desire to ascertain the period during which Pueblo Bonito was
inhabited. As set forth in my foreword to his 1935 paper, "Dating
Pueblo Bonito and Other Ruins of the Southwest," Dr. A. E.
Douglass, director of Steward Observatory at the University of
Arizona, while seeking evidence of sunspot influence on climate, had
discovered a correlation between the annual rings of pines in widely
separated localities—a correlation that permitted the superposition of
one tree's life record upon the end of another, and so on until a very
respectable number of years was brought into a single sequence. The
archeological possibilities of this discovery were recognized in 1914
by Dr. Clark Wissler, late curator of anthropology at the American
Museum of Natural History, New York City, who aided and encouraged
further research by every means at his command. In 1922
Dr. Wissler and the American Museum graciously relinquished their
interest in the project to the Society. The fascinating story of the
search thereafter for older, and still older, timbers in ruined Spanish
churches, Indian villages occupied since the Conquest, and prehistoric
cliff dwellings was first told by Dr. Douglass in the National Geographic
Magazine for December 1929.

In that article and in a second one published in 1935, Dr. Douglass
has recognized our obligation to many members and friends of the
Society whose individual helpfulness contributed to the success of
the three beam expeditions. It is now my privilege to acknowledge
our indebtedness to those who participated more directly in the
explorations at Pueblo Bonito.

First of all, I wish to express my personal gratitude to Dr. Gilbert
Grosvenor, President, and other officers of the National Geographic
Society and to members of its 1921 Committee on Research—Dr.

Frederick V. Coville, chairman, Drs. Gilbert Grosvenor, John Oliver
La Gorce, C. Hart Merriam, Sylvanus G. Morley, Carl L. Scofield,
Charles Sheldon, Hugh M. Smith, and Philip Sidney Smith—who
fully appreciated the complexity of our problems and sought in every
way to lessen them.

Since my associates in the field were selected mostly from among
college students then preparing for a career in archeology, it is pleasing
to recall, as I write these lines, the number now firmly established
on university faculties and in research institutions, and to believe their
experiences at Pueblo Bonito proved helpful, as was intended. These
colleagues, to whom I am more deeply obligated than this impersonal
reference indicates, are as follows:

                               

	1921	1922	1923	1924	1925	1926	1927
Karl Ruppert	x	x	x	x	x	x
O. C. Havens	x		x	x	x
A. H. Linsley (cook)	x
H. B. Collins, Jr.		x	x	x
George B. Martin		x	x
Robert McFarlane (cook)		x
Cecil Ban (cook)			x
Frans Blom				x
L. C. Hammond				x	x	x	x
J. B. McNaughton (cook)				x
Frank H. H. Roberts, Jr.					x	x
Monroe Amsden					x
George M. McLellan (cook)					x	x	x
Henry B. Roberts						x	x
Dolores Calahan (secretary)							x

Our topographic survey of Chaco Canyon, a prerequisite to the
investigations contemplated, was completed in 1922 by the late Capt.
R. P. Anderson. Dr. Kirk Bryan, late Professor of Physiography
at Harvard University, was engaged during the summers of 1924 and
1925 with studies pertaining to the geophysical history of Chaco
Canyon. The final ground plan and several cross sections of Pueblo
Bonito were prepared in 1925 and 1926 by Oscar B. Walsh, C. E.,
of the U. S. General Land Office. Based on this plan and our excavation
data, Prof. Kenneth Conant, of the School of Architecture at
Harvard University, in 1926 executed four drawings that picture
Pueblo Bonito as it probably appeared in its heyday. They will be
reproduced in a subsequent publication on this subject.

To the late Dr. Clark Wissler, of the American Museum of Natural
History, I am personally indebted in many ways and especially for
his courtesy in sending me, in mid-May 1921, partial page proof of
Pepper's "Pueblo Bonito." This volume, which consists primarily

of the author's notes covering field work of the Hyde Exploration
Expeditions of 1897-1900, went to press in the fall of 1920, and
Dr. Wissler kindly provided a prepublication copy, albeit in page
proof. In the quarter century that had lapsed between the first Hyde
expedition and inauguration of the Society's project, the true significance
of Pueblo Bonito had become apparent. It was no longer
merely the largest and best-known ruin in Chaco Canyon but the very
symbol of Pueblo civilization in full flower. To know more of this
civilization it was necessary to know more of Pueblo Bonito. To
avoid duplication of effort it was desirable to learn as early as possible
in the course of our explorations what rooms had been excavated and
subsequently refilled by the Hyde expeditions.

Prof. Richard E. Dodge, of Connecticut Agricultural College, who
in 1900 and 1901 conducted the physiographic studies quoted by
Pepper, generously placed at our disposal his original Chaco Canyon
notebooks. With these in hand it was possible, in 1923 and again in
1925, to identify several of the sites where Professor Dodge made
his observations and thus note to what extent erosion had progressed
in the interval.

The better to gage changes within Pueblo Bonito itself, the Bureau
of American Ethnology furnished copies of photographs made by
Victor Mindeleff in the winter of 1887-88, and B. T. B. Hyde kindly
permitted me to have prints made from many of Pepper's unpublished
negatives. What a tragedy that W. H. Jackson, experimenting with a
substitute for the old wet-plate process, should have lost the entire
photographic record of his otherwise productive trip to Chaco Canyon
in 1877!

Beginning in 1921, annual symposia were held at Pueblo Bonito
for several seasons. To these gatherings came students of archeology
and ethnology, agronomy and botany, geology and physiography. The
discussions prompted by this association of kindred spirits proved
mutually instructive and, I trust, adequate recompense for the inconveniences
of an archeological camp.

Our crew of Zuñi and Navaho workmen varied in number from
month to month and from year to year in accordance with each season's
excavation program. The monthly average for the summer of
1921 was 14; for 1924, 28; for 1927, 8. Contrary to the predictions
of one alarmist, we experienced no trouble from the simultaneous
employment of representatives of these two tribes, hereditary enemies
for over 400 years. So far as I could observe, the Zuñi were always
welcome guests at Navaho homes throughout the valley, and several
Navaho were invariably present on Sunday nights when the Zuñi

danced and sang in the light of a weekly bonfire before our tents.
Once, to be sure, we were somewhat concerned when passersby
brought word that a workman I had discharged the week before had
returned to Zuñi with a Navaho scalp and demanded that it be received
with the full ceremony of former days. But it was later proved that
the scalp had been taken from the body of a woman buried sometime
previously, a fact that convincingly identified our "warrior" as a
crackpot.

As every archeologist knows, winnowing the data one assembles in
the field and grinding the brighter kernels into a satisfactory report
constitute a more arduous task than the mere pick-and-shovel work
of excavation. It was my original desire to present the results of our
investigations at one time, and in their proper order, but the combination
each year of four months in the field and eight months of unremitting
museum routine proved a windmill against which my good intentions
were repeatedly shattered. Even after conclusion of our
explorations, time for uninterrupted writing seemed always just beyond
reach. Hence, it was decided in 1934 to abandon the earlier plan
and publish our observations in a series of papers not necessarily in
their logical sequence. Dr. Douglass's "Dating Pueblo Bonito and
Other Ruins of the Southwest," issued in 1935, was the first of these;
Dr. Kirk Bryan's on the geology was the second; the present report
is the third. Subsequent numbers will consider the exceptional pottery
of Pueblo Bonito, skeletal remains, the architectural development and
decline of Pueblo Bonito, excavations at Pueblo del Arroyo, and other
phases.

Except for a small selection on view in Explorer's Hall, at the
Washington home of the National Geographic Society, our entire
Pueblo Bonito collection is in custody of the United States National
Museum where it is available, together with our notes and ground
plans, for examination by qualified students. Stone artifacts and
potsherds studied in the field were left at the ruin, reburied as protection
against the ubiquitous curio collector.

Identification of materials cited herein has been made, for the most
part, by my coworkers at the National Museum: Bird bones, by
A. Wetmore; mammalian bones, by G. S. Miller, Remington Kellogg,
David H. Johnson, and H. H. Shamel; minerals, by W. F. Foshag
and E. P. Henderson; botanical specimens, by C. V. Morton, of the
National Herbarium, and the late Dr. F. V. Coville.

Plates illustrating artifacts are by B. Anthony Stewart, staff photographer
of the National Geographic Magazine; text figures are by
William Baake, except as otherwise noted. Authors and articles referred

to in the text are given in the bibliography and there are
doubtless many others I should have consulted. These references offer
a variety of spellings for the several Chaco ruins, but in this series
we shall follow Simpson and Jackson, whose official reports, published
in 1850 and 1878, respectively, first brought these ruins to public
notice and whose orthography has been generally accepted by the
Bureau of American Ethnology, the United States Geographic Board,
and other authorities.

Mrs. Leta B. Loos, my secretary during the 25 years this volume
has been in preparation, typed all the original manuscript with the
exception of chapter I, which fell to Miss Lucy H. Rowland. For
brief periods during summer vacations, Susan Perkins Setzler, Betty
Jane Meggers, Robert N. Ladd, and Richard B. Woodbury have
helped with reference work, sorting and analysis of specimens, checking
tabulated data, and other tasks. Mrs. James W. Goodwin, who
shared some of our experiences in the field, has contributed helpful
advice and editorial criticism. And, lastly but foremost, my wife, Anne
MacKay Judd, by her tact and gentle persuasion, is responsible for
keeping this volume in process throughout the years. I have unquestionably
been derelict in allowing my daily vocation to interfere so
persistently with this writing. And yet it is probably a fact that only
those few of my archeological coworkers who desired earlier to learn
the results of our observations have really been inconvenienced by
my tardiness.