University of Virginia Library

THE MATERIAL CULTURE OF PUEBLO BONITO

By NEIL M. JUDD
Associate in Anthropology
U. S. National Museum

(With 101 Plates)

I. INTRODUCTION AND CONCLUSIONS

Pueblo Bonito is a ruined communal dwelling, the home of
perhaps 1,000 Indians at the close of the eleventh century, A.D.[1]

The ruin stands toward the lower end of Chaco Canyon, a 15-mile
section of Chaco River, in San Juan County, northwestern New
Mexico. The river rises on the Continental Divide 30-odd miles to
the east, flows westwardly past Pueblo Bonito and some 40 miles
beyond, then turns abruptly north to join the Rio San Juan just
above Shiprock.

In or bordering Chaco Canyon, within 6 miles of Pueblo Bonito,
are 12 other ruins of like age and culture and dozens of lesser ones,
older or later. Kinbiniyol lies 10 or 12 miles to the southwest, in a
valley of the same name; Pueblo Pintado forms a prominent landmark
20 miles to the east and Kin Yai, or Pueblo Viejo, is to be found near
Crownpoint, 30 miles south. Together, these one-time habitations,
large and small, comprise Chaco Canyon National Monument, created
by presidential proclamation on March 11, 1907, and now administered
by the National Park Service, Department of the Interior. (See
map, fig. 1.)

Chaco River has cut its canyon through massive beds of Upper
Cretaceous sandstone. The more conspicuous of these, with lesser

strata between, are collectively known to geologists as "Cliff House"
sandstone. They are of marine origin and vary in color from pale
yellow to brown. Beneath the Cliff House is the Menefee formation,
composed of diversified sandstones and a series of carbonaceous shales,
gray to black. Subbituminous coal outcrops at intervals along the
junction of the Menefee and the Cliff House.

Chaco Canyon varies in width from half to three-quarters of a mile,
or a little more. Its floor is uniformly level from side to side and lies,
out in front of Pueblo Bonito, at an elevation of 6,250 feet (6,250
was the reading at an assumed benchmark where Sections 11, 12, 13,
and 14 meet, just south of Pueblo del Arroyo). Immediately behind
Pueblo Bonito the Cliff House sandstones rise sheer 135 feet and
then continue, steplike, to Pueblo Alto at an elevation of 6,560.
Northward from Pueblo Alto the Chaco Plateau dips gently to 5,500
feet at the San Juan River, 45 miles away; toward the south it rises
almost imperceptibly for 30 miles to 6,800 feet near Crownpoint
(Gregory, 1916; Reeside, 1924).

At 6,500 feet above sea level, New Mexico temperatures may differ
considerably from day to night and from summer to winter. Precipitation
likewise is variable and unpredictable. Native vegetation mirrors
climate, and the rigorous climate of Chaco Plateau is reflected in its
plant life. Yellow pines grow at the higher elevations where rainfall
is greatest; junipers and pinyons, a little lower; lower still, a scattering
of sagebrush and greasewood. Perennial grasses thrive where
floodwaters are allowed to stand. Less conspicuous plants are present
also, though sometimes sparse.

ANCIENT FORESTS

Dr. A. E. Douglass (1935) has recounted our search for traces
of the forests that furnished timbers for construction of Pueblo
Bonito. Fifteen or sixteen miles east of the ruin a couple of dozen pine
trees, living and dead, comprised the largest surviving remnant of
those forests. Four dead pines, one of them still standing (pl. 2, left),
were seen at the head of Wirito's Rincon, 2 miles or more southeast
of Bonito. A lone survivor, on the south mesa and within sight of
our camp, was cut for firewood during the winter of 1926-27.

Thousands of logs went into the roofs and ceilings of Pueblo
Bonito. Fragments unearthed during the course of our excavations
were invariably straight-grained, clean, and smooth. They had been
felled and peeled while green; they showed no scars of transportation.

Clearly they were cut within easy carrying distance. The
character of their annual rings shows that most of them grew under
exceptionally favorable conditions. Thanks to a technique developed
by Dr. Douglass, the age of pine and fir beams can ordinarily be determined
from their growth rings, but fully 10 percent of the samples
we collected are useless for that purpose because their rings are too
uniform in thickness. Such regularity indicates an abundant, constant
water supply. Obviously Chaco Canyon had more rainfall when those
beams were living trees.

Old Navahos told us of pines and pine stumps formerly standing
in Mockingbird Canyon and elsewhere. We found some but not all.
At the south end of the West Court we unexpectedly discovered the
remains of a large pine that had stood there, alive and green, when
Pueblo Bonito was inhabited. Its decayed trunk lay on the last
utilized pavement, and its great, snaglike roots preclude the possibility
of its ever having been moved (pl. 2, right). Unfortunately the outer
part had rotted away, and so we could not learn the year the tree
died. Its last readable ring gave A.D. 1017, but there was an unknown
number missing after that. Altogether, our observations indicate the
former existence of a pine forest in close proximity to Pueblo Bonito,
principally on the south mesa but with fringes reaching down into
the rincons and even out upon the valley floor.

Man and nature joined in the dissipation of the Chaco forests. Man
felled the trees; without trees to check runoff following passing
storms, the shallow soil was gradually washed from the underlying
sandstone. Floodwaters drained even more quickly from bare rock
and poured down into the valley. In a surprisingly short time the
alluvial fill of the canyon was being trenched by an animated gully.
Year after year that gully grew in width and depth as it cut its way
upstream. In consequence, the water table was soon lowered beyond
reach of grass, trees, and shrubs. As the ground cover withered and
died the rapidity of runoff was accelerated. When floodwaters could
no longer be controlled, fields they had previously watered were useless.
Without bountiful crops, communal life on the scale practiced
at Pueblo Bonito became impossible. Family groups withdrew to seek
their fortune elsewhere; eventually none was left.

The channel that may well have been a determining factor in compelling
abandonment of Pueblo Bonito has its present-day counterpart.
We watched this latter as it annually carved a deeper course and
reached out hungrily on either side. Every passing flood took its toll.
In a single season, that of 1923, storm waters debouching from
Wirito's Rincon, a mile and a half upcanyon, left a wide fan of sand

and gravel that completely blocked our road to Crownpoint and
Thoreau. Successive floods uprooted the windmill on an arroyo bar
west of Una Vida and gnawed at the talus under the nearby cliff.

There was an arroyo of sorts here in 1849. It was probably intermittent
and, for the most part, inconspicuous. We draw this inference
from the journal of Lt. James H. Simpson, a member of the military
expedition under Lt. Col. John M. Washington that passed through
upper Chaco Canyon that year. After breaking camp on the morning
of August 28 the main body of troops left the canyon at Fajada
Butte while Simpson and nine companions went on to see reported
ruins. His journal makes no reference whatever to a gully, but when
the little party stopped briefly at the ruin next below Pueblo Bonito
his Mexican guide had a name on tongue's tip: "Pueblo of the
Arroyo" (Simpson, 1850, p. 81).

During a day crowded with the excitement of inspecting what few
white men had previously seen and none had described, six major
Chaco Canyon ruins and sundry smaller ones, it is conceivable that
Simpson overlooked so commonplace a subject as an arroyo. On the
other hand, he mentions none between August 25, when the troops
were on the east crest of the Continental Divide, and September 1,
when they began their ascent of the Tunicha Mountains.

Where Colonel Washington's command camped for the night of
August 27, 1849, less than 2 miles west of Pueblo Wejegi, Simpson
(ibid., p. 78) reported that "the Rio Chaco . . . has a width of eight
feet, and a depth of one and a half. Its waters . . . are of a rich clay
color." Twenty-four hours later and about 23 miles farther west,
he added: "The water of the Rio Chaco has been gradually increasing
in volume in proportion as we descended" (ibid., p. 86). He had
passed the Escavada and several lesser tributaries. Twenty-three
miles of running water can only mean that rains had crossed the
upper Chaco drainage a few days earlier and, as may happen, had
somehow missed the expedition. Late August is within the normal
rainy season.

In 1877, 28 years after Simpson, W. H. Jackson, famed photographer
of the Hayden Surveys, found Chaco Canyon gutted from
end to end by a channel 10 feet deep or more. It was 10 or 12 feet
deep at Pueblo Pintado; 16 at Pueblo del Arroyo (Jackson, 1878,
pp. 433, 443).

Our oldest Navaho neighbors (pl. 3) professed to remember when
there was little or no gully in Chaco Canyon; when water could be had
anywhere with a little digging; when a ribbon of cottonwoods and
willows marked the middle of the valley, and grass grew thick and tall.

Fig. 1-The central portion of Chaco Canyon, New Mexico
scene of the National Geographic Society's
archeological investigations.

Hosteen Beyal stated emphatically that there was no arroyo above
the mouth of Escavada Wash when he was a boy. On the contrary,
the canyon was then carpeted with high grass among which shallow
pools of rainwater stood throughout the year. He recalls neither
cottonwoods nor willows opposite Pueblo Bonito but says both were
numerous downcanyon, nearer Peñasco Blanco, and still more plentiful
beyond.

By his son's estimate, Hosteen Beyal was born about 1832 and first
saw Chaco Canyon 10 years later. Thus his boyhood recollections
were of a time shortly antedating Simpson's recorded observations of
1849. Where Simpson found an arroyo just prominent enough to
suggest a name for the ruin nearest Pueblo Bonito, Jackson, 28 years
later, encountered one 16 feet deep and 40 to 60 feet wide.

Intrenchment of the Chaco was therefore already accomplished
when cattle were locally introduced on a large scale, in 1878 or 1879.
The livestock industry may be blameworthy elsewhere but not here.
Jackson, reporting his 1877 observations, mentions neither cattle nor
cattlemen. Yet within 2 years thereafter, two large companies, the
"LC's" and the Carlisles, had moved in and usurped nearly all the
range between the present Crownpoint area and the San Juan. It
was probably the former, owned by a Dr. Lacy, that in 1879 built
the stone houses under the cliff north of Peñasco Blanco for ranch
headquarters (information from John Wetherill, 1936). I have not
learned when or why they abandoned the Chaco country, but both
companies had moved into southeastern Utah before 1896. And Old
Wello had promptly appropriated to himself the vacated "LC" buildings
and continued to occupy them until his death, in 1926.

The existing Chaco arroyo is at least the third of its kind, according
to Bryan (1941). His physiographic studies in our behalf (Bryan,
1954) show that here, as in several other localities examined, floodwaters
have alternately deposited vast quantities of alluvium and
later bisected those deposits with gullies similar to recent arroyos.
Presumably another cycle of alluviation will follow the current period
of erosion. These phenomena are most readily explained, in Bryan's
opinion, by the theory of climatic change, a theory first proposed by
Huntington (1914).

The theory of a changing climate assumes that floodwaters are
largely regulated by vegetation. A conspicuous change in temperature
or rainfall is not essential, merely a slight shift from the dry toward
the less dry. We have ample proof of such shifts. Although our
Navaho informants, relying upon memories of their boyhood, insisted
that he exaggerated, Simpson pictured a rather sparse ground cover

when he rode through Chaco Canyon in 1849, at the inception of the
present arroyo system. On the other hand, the rushes with which
Bonitian wives wove their sleeping mats and the pine logs that roofed
their dwellings alike evidence moister conditions when Pueblo Bonito
was inhabited, 800 years before. Here and elsewhere throughout
the plateau country growth rings in timbers from prehistoric ruins
provide a visible record of recurrent periods of deficient rainfall in
times past. The Great Drought of 1276-99 merely climaxed a long
succession of lesser droughts (Douglass, 1935, p. 49). Since the
protection normally provided by living plants is lessened by any reduction
in their density, erosion naturally follows periods of diminished
rainfall. Thus the theory of climatic change seems to offer the
most plausible explanation for the alternating periods of erosion and
sedimentation Bryan sees in the alluvial fill of Chaco Canyon.

DISCOVERY AND EXPLORATION

Simpson was first to publish a personal impression of the principal
Chaco ruins; Jackson was first to give detailed descriptions. Simpson
names six of the eight ruins he and his nine companions visited between
sunrise and sunset on August 28, 1849. Accompanied by old
Hosta, ex-governor of Jemez pueblo and one of Simpson's guides,
Hosta's grandson, and an interpreter, Jackson, in May 1877, spent
"four or five days" in the canyon during which he examined and
plotted 11 ruins and reported upon other features. I find no fact to
support statements that Ainza in 1735, Gregg in 1840 or thereabout,
and Domenech a decade later were ever in Chaco Canyon. And I
see absolutely nothing on the oft-cited 1776 map of Don Bernardo
Miera y Pacheco (Library of Congress, Lowery 593) to indicate
that he had ever been there either. Traders, colonial agents, and
militiamen unquestionably penetrated this "Provincia de Nabajoo"
repeatedly prior to 1840, and the tales they carried to the market
place in Santa Fe probably supplied the generalized information that
led Gregg (1845, p. 285) and Loew (1875, p. 176) to describe Pueblo
Pintado as Pueblo Bonito. Brand (1937) has best summarized the
known history of the Chaco country, although he errs in some
particulars.

Morgan (1881) quotes directly from Simpson and Jackson and
reproduces the latter's map and ground plans. Mindeleff (1891)
photographed the central Chaco ruins but had surprisingly little to
say of them in connection with his study of Pueblo architecture. After
Mindeleff came a succession of writers, vacationists, and others drawn

by the mystery and romance with which they, themselves, veiled the
dead towns.

The Hyde Expeditions.—In 1896 Richard Wetherill, a leader in
the discovery and exploitation of cliff dwellings and earlier remains,
transferred his field of operations from Colorado and Utah to Chaco
Canyon and began digging in Pueblo Bonito. His initial success, plus
the remarkable condition of the ruin, prompted the idea of a more
formal program. He communicated his thoughts to B. Talbot B.
Hyde and Frederick E. Hyde, Jr., of New York, to whom he had
previously sold a Utah collection. Having donated this latter to the
American Museum of Natural History, the Hyde brothers quite
understandably went to the Museum seeking advice on Wetherill's
proposal. Prof. F. W. Putnam, then curator of the department of
anthropology, not only approved the plan but undertook to guide its
scientific phase from New York while his newly appointed assistant,
George H. Pepper, directed field operations. The Hyde brothers
took over Wetherill's 1896 finds and financed the program during
the four following years, 1897 through 1900. Field work was not
resumed in 1901 "by reason of Government interference" (Holsinger,
Ms., p. 73).

With "about 100 Navajos" employed, provision for their subsistence
had to be made. This necessity suggested a trading post at
Pueblo Bonito, for there was none within 30 miles at the time. Accordingly,
in 1898 a company was formed, under the name of the Hyde
Exploring (or Exploration) Expedition, with Richard Wetherill field
manager and Frederick E. Hyde, Jr., general supervisor. Company
headquarters were established at Pueblo Bonito; in 1901 a local post
office was authorized under the name "Putnam."

A residence for Wetherill was built a few feet from the southwest
corner of Bonito, paralleling its west wall. Rooms 122-124 were
cleared and revamped for occupancy. The store, a large room, adjoined
the residence on the west. Back of the store, extending toward
the cliff, was a long, narrow building, the stable. At the northeast
corner of Pueblo del Arroyo a bunkhouse was built for employees;
at the southeast corner, a boardinghouse with a few rooms for
transients later became known as "the hotel." There were lesser
structures here and there and a horse pasture south of the arroyo,
at the foot of The Gap. All these improvements had been made on
the unappropriated public domain.

On May 14, 1900, Wetherill filed a homestead entry upon the NW
¼ sec. 30, T. 21 N., R. 11 W., an area that included Kinklizhin ruin
and the adjacent prehistoric farmlands. Six months later, alleging

a surveyor's error, he asked permission to change the entry to the
south quarter of section 12, embracing not only the buildings he had
erected but also the ruins of del Arroyo, Bonito, and Chettro Kettle.
To inquire into this request and at the same time to investigate alleged
acts of trespass, Special Agent S. J. Holsinger of the General Land
Office was directed to visit Chaco Canyon. His report to the Commissioner,
under date of December 5, 1901, contains much information
and much misinformation. Wetherill and Frederick E. Hyde, Jr.,
gave their testimony under oath, but it is obvious that they indulged
freely, at other times, in that favorite western sport, spoofing the
stranger. Like those before him, Holsinger was swayed to superlatives
by the size and condition of Pueblo Bonito. He accepted
enthusiastically Wetherill's idea of preserving the Chaco ruins in the
public interest, and it was his argument, in large part, that brought
about creation of Chaco Canyon National Monument in 1907.

Following Holsinger's investigation, but before his report was submitted,
the Hyde Exploring Expedition transferred its headquarters
from Pueblo Bonito to Thoreau, on the Santa Fe Railroad, and its
archeological collections were presented to the American Museum of
Natural History, in New York. A handsome gift half a century ago,
those collections remain today not only convincing proof of the
generosity of the Hyde brothers but also of the cultural heights
attained by the builders of Pueblo Bonito.

Some of his more spectacular finds were described in four short
papers by Mr. Pepper (1899, 1905b, 1906, 1909). The final report
he had hoped to prepare was never written, but in its stead publication
of his rough field notes was authorized in the autumn of 1920. These
notes, of but limited usefulness to one not intimately acquainted with
Pueblo Bonito, are often confused and incomplete, as are my own.
Pepper and I were close friends for 10 years prior to his death in
1924, and Pueblo Bonito was a frequent subject of conversation.
Since we both earned our daily living in museums, no one knows
better than I his disappointment when museum chores year after
year delayed the volume that should have been an appropriate end to
the principal undertaking of his scientific career.

The National Geographic Society Expeditions.—In beginning researches
at Pueblo Bonito 20 years after the Hyde Expeditions, the
National Geographic Society had but a single purpose: to contribute,
if possible, additional information regarding Pueblo civilization at its
height. This cultural apex, many agreed, was best exemplified by
the major Chaco Canyon ruins, and of these Pueblo Bonito had been
recognized by our 1920 reconnaissance as the one site at which all

phases of the distinctive Chaco culture should be most fully illustrated.
Pueblo del Arroyo was added because its proximity permitted examination
coincident with the Pueblo Bonito investigation and because
masonry walls exposed by the arroyo on the west side of the ruin
were thought to underlie the latter.

The Society's program of investigation, as approved by its Committee
on Research, included everything identifiable with the life of
these two prehistoric communities. Their domestic water supply,
their sources of food and fuel, their entire subsistence problem—all
lay within the scope of our inquiry.

In the early summer of 1921 we set up our tents directly south of
Pueblo Bonito, on the edge of a long, cellarlike excavation that had
been the Hyde Expedition's storeroom for wool and Navaho blankets.
Where we dug our well, on a sand bar at one side of the main watercourse
and a couple of feet higher, the arroyo measured 32 feet deep
and 180 feet wide. Elsewhere, depth and width were greater. Water
for camp purposes was pumped into a tank elevated above the tents;
gravity carried it down into the kitchen, at the east end of the old
cellar, and to a mud box near the ruin. (A crew of three, sometimes
two crews, made wall repairs as our excavations progressed.)

It is generally recognized throughout the Southwest that drinkable
water is to be had only by digging in, or adjacent to, the actual stream
course of an arroyo. The Hyde Expedition was an early experimenter
in Chaco Canyon. "A six-inch well, 350 feet deep, was drilled
near the south-west corner of Bonito ruins with the hope of securing
artesian water. No flow, however . . . and only brackish water,
unfit for use, encountered." (Holsinger, Ms., p. 10.)

In April 1901, at the time of Holsinger's visit, the well supplying
Hyde Expedition personnel and livestock was situated "just south
and almost under the walls of Pueblo Arroyo" and was 20 feet deep.
It was short-lived, however, presumably ruined at the same time
floodwaters destroyed the wagon road across the arroyo at that point,
since a new well had been dug and a new crossing prepared a hundred
yards upstream prior to Wetherill's death in 1910. During the following
decade floods continued their annual channeling, for when I first
crossed here, in June 1920, the well platform stood 4 feet above the
bottom of the arroyo and a crumpled steel windmill tower lay half
buried in the sand. A year later both wreckage and well disappeared.

WATER RESOURCES AND AGRICULTURE

Potable water is a major want in Chaco Canyon today, but was it
always so? In 1877 Jackson camped three days at a muddy pool 250

yards west of Pueblo del Arroyo. Not until the very morning of his
departure did he find the ancient stairway up the cliff back of Pueblo
Bonito and the deep, half-filled water pockets beyond. Richard
Wetherill drew upon these latter, letting a daily ration down over the
cliff by rope and bucket, until a well had been dug in the Chaco wash;
he also built an earth dam to increase the storage capacity of the
pockets and later replaced it with one of concrete (verbal statement
of John Wetherill, 1921). Nine hundred years before, women and
girls from Pueblo Bonito climbed the old stairway to that same source
of cool, clear water and back again, each with an olla balanced upon
her head.

Deep as they are, the water-worn cavities on the cliff overlooking
Pueblo Bonito were reservoirs of limited capacity. They can scarcely
have met the yearlong needs of the village. But, visited upon occasion,
they offered opportunity for feminine gossip and a change from, presumably,
the more frequented waterholes down on the canyon floor.
If we can accept Hosteen Beyal's recollections of 1840 or thereabout,
when the water table was only 2 or 3 feet below the surface and a
succession of shallow, willow-bordered pools marked the middle of
the valley, another such series must have been present when like conditions
prevailed back in the days of Pueblo Bonito. These pools
naturally vanished as floodwaters cut away the intervening sod and
thus initiated an arroyo system. Being shallow-rooted, willows were
doomed to disappear as the water table fell beyond reach of their roots.

According to Jackson, willows and cottonwoods were still fairly
numerous in 1877. Most of them, however, had disappeared before
1920, the year of our reconnaissance. At that time we noted several
cottonwood trees on the south side of the canyon, east of Wejegi, and
others here and there. A lone example was growing near the windmill
in the arroyo west of Una Vida, and two more, similarly situated,
stood a quarter-mile below Pueblo del Arroyo. These latter clearly
had slumped from surface level with caving of the arroyo bank. One
of them, transported a mile farther downstream, still flourished in
1924. Clustered willows sprouted on gully sandbars each spring, but
their numbers decreased from year to year as the channel grew wider
and deeper.

To test the quality of Chaco Canyon water and to measure the
effect of floodwaters upon that quality, we submitted several samples
to the U. S. Department of Agriculture for analysis in 1923 and again
in 1925. I desire at this time to acknowledge our indebtedness to
C. S. Scofield, then senior agriculturist, in charge, Office of Western

Irrigation Agriculture, and to J. F. Breazeale, also of that office,
for the following report:

Quality of water samples from Chaco Canyon, N. Mex., expressed in parts
per million

               

Sample No.	Ca	Mg	HCO3	Cl	SO4	NO3	Total salts
1	30	tr.	240	72	108	tr.	432
2	36	5	264	42	236	tr.	640
3	33	tr.	336	42	169	2	616
4	36	0	312	42	172	2	568
5	30	0	240	tr.	164	2	496
6	138	6	216	0	725	5	1,304
7	105	2	192	0	436	0	848

Description of samples

• No. 1, First floodwaters of 1923, collected July 9.

• No. 2, N.G.S. well, collected July 10, 1923.

• No. 3, N.G.S. well, June 24, 1925, before cleaning.

• No. 4, N.G.S. well, June 26, 1925, after cleaning.

• No. 5, Floodwater, June 24, 1925.

• No. 6, Rafael well, July 16, 1925.

• No. 7, Surface water, Kinbiniyol alluviation plain near Navaho cornfield,
  July 15, 1925.

Character of salts expressed as reacting values or milligram equivalents

               

Sample No.	Ca	Mg	HCO3	Cl	SO4	Total acids	Na[2]
1	1.5	tr.	3.9	2.0	2.2	8.1	82
2	1.8	0.4	4.3	1.2	4.9	10.4	83
3	1.6	0	5.5	1.2	3.5	10.2	84
4	1.8	0	5.1	1.2	3.6	9.9	82
5	1.5	0	4.0	tr.	3.4	7.4	80
6	6.9	0.5	3.5	0	15.1	18.6	60
7	5.2	0.2	3.1	0	9.1	12.2	56

In his letter of August 24, 1925, transmitting the foregoing results,
Mr. Scofield says:

Mr. Scofield adds that there was no appreciable change in the
quality of the water between 1923 and 1925. This was true also, as
one might expect, in samples taken both years from the Expedition
well and from the reconditioned Wetherill well, a hundred yards
downstream.

The last sentence quoted from Mr. Scofield's letter echoes a thought
he had previously expressed, namely, that Chaco Canyon water might
prove unsuitable for irrigation. This possibility prompted an analysis
of soils from fields presumably cultivated by the Bonitians. The results
are reported in our next chapter. It may be noted in passing,
however, that a calcium deficiency and an excess of sodium salts in
the soil samples analyzed have left them impervious to water and
therefore incapable of producing crops. Poor soil thus becomes a
second probable cause for abandonment of Pueblo Bonito. Together,
poor soil and the twelfth-century arroyo would have frustrated every
Bonitian effort toward large-scale agriculture in Chaco Canyon.

There are no springs in the canyon now, but seeps here and there,
chiefly at the heads of rincons, may have been more productive in
times past. Rushes still grow below these seepage zones, but they are
noticeably smaller and less sturdy than those used in ceiling construction
and in floor mats at Pueblo Bonito. This fact suggests a more
generous rainfall when the pueblo was inhabited. On the basis of
our incomplete observations we estimated at 10 inches the current
annual precipitation, but geologists studying the local situation reason
that even one additional inch per year would cause existing seeps to
flow again.

The most active seep seen by members of our party was in a shallow
sandstone cave in upper Rincon del Camino, about a mile and a half
northwest of Pueblo Bonito. It had been developed and carefully
protected for domestic use by Dan Cly, one of our Navaho workmen,
who resided nearby. As is evident from the following analysis, the
water is exceptionally pure:

   

Ca	Mg	HCO3	Cl	SO4	NO3	Total salts
30	0	120	0	48	0	152

Floodwaters following midsummer rains make a noisy approach,
at once fascinating and frightening. Time after time we watched
unbelieving as they methodically undercut the arroyo banks and

carried them away, yard by cubic yard (pl. 4, upper). During our
seven summers in Chaco Canyon, every storm that passed meant an
interruption to our work while we repaired approaches to the road
crossing.

Despite all the destruction they have caused, these recurrent floods
performed one worthy service: they laid bare a partial profile of
Chaco Canyon history. Across from Pueblo del Arroyo a low mound
in midvalley marks a small Pueblo III ruin. One corner had already
been exposed when W. H. Jackson in 1877 observed that the foundations
lay "five or six feet below the general level." The arroyo, then
16 feet deep, was 12 feet deeper in 1920, when, to judge from what
remained, fully half the little ruin had been undermined and washed
away.

Both above and below the surface on which that house was erected,
silt deposited by gently flowing waters formed uniform layers extending
right and left toward the canyon walls (pl. 4, lower). Obviously,
when those silt layers were laid down a lush ground cover was
present to hinder and delay runoff. Our test pits at a number of places
showed like stratification, although nearer the cliff the overburden was
sometimes only 2 feet thick.

The prehistoric arroyo.—Bryan (1925, 1926) described the origin
and development of the present-day arroyo and compared it with one
that existed in Pueblo Bonito times. This latter, which we plotted
for more than a quarter mile, apparently did not exceed 12 or 13 feet
in depth. Nevertheless, it could have brought about what the present
arroyo is even now accomplishing, namely, transformation of Chaco
Canyon from a suitable place of residence into a waste incapable of
supporting more than a few scattered families.

An interval of approximately 800 years separates this modern gully
and its predecessor. After the older one had run its course it was
gradually filled with alluvium and then buried under an additional 5
or 6 feet, as we have seen. Thus the old channel was completely
hidden until exposed by its present-day parallel. What other secrets
lie concealed by those 5 feet of silt is one of the tantalizing mysteries
connected with Pueblo Bonito.

W. H. Jackson first called attention to this buried channel. A cross
section of it near Pueblo del Arroyo showed, 14 feet below the
surface, an irregular stratum of potsherds, flint chips, and bone fragments—household
and workshop waste from the trash piles of Pueblo
Bonito. Here, too, apparently brought in by floodwaters the previous
summer, was a human skull from an unmarked upcanyon grave. A

lesser stratum of sherds on the south bank led up to the small arroyoside
ruin above mentioned (Jackson, 1878, pp. 443-444).

The prehistoric arroyo presumably reached its climax about the
middle of the twelfth century. We draw this inference because Late
Bonitian potsherds were found on the bottom of it and because new
house construction at Pueblo Bonito seems to have come to an end
by that time. Of 52 datable timbers recovered during our excavations
only 4 were felled after A.D. 1100, and the latest of these was cut in
1130 (Douglass, 1935, p. 51). Since the present 30-foot channel
has already been a century in the making, we may, employing the
same time gage, assume its predecessor had a beginning somewhere
around 1075. Bryan (1941, p. 231) dates the period of refill and
alluviation between 1250 and 1400. By 1500 or 1600 ecological equilibrium
had been reestablished and Chaco Canyon was once again a
fit place in which to live.

The Navaho were quick to discover this fact, for the upper Chaco,
with the mesa country northward along the Continental Divide to the
Gobernador, was their tribal birthplace and nursery. It was here
they gathered the numerical strength for recurrent depredations that
all but wiped out the Jemez towns by 1622 (Hodge, in Ayer, 1916,
p. 243). With Navaho acquiescence Pueblo refugees from the aftermath
of their 1680 revolt against Spanish dominance found brief
asylum in this same region (Kidder, 1920).

ABORIGINAL OCCUPANCY OF CHACO CANYON

Evidences of Navaho occupation abound throughout the Chaco
country, but one cannot always fix their age. The site of a hogan,
for example, may be 50 years old or twice that. Neglected drainage
ditches look timeless. Here and there along the canyon rim are
"watchtowers" of sandstone blocks loosely piled 2 or 3 feet high. I
believe these structures to be of Navaho origin, despite the possible
presence of Pueblo potsherds, because they are more or less circular
and invariably have a sill-less opening to the eastward. They could
be relics of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when guards were
posted to warn of approaching troops, sent to retaliate for Navaho
raids on Spanish and Pueblo settlements to the east and south.[3]

Notwithstanding its present-day barrenness and desolation, Chaco
Canyon formerly possessed some now-missing quality that attracted
Indian settlers. The ruins of one-time habitations, some older than

others, are to be seen on every hand. A Late Basket Maker village
9 miles east of Pueblo Bonito was tested in connection with our
studies in 1926 and excavated the following year for the Bureau of
American Ethnology by Roberts (1929). During our 1920 reconnaissance,
to keep three Zuñi occupied while I visited Pueblo Pintado
and the upper Chaco, a P. I pit house on the south side of the canyon,
opposite Pueblo Bonito, was partly excavated. Two years later we
cleared what remained of another, in midvalley and a mile to the east.
From this second dwelling, its roof level buried under six feet of
alluvium, we removed two charred logs subsequently dated A.D.
777±10 (Judd, 1924; Douglass, 1935).

Scores of small Pueblo II and III structures are to be found along
the south side of the valley and in the open country beyond. In contrast,
most of the great P. III towns are situated close under the
canyon's north wall. Here, too, a few natural cavities had been converted
into granaries or one-family shelters; terraced houses were
piled against the cliff behind Pueblo Bonito and Chettro Kettle. Upcanyon,
on jutting crags beyond Wejegi, are the ruins of at least two
houses built between 1680 and 1700 by refugee families from Rio
Grande pueblos. In few places can the pageant of Pueblo history be
seen so clearly as in Chaco Canyon!

In this and following reports on our investigations I shall continue
to designate culture sequences by the terminology of the Pecos Classification
(Kidder, 1927), with occasional resort to Roberts's 1936 proposals
by way of variation, despite the fact that increase of knowledge
since these studies were begun has shown that material and physical
differences between the so-called Basket Makers and the Pueblos are
less real than was formerly supposed.

Like the Basket Makers, the Early Pueblos (P. I) dwelt in pits
before they learned to build houses that could stand alone. Walls
made of posts and mud eventually were replaced by those of masonry;
detached, one-family dwellings were brought into juxtaposition, their
storage bins at the rear; one-clan structures developed into vast,
terraced buildings housing several hundred persons. Pueblo Bonito
and others of its kind illustrate this latter stage, the third (P. III)
and highest advance of Pueblo civilization. It was followed by a
period of retrogression, commonly designated Pueblo IV, and then
by the further disruption of the Spanish Conquest (P. V). Some
30-odd Pueblo villages in New Mexico and Arizona still cling, more
or less tenaciously, to the traditional way of life and the old religion.
At least two of them, Acoma and old Oraibi, still occupy the very
sites they occupied in 1540.

When our Pueblo Bonito investigations were inaugurated, in the
spring of 1921, most archeologists working in the Southwest depended
upon fragments of pottery to suggest the degree of development
at any one site. Pueblo I pottery had a certain sameness, no
matter where found; it could never be mistaken for P. III pottery.
Therefore potsherds served as evidence both of material progress and
passing time. Stratigraphy was the means by which that evidence
was acquired.

Hence our first desire, as soon as camp had been organized, was a
good look at the Bonito dump. Two conspicuous rubbish piles stand
just south of the ruin. Because floor sweepings at the bottom of those
piles would be older than sweepings on top, a cross section should
reveal every major change in the material culture of the villagers
during the period that trash was accumulating.

Previous experience in Utah and Arizona had taught me that
certain types of earthenware were associated with early dwellings;
other types, with later. But our trench into the larger of the two
Bonito rubbish heaps disclosed an intermixture of early and late types
from top to bottom. We cut a second stratigraphic section and then
a third. Each revealed the same puzzling fact: early sherds were
with and above late fragments.

The story of how this mystery finally was solved has been reserved
for my chapter on pottery. But the solution, I must add, also provided
convincing evidence that a settlement had existed here a long,
long while before its population was doubled by an immigrant people.
Still later, more foreigners arrived.

Thanks to the late Dr. Clark Wissler, then curator of anthropology,
American Museum of Natural History, partial page proof of Pepper's
"Pueblo Bonito" was received late in May 1921, shortly after we
had turned our attention from the rubbish piles of Pueblo Bonito to
the ruin itself. This text, and a number of prints from Pepper negatives
purchased through courtesy of B. T. B. Hyde, enabled us at the
outset to identify the rooms Pepper had excavated and thus avoid
any possible duplication of effort.

Discussing the nature and extent of the Hyde Expeditions' work
in his foreword to Pepper's volume, Dr. Wissler says: "Something
less than half the rooms in the pueblo were excavated, 198 in all."
The total given is apparently a typographical error, for Pepper's text
and ground plan include only 189, plus the sunken shrine in the East
Court, No. 190. The ground plan, it is explained, was prepared by
B. T. B. Hyde from Pepper's field notes and a sketch made in 1916
by N. C. Nelson. That such a composite should contain a few discrepancies

was perhaps inevitable and was anticipated by Mr. Nelson
(in Pepper, 1920, p. 387). Wherever disclosed during the course of
our own explorations, these errors have been corrected. On the plan
appearing herein, figure 2, rooms numbered 1-190 are those excavated
by the Hyde Expeditions; with a few exceptions those examined
by the National Geographic Society are numbered 200-351
and the kivas are lettered. In our text the letters B, C, and D indicate,
respectively, the second, third, and fourth stories. Five rooms (210,

Fig. 2.—A crescent of Old Bonitian houses formed the nucleus of Pueblo Bonito and influenced
each successive addition to the village. (Drawn from the original survey by Oscar B. Walsh.)

227, 295, 299, 300) and two kivas (Y, Z) were cleared by unknown
persons between 1900 and 1920. In addition to those left unnumbered,
Rooms 205-208, 297, 301-303 were purposely not excavated; and
Kivas O, P, S, and 2-C were merely tested. These, I hoped, might
be reserved for examination some years hence.

It was my desire, and one in which the Society's Committee on
Research unanimously concurred, to save Pueblo Bonito for what it
actually is, a ruined prehistoric town, and let its empty rooms tell
their own story. Toward this end we did a great deal each season to
strengthen standing walls in order that they might be preserved as
we found them. A repair crew was kept constantly at work as
excavations progressed, patching broken masonry, replacing missing

door lintels, and taking other reasonable precautions to check further
disintegration.

To provide drainage in rooms that we opened in the eastern part
of the ruin, a hole often was dug in the middle floor, filled with rocks,
and covered with sand. To protect the ruder stonework of the western
half, our rooms were wholly or partially refilled, the refill being cupped
in the middle. For like reasons we carted away the excess dirt and
rock the Hyde Expeditions had thrown out of their excavations.
Hewett (1936, p. 32) was well aware of this when he sought to belittle
our program by stating that the Society had reexcavated the
Pepper rooms.

Pueblo Bonito well merits preservation. It is at once the largest
and oldest of the major Chaco Canyon towns. It is a complex, the
union of several distinct parts. It is the work of two similar but
unlike peoples. Despite joint occupancy of the village for 100 years
or more, these peoples were culturally two or three generations apart,
as we shall see presently.

THE PEOPLE OF PUEBLO BONITO

Pueblo Bonito originated in the ninth or early tenth century as a
cluster of rudely constructed masonry houses. This original house
cluster, occupying the slight elevation where a Pueblo I pit village
formerly stood, expanded crescentically to right and left as new homes
were required. Then, perhaps in the second quarter of the eleventh
century, the local population was suddenly increased by arrival of
the second group, emigrating from some as yet undetermined point
of departure, presumably in the north.

These newcomers, culturally more advanced than their hosts and
perhaps numerically superior, lost little time in assuming leadership
of the community. They encompassed the old village in their first
constructional enthusiasm; later they unhesitatingly razed their own
and neighboring houses to make way for successive alterations; they
increased the impregnability of the pueblo and twice enlarged it, the
last time after having abandoned plans that would have doubled its
ground area.

Differences between the two peoples responsible for Pueblo Bonito
are evident in many ways. The one group was old fashioned, unchanging;
the other, alert and progressive. Each had its preferences
in architecture; each had its favored shapes for kitchen utensils.
Since we do not know the real name of either we shall hereinafter,
merely for convenience, designate the first people the "Old Bonitians"
both because they were the original settlers and because they remained

so stubbornly conservative until the end. We shall refer to the second
group as the "Late Bonitians" since they were, in fact, late comers.
It was these latter who molded Pueblo Bonito to its final form, gave
it the mastery in art and architecture that set the tempo for all Chaco
Canyon, and won for it a fame that echoed down the beaches of
Lower California and through the jungles of Veracruz. Together,
these two peoples naturally become the "Bonitians."

Old Bonitian houses were built usually of sandstone slabs as wide
as the wall was thick. The slabs might vary in length and weight,
but they were always reduced to standard width by breaking away
the sides. Since spalling left the edges thinner than the middle,
quantities of mud were required to bed the slabs evenly. And because
that mud was spread and pressed into place by human hands, fingerprints
invariably appear on the surface. Sometimes a mosaic of stone
chips on outside walls protected the mortar from rain and windblown
sand. Interior walls occasionally were made of upright poles bound
together with willows and packed between with mud and chunks of
sandstone, a practice handed down from Basket Maker III and
Pueblo I times.

In contrast, Late Bonitian masonry consists of a core of rubble
and adobe, faced on both sides by neatly laid stonework. Ignoring
for the time being several nondescript but contemporaneous varieties,
we may recognize three successive styles in Late Bonitian wall construction:
(a) that veneered with blocks of friable sandstone of
unequal size and shape but all pecked or rubbed smooth on the exposed
surface only and chinked with pieces of laminate sandstone
about a quarter inch thick; (b) that with fairly uniform, dressed
blocks of friable sandstone, or laminate sandstone, alternating with
bands composed of laminate tablets an inch in thickness, more or less;
and (c) that faced solely with laminate sandstone. Beginning with
that peculiar to the old people, these four kinds of masonry will be
referred to hereinafter as types 1, 2, 3, and 4 (pl. 5). Their relative
ages may be approximated from the fact that tree-ring dates for 65
beams range from A.D. 919 to 1130, as published by Douglass
(1935, p. 51).

The Old Bonitian part of town (fig. 2) was built earlier, and it was
occupied later than the remainder. Five feet of blown sand had
accumulated against the outer wall of the original settlement before
the Late Bonitians arrived and built their homes upon that accumulation.
More sand had gathered against old and new walls before
extensive alterations introduced the third type of stonework. Still
later, construction on a very considerable northeast addition was

interrupted in favor of plans that brought Pueblo Bonito to its
final form.

I believe the Old Bonitians continued in residence longer than the
Late Bonitians because practically all the cultural material recovered
by the Hyde Expeditions, and by the National Geographic Society,
came from Old Bonitian rooms. Some of these rooms are former
dwellings; others clearly had been designed for storage. Eventually
eight of them, both storerooms and one-time habitations, were requisitioned
for burial purposes. Materials stored at the time, religious
or otherwise, were abandoned when the first body was brought in.

Late Bonitian houses, on the other hand, appear to have been
emptied of their contents and leisurely vacated. Windblown sand
sifted in, and subsequently flooring and stonework from upper stories
collapsed upon that sand. No Late Bonitian room had been used for
burials, but a number came to be recognized, sooner or later, as more
convenient places than the village dump for disposal of household
sweepings.

Dumping household waste in convenient corners was not a Late
Bonitian trait exclusively. The Old Bonitians were equally guilty.
Indeed, there is probably not a ground-floor room in the entire village
that wholly escaped the bearer of trash. Some of the lesser quantities
we encountered might have been brushed through open hatchways by
housewives living on the floor above, but larger accumulations represent
repeated contributions by all families in the vicinity. Room 323
was a neighborhood dump both before and after its ceiling collapsed.
Trash from a single source was often thrown in various places. A
bowl with drilled holes evidencing ancient repairs (U.S.N.M. No.
336297) is one of several vessels we restored from fragments
recovered from two or more separate debris heaps.

Where vegetal matter is lacking it is not always possible to distinguish
between intentional and unintentional rubbish deposits. Fireplace
ashes may be quite inconspicuous where blown sand is predominant.
At first it seemed reasonable to recognize as a trash repository
any room in which we found 1,000 or more fragments of broken
pottery. But potsherds alone are not enough. Room 247, for example,
with 2,732 sherds, was not really a dump, but the southwest corner
of Room 245, with only 329 fragments present, obviously was. Here
floor sweepings had been poured through a side door of Room 246B,
in the second story, until it formed a 5-foot-high pile in the corner
of the ground-floor room below and adjoining. An unusual number
of potsherds plus an unusual number of discarded implements such
as bone awls, hammerstones, and manos, is a more reliable measure

Plate 2

Dead pine at the head of Wirito's Rincon, southeast
of Pueblo Bonito. (Photograph by Karl Ruppert,
1922.)

Decayed remains of a great pine that stood within the West Court
of Pueblo Bonito. (Photograph by O. C. Havens, 1924.)

Plate 3

Old Wello and Padilla, Navaho neighbors and frequent visitors
at the National Geographic Society's Pueblo Bonito camp. (Photograph
by O. C. Havens, 1925.)

Hosteen Beyal (Mister Money) who remembered Chaco Canyon
as it was about 1840. (Photograph by Neil M. Judd, 1927.)

Plate 4

Upper: The Chaco in flood. Wetherill's well, destroyed a few weeks later, stands at the left;
below it, wagon tracks on the crossing used until 1928. (Photograph by O. C. Havens, 1921.)

Lower: Layers of silt deposited by gently flowing floodwaters underlie a small ruin, a contemporary
of Pueblo Bonito. Pueblo del Arroyo appears at the right. (Photograph by Charles
Martin, 1920.)

1. Spalled-sandstone slabs of wall width laid in
abundant quantities of mud and often protected
from the elements by closely placed stone chips.

2. Rubble veneered with casual blocks of friable
sandstone dressed on the face only and chinked all
around with chips of laminate sandstone.

3. Rubble veneered with matched blocks, either of
laminate or dressed friable sandstone or both, alternating
with bands of inch-thick tablets of laminated
sandstone.

Plate 5.—The four principal types of masonry at Pueblo Bonito, each represented by a
2-foot square section.

4. Rubble veneered with laminate sandstone of
fairly uniform thickness laid with a minimum of
mud plaster between.

of the deliberate rubbish pile than potsherds alone. The wattled partition
crossing Room 256 may have been built to retain trash piled
deeper behind the wall than in front of it.

Whenever Transitional, Early Hachure, Solid, and Plain-banded
types of pottery were preponderant in a given accumulation we assumed
that most of it came from Old Bonitian dwellings. By the
same token a Late Bonitian source was indicated if Late Hachure,
Chaco-San Juan, Mesa Verde, and Corrugated-coil culinary wares

predominated. With these yardsticks 70 percent of 24,587 sherds
tabulated from Room 323 were Old Bonitian varieties, while, curiously
enough, 51.3 percent of those from Room 325, next on the south, were
Late Bonitian. Our data do not identify Kiva Q as a communal
dump, and yet of the 4,527 fragments collected there 33.4 percent
were Old Bonitian and 37.2 percent were Late. Of 5,558 sherds from
rubbish in Late Bonitian Room 334, 60.2 percent were Late Bonitian
types, but of 642 from a test pit beneath the floor of that same room
52.4 percent were Old Bonitian.

In figure 3 I have attempted to show the distribution of trash
accumulations within the walls of Pueblo Bonito. Our evidence is
conclusive in some instances but not in all. Of the rooms and kivas

excavated by the National Geographic Society I recognize 34 as
certain or probable dumps, while if 1,000 or more potsherds were our
only criterion I should have to add nine more rooms and seven kivas.
Pepper's text identifies only four of his excavated rooms (24, 25, 67,
105) as rubbish repositories but I have marked 10 others as probable
dumps on the basis of Hyde's tabulation (Pepper, 1920, pp. 359-372)
of specimens recovered. His four burial rooms are included because
our four (320, 326, 329, 330) all contained debris of occupation intentionally
carried in to cover the bodies. Of 628 potsherds among
household trash covering the 10 burials in Room 320, 46.1 percent
were Old Bonitian and 25.0 percent Late Bonitian, while of 622 like
fragments among additional debris above the second-floor level the
percentages were 41.6 and 30.8, respectively. Clearly both Old
Bonitian and Late Bonitian families dwelt hereabout and had contributed
proportionally to the earlier as well as the later part of the
room fill.

Intramural trash heaps, each marking an abandoned room, suggest
either a shifting of families within the pueblo or a gradual reduction
of population. A decrease in population could have been brought
about by an epidemic, by failure of the water supply, or by any one
of various lesser causes. The most likely, however, and one for
which we have supporting evidence, is annual reduction in the amount
of arable land. A dwindling food supply spurs discontent; famine
has repeatedly impelled Pueblo migrations within historic times.
Families uprooted and forced from their homes by dissension would
leave most of their possessions behind, as at Oraibi in 1906. Thus,
voluntary departure of their occupants seems a plausible explanation
for the emptiness of Late Bonitian dwellings. Presence of Late
Bonitian utensils in Old Bonitian houses evidences contemporaneity.

Room 28 is a case in point but with complicating factors. Here
Pepper uncovered an astonishing hoard of earthenware vessels and
other objects. According to Hyde's tables (Pepper, 1920, pp. 359372),
the specimens from this one room included 111 cylindrical vases,
39 bowls, 24 pitchers, 2 effigy vessels, 75 stone jar covers, and various
other items. Some of them had been burned or blackened by fire.
Several coiled baskets and 33 earthenware vessels bearing either Old
Bonitian or Late Bonitian designs, lay in the northeast corner at the
level of, and actually on, the sill of the door connecting with Room
51a. About 7 feet to the west, 110 cylindrical vases, 18 pitchers, and
8 bowls had been piled in five layers on "an area of 20 square feet"
(ibid., pp. 119-120). There can be no question that this remarkable
assemblage had been intentionally placed where Pepper found it.

Only Late Bonitian pottery types, in form and decoration, are
discernible in his illustrations.

As he describes excavation of the room, Pepper enumerates many
objects not listed by Hyde; he repeatedly mentions both shell and
turquoise ornaments; 400 shell beads were "associated directly with
the pottery vessels." (Ibid., p. 125.)

Pepper's published field notes are not always easy to follow, but
careful study of them makes it clear that Rooms 28 and 28a originally
formed a single ground-floor Old Bonitian dwelling about 40 feet
long. An introduced partition later divided this long chamber. Room
28 extends from the partition westward beneath Rooms 55 and 57.
These latter are 2-story Late Bonitian structures whose east walls
rest upon logs inserted at ceiling level of the old room below. The
concave north side of that old room was straightened by the Late
Bonitians, but they left the convex south side undisturbed to serve
as foundation for a new wall they built to enclose a second-story
chamber over the east half of Room 28 and all of 28a. This secondstory
chamber, on a level with the first stories of Rooms 55 and 57,
we shall henceforth refer to as 28B.

Pepper's description of Rooms 28 and 28a leaves no doubt that
they were originally constructed of first-type, or Old Bonitian, stonework.
But his figure 44 (1920, p. 116) and his previously unpublished
prints 103, 104, and 120 (herein pls. 6, upper and lower; 7, lower),
together with our own notes, show that the substitute north wall of
Room 28, westward to its junction with the outer southeast corner of
Old Bonitian Room 33, is constructed of laminate sandstone, chinked
with thin little tablets in the manner of our second-type masonry; that
the west and north walls of 28B, including continuation of the latter
to Room 58 (the second story of Room 33), are of second-type stonework
in which dressed blocks of friable sandstone predominate.

Bonitian architecture is often bewildering. I give it thought in this
place only because I believe architecture helps explain the cultural
complexity in Room 28 and adjacent structures. My deductions are
drawn almost entirely from Pepper's notes and photographs, since
our own efforts hereabout were directed toward leveling piles of
previously turned earth and stone the better to control surface drainage.
In the course of this undertaking we laid bare as many secondstory
walls as seemed wise and made a few observations upon them.

If I interpret Pepper correctly, Room 28 was a 1-story Old Bonitian
house that the Late Bonitians altered without wholly dispossessing
its owners. The newcomers corrected the asymmetry of its north
wall just to provide a straighter foundation for the dwelling they

wished to construct above. This latter, 28B, we know to have been
one of a series of early (second-type masonry) Late Bonitian houses
that overlay Old Bonitian rooms west and south as far as Room 327.
The original ceiling beams in Room 28 were replaced by pine logs
whose north ends were socketed 2 or 3 inches in the old walls. Supporting
posts, if not provided at the time, were inserted later. During
these alterations constructional debris was allowed to lie where it
fell; upon this accumulation, with sand carried in for the purpose,
a new surface was created at, or just below, the sill level of the doors
into Rooms 32, 51, and 51a.

The partition separating 28 and 28a, if not built while these changes
were under way, was introduced shortly after. Pepper's figure 44,
illustrating pottery in the northeast corner of Room 28, shows that the
mud with which the partition was coated had been pressed against the
previously plastered north wall. Here the partition was "about a foot
thick and four feet high" (ibid., p. 117). Described from Room 28a,
this same partition was 6 feet high and supported by a 2½-foot foundation
of large stones which, in turn, rested upon the original floor,
8½ feet below the ceiling (ibid., p. 126). In other words, approximately
4½ feet of constructional debris and sand was already present
in the northeast corner of Room 28 when that pottery was left at the
door into Room 51a. With only a 4-foot headway remaining, Room
28 obviously had little use thereafter except storage. On a 4- by
5-foot space in the middle of its floor, 136 vases, bowls, and pitchers
were carefully piled. Miscellaneous stone slabs, tools, and other
possessions were carried in from time to time and left about the room.
Meanwhile sand drifted in with every windstorm until it half covered
the piled pottery, the tools, and utensils.

Some time later 28B and the room or rooms immediately west of
it were partially destroyed by fire. Their floor timbers and supporting
posts were burned, or partly burned; walls were reddened and the
blown sand "vitrified and formed into a slag" (ibid., p. 125).

Reconstruction soon followed, in 1083 or thereafter.[4] The burned
walls were razed; charred timbers, discarded building stones, and
mud mortar were dumped into the storeroom below. By this time,
however, a third variety of stonework was in vogue among the Late
Bonitians; the substitute walls they built on the south side of Rooms
28B, 55, and 57, and between the latter two, were not of second-type,
but of fourth-type masonry—the kind utilized in the latest addition
to the east and southeast quarter of the pueblo. The west walls of

28B and 57 survived the conflagration in large part, for they stand
today as examples of second-type masonry with fourth-type repairs.
The beams and "cedarbark floor covering" mentioned by Pepper
(ibid., p. 216) in Room 55 are relics of this second reconstruction.[5]

Now when and why were 136 bowls, pitchers, and cylindrical vases
piled in the middle of Room 28? An answer to the first question, at
least, may be deduced from Pepper's notes. Describing Rooms 55
and 57, he remarks that their east and west wall "foundations" were
"simply the debris of the burnt-out portions of the rooms" (ibid.,
pp. 216, 219). Below the cedarbark-and-adobe floor of 55, which had
been crushed down "about 4 feet" (thus evidencing an open space
beneath), the "excavations were carried to a depth of over 4 feet
. . . but nothing but clean sand was discovered." Over 4 feet of clean
sand plus 4 feet of open space above thus approximate the 8½-foot
ceiling height reported for Room 28a.

Again, in Room 28, Pepper observed (ibid., p. 117) that "the lower
portion . . . was filled with sand that had drifted and washed in
before the ceiling fell" and (p. 120) that most of the vessels stacked
on the middle floor "were imbedded in the debris that formed the
foundation of the western wall." Now his print No. 103, first published
herein (pl. 6, lower), identifies this "western wall" as that at
the west end of Room 28B, which was built upon a beam bridging the
Old Bonitian room below. The debris of reconstruction, which
Pepper recognized as such but carelessly misnamed, actually flowed
down from beam height into direct contact with the stored pottery.
Because most of the tabular stones visible in that debris slope down
and away from Room 55 it seems clear this waste was poured
through a hole in the floor on the east side of 55. Beyond this dump,
in the west third of Room 28, the quantity of waste was much less,
for it did not prevent the rebuilt floors of Rooms 55 and 57 from
sagging 4 feet when they, in turn, were later broken by collapse of
upper walls. Striated sand against the west wall of 28B proves that
the second-story floor here, as in Rooms 55 and 57, remained in place
for some time after abandonment.

After he had laid bare all the artifacts in Room 28, Pepper photographed
them from various angles. One of the most illuminating
views is that taken from directly above and reproduced as his figure
42 (ibid., p. 114). If the reader will hold this reproduction in reverse,
thus to orient it with the room, he will recognize in the upper right
corner some of the vessels shown (fig. 44, p. 116) at sill level of the

Room 51a door. To the left of these, ranged along the base of the
north wall, are fragments of a stone tablet, two large stones, one
upon the other, a beam-supporting post with charred top (seen more
clearly in print 103), and then a jumble of stone implements apparently
unearthed elsewhere in the room and temporarily stacked here.
Lastly, in the upper left corner of the photograph, one notes a bulging
section of masonry. That bulge marks a sealed door to Room 32.

Pepper first mentions this sealed door while reporting the excavation
of 32, a burial room. The one body interred here lay about 6
inches above doorsill level, or approximately 18 inches above the floor.
A foot and a half of wind- and water-borne sand had collected before
the body was brought in. That the room continued in use while this
sand was accumulating is evidenced by earthenware vessels and other
objects left at various distances above the floor.

Pepper's four burial rooms, 32, 33, 53, and 56, opened one into
the other, yet their only known connection with the outside was the
door from 32 into 28. Presumably each of the bodies interred in the
three inner chambers had been dragged through this same door. The
Room 32 burial, therefore, must have been last of the series, for it
was left 6 inches above sill level; a number of grave offerings, including
two Mesa Verde mugs, a typical San Juan kiva jar, and a bowl
(ibid., p. 124, figs. 47a, c, 48b; p. 132, fig. 49) were pushed in after
and the door was sealed. Since our stratigraphic tests prove that
Mesa Verde pottery reached Pueblo Bonito quite late, it is obvious
the Old Bonitians remained long in occupancy of their section of the
village. They remained there long enough to augment their own
characteristic tableware with vessels produced at various times by
the Late Bonitians: long enough to welcome, during the final years
of Pueblo Bonito, a few immigrant families from the Mesa Verde
country.

However, the door to Room 32 must have been sealed before
Room 28B was rebuilt with fourth-type masonry, since debris of reconstruction
dumped in at that time not only covered the pottery
piled on the floor of 28 but banked up against the north wall. Had
the door then been open, this waste would have flowed through and
into 32.

But even though the western part of Room 28 was isolated by a
pile of debris rising ceiling high, a corridor at the east end remained
open and in use. Witness, in the northeast corner, an assemblage of
33 pieces of pottery and two or three coiled baskets at sill level of the
open door to Room 51a but under "a heap of sand 3 feet high and 3½
feet in width" (ibid., pp. 117-119). Sand so compressed suggests a

wall paralleling the partition, but one sees no trace of it in note or
photograph.

Open doors connected Rooms 28 and 51a, 51a and 39b, 39b and
37, 37 and 4. But the only means of access to the series, other than the
ceiling hatchway in 39b, was my assumed corridor at the east end of
Room 28 and a door cut through the south wall of the latter directly
opposite the entrance to 51a. Pepper does not mention this south
door, but it may be seen behind the shovel handle in the lower left
corner of his print 103 (herein pl. 6, lower) and in the same relative
position on print 104 (herein pl. 6, upper), beneath a rubbish-filled
door. This latter is the westernmost of the two blocked, T-shaped
doors in the south wall of 28B. By a flight of stone steps this south
door gave access to the terrace overlooking Kivas Q and R; its exit,
at floor level of Room 28B, is Pepper's "bin" in nonexistent Room 40.

That the entire east end of 28 remained open for a long while after
the pile of constructional waste was dumped in from Room 55 is
further indicated by the quantity of blown sand that had gradually
accumulated in and below the stepped doorway in the southeast corner.
Pepper's print No. 115 (herein pl. 7, upper) shows the broken west
jamb of that doorway and the imprint of a decayed post directly
above a pitcher and a cylindrical vase. This latter stands on approximately
8 inches of stratified sand, the strata slanting down to the right
toward the little 4-handled bowl, No. 145. Pepper mentions (ibid.,
p. 118) "a cache of stone jar covers" between the bowl and the other
two pieces; from his unpublished print No. 105 I judge the covers
to be on the same level as the store of 136 vessels and the little bowl
to be perhaps a couple of inches higher.[6]

Thus, from Pepper's data I conclude that Room 28, a one-time
Old Bonitian house, became a storeroom when the Late Bonitians
erected one of their dwellings above it. This Late Bonitian dwelling,
Room 28B, was occupied throughout the period of maximum expansion
and architectural change elsewhere in the village. Sometime
during this period, and most likely during the second or third quarter
of the eleventh century, 136 earthenware vessels, apparently all of
Late Bonitian manufacture, were piled on 20 square feet in the middle
of Room 28. Whether they were placed there by the Late Bonitian
occupants of 28B or by Old Bonitian owners of adjacent structures
is a question I cannot answer. Neither can I guess the motive for

the assemblage or why the vessels were stacked in five layers instead
of being arranged in rows against the wall. They were piled on an
indefinite surface formed by sand carried in to conceal constructional
debris covering the original floor. When fire later gutted Rooms 28B,
55, and 57, the pottery stored below, undamaged by the conflagration,
was abandoned where it lay. A sacrificial offering of shell beads was
scattered over the pile, and then debris of reconstruction was dumped
in upon it. The burned dwellings were rebuilt, in 1083 or later, and
life went on as before. Reoccupancy of these second-story rooms
and those adjoining is established by Pepper's finds in them, finds
that include cylindrical vases and other varieties of Late Bonitian
pottery.

Just as windblown sand had found a way into Room 28, so, too,
sand had collected in other ground-floor rooms throughout the pueblo.
In the eastern section, for example, we repeatedly noted 1 to 18 inches
of clean sand on the floors of Late Bonitian houses with fallen
masonry on top. This fact suggests that the rooms had stood empty
for a time prior to collapse of their upper walls. Contrary evidence
comes from Old Bonitian dwellings.

In Old Bonitian houses sand gathered while the rooms were still
inhabited; blown sand was frequently overlain by occupational debris.
Sand had collected in Room 325 to an average depth of 16 inches
before nearby residents began to use the place as a convenient dump
for floor sweepings and kitchen refuse. Room 323, next on the north,
became a dumping place also, and so too did 328. This latter, a
smallish structure built in front of 325, was filled almost ceiling high
with blown sand and household rubbish. Some of these rooms remained
open and accessible for a time, but the sand deepening in
them year after year eventually invited burials when circumstances
barred access to the accustomed places of interment.

It was probably compelling necessity rather than family preference
that first dictated use of storeroom 320 for burial purposes. The
room was free of blown sand at the time, for most of the skeletons
we found there lay directly upon the flagstones. Altogether, 68 individuals
were buried in the four adjoining rooms, 320, 326, 329, and
330. These four are situated at the extreme southwestern end of
the old, original settlement; solid walls separate them from Late
Bonitian houses abutting on the west and south. Of the 24 bodies in
Room 329, two rested upon the floor and the others in an overlying
14 inches of sand mixed with debris of occupation. Old Bonitian
graves were shallow, hastily dug, and hastily refilled.

These several factors—Late Bonitian houses stripped of their

furnishings and vacated; Old Bonitian families crowded together in
their corner of the village; abandoned utensils and ceremonial equipment;
eight Old Bonitian rooms transformed into sepulchers for a
hundred dead that could not be buried outside the walled town—
appear ample reason for believing that the population of Pueblo Bonito
was first halved by migration of Late Bonitian clans and then further
reduced through piecemeal separations prompted by impoverished
farmlands or enemy attacks or both.

That the inhabitants of Pueblo Bonito were plagued by marauding
bands over a long period is proved by the successive measures they
took to strengthen their defenses. The original settlement had no
door in its convex, or cliffward, wall. When the Late Bonitians built
an abutting tier against that wall they provided each room, even those
in the second and third stories, with external doorways. But these
were soon closed, and permanently. In each subsequent major building
program the Late Bonitians deliberately strove to increase the
impregnability of the pueblo. They never again placed a door in the
outer, rear wall; eventually they closed, or partially closed, all ventilators
in that wall and they barred the only gateway to the village.

The lone town gate, that at the southeast corner of the West Court,
was provided when the Late Bonitians were pressing their second
expansion program. Shortly thereafter they built a transverse wall
across the passage but left an ordinary door through the middle.
When this small opening was subsequently blocked with masonry,
Pueblo Bonito was as unassailable as its occupants could make it.
From that time forward there was no gate, no open door, anywhere
in the outside wall of the town. From that day every man going out
to work in his field, every woman seeking water or fuel, went and
returned by ladders that led up to and across the rooftops of 1-story
houses enclosing the two courts on the south.

CULTURAL RELATIONSHIPS

Now who were these people—the Old Bonitians and the Late
Bonitians? Where did they come from, and where did they go? Our
data point to certain possibilities but without conviction. The Old
Bonitians may have descended from earlier Chaco Canyon settlers,
but it is more likely they were immigrants from beyond the San Juan
River. They were the founders of Pueblo Bonito as we now know it,
although the same site had been previously occupied by Pueblo I
families. We discovered the slab-lined floor of a typical Pueblo I
pit house out in front of Old Bonito and under 12 feet of Old Bonitian
rubbish, and other pit houses probably lie at the same deep level.

Archeologists have learned that Pueblo I pit houses usually were
succeeded by above-ground structures having jacal, or post-and-mud,
walls. Although this type of construction is present in Old Bonito it
occurs infrequently. Hence I find it easier to believe the Old Bonitians
had moved in from the north as a body and employed their
newly acquired knowledge of masonry in constructing their Chaco
Canyon home.

Old Bonito, separated from later accretions, consists of a double
row of rectangular rooms, grouped crescentically and facing southeast
(fig. 2). Close within the crescent and below its foundations
were several circular, ceremonial chambers or kivas. We exposed
sections of three but did not venture more for fear of endangering the
buildings that had supplanted them. The whole assemblage—an arc
of dwellings with adjoining storerooms at the rear; sunken, ceremonial
rooms in front, and the village dump beyond—parallels Late
Basket Maker and Early Pueblo settlements north of the Rio
San Juan.

Roberts (1930), Martin (1938, 1939), Morris (1939), and Brew
(1946) have reported upon a number of these B.M. III and P. I
villages. They have shown that living quarters evolved from deep,
earth-walled pits to dwellings having floors only 6 to 18 inches below
the surface and upper walls of mud supported by posts; thereafter,
to rectangular rooms joined end to end and curving about the north
or west side of a depression. Some of these later above-ground structures
were provided with fireplaces; each was accompanied by one
or two storerooms in a second tier immediately behind the first—
precisely the arrangement we have already noted in Old Bonito.
Sandstone slabs on end as a sort of baseboard and rocks used as
fillers in post-and-mud walls are features repeatedly noted in P. I
rectangular dwellings and, as one might expect, they are to be seen
here and there in Old Bonito.

These and other outmoded constructional practices will be considered
at greater length in our study of the architecture of Pueblo
Bonito. For the present I wish merely to record my belief that such
survivals, especially the traditional grouping of dwellings, storerooms,
kivas, and trash piles, all point to southwestern Colorado as the most
likely place of origin for the culture that brought Old Bonito into
being. It is there, also, north of the San Juan, that one finds the
prototype of the "great kiva" in its earliest recognizable manifestation,
and the great kiva is undeniably one of the distinguishing elements
in what has come to be called "The Chaco culture." From southwestern
Colorado southward through Aztec and Chaco Canyon to the

Zuñi Mountains, the obvious importance of the great kiva in the
religious life of the community increases directly with distance.

Table and kitchen ware may be as informative as architecture, or
more so. Part of the earthenware we recovered at Pueblo Bonito had
been imported, but the bulk of it was produced locally and by the
Old Bonitians. The same shapes and ornamentation are represented
by fragments from the Old Bonitian dump under the West Court.
We named this preponderant ware "Transitional" because in 1925,
at the time our sherd analysis was made, it seemed to us a sort of
transition from what we would now call Pueblo I to Pueblo II pottery.

Every archeologist acquainted with the San Juan country is familiar
with our Transitional ware although perhaps under another name.
It is a widely distributed variety, rock- or sherd-tempered, grayish
white in color, slipped, polished, and ornamented with black mineral
paint.

The dominant pottery at Lowry Ruin, northwest of the Mesa
Verde, is called "Mancos black-on-white" by Martin (1936, p. 94).
It is to him evidence of a northward flow of Chaco culture from "the
area between Gallup and Shiprock" (ibid., p. 111). Martin's description
and illustrations show that some of his Mancos black-on-white is
indistinguishable from Old Bonito "Transitional." Brew (1946) illustrates
Mancos black-on-white designs from P. II sites on Alkali
Ridge, southeastern Utah, and Morris (1939) finds the same decorative
elements on P. II pottery from the La Plata district, southwestern
Colorado. While bowl rims were rarely, if ever, blackened at
Alkali Ridge P. II sites or at Lowry Ruin, Morris finds approximately
half of those from La Plata P. II sites so treated. At Old
Bonito the black rim line is a constant feature.

Typical Old Bonitian designs are to be seen on vessels and sherds
from Chaco Canyon small-house sites identified as P. II by University
of New Mexico archeologists (Brand et al., 1937; Dutton, 1938;
Kluckhohn et al., 1939), but other fragments from the same ruins I
should call P. I or P. III. During the 1925 season we made a partial
survey of small-house remains in the Chaco district and are confident
some of them were built before, some after, Pueblo Bonito.

Fragments of two charred poles from a Pueblo I pit house that we
examined in 1922 were subsequently dated A.D. 777 and 777±10
(Douglass, 1935, p. 51). Gladwin (1945, p. 43) lists several other
P. I structures the tree-ring dates of which range from 785 to 867.
He includes Morris's Site 33, in southwestern Colorado, with its great
kiva dated A.D. 831±. Pottery, rather than architecture, bridges the
half century between our Chaco pit house and Site 33.

Morris (1939, p. 85) places the principal occupancy of Site 33 in
Pueblo I times but recognizes the possibility of initial settlement
during the preceding period. Buildings I, II, and III were aggregations
of post-and-mud rooms arranged crescentically with dwellings
in front, storerooms at the rear. Roberts (1930, 1939), Martin
(1939), and Brew (1946) describe similar structures, similarly
grouped. The arrangement, but not the construction, is what we have
noted in the old, original part of Pueblo Bonito.

The builders of Old Bonito had advanced beyond the post-and-mud
stage of P. I civilization. They built almost exclusively with masonry.
Their dwellings were rectangular, standing end to end in a wide
crescent, storerooms behind. Their kivas were deep, with flaring
walls, an encircling bench, and low pilasters. From the architectural
point of view, we can only recognize the Old Bonitians as a P. II
people.

The stonework of Old Bonito is one of its distinctive features.
There is nothing like it elsewhere in the Chaco country, so far as I
could ascertain, except in a number of ground-floor rooms at Peñasco
Blanco. One must go north of the San Juan to find its counterpart.

Morris's (1939, p. 34) description of Pueblo II masonry on the
La Plata, wherein the individual blocks of stone were reduced to size
by "spalling back the edges much as a flint blade would be chipped
to shape," accurately mirrors Old Bonitian stonework. If anything
is lacking it is the external mosaic of sandstone chips employed at
Old Bonito as protection against wind and rain. Here, too, the outside
walls customarily sloped to a floor-level thickness twice that at
ceiling height—a constructional practice that possibly reflects the
batter of P. I house walls. Thus Old Bonitian architecture seems to
be a blend of La Plata P. I and P. II, with certain features retained
even from B.M. III times.

Late Bonitian masonry likewise appears to be of northern inspiration.
It is dominant in both quality and quantity and completely
overshadows that of the Old Bonitians. It includes three successive
varieties, each characterized by a core of mud and broken rock faced
with carefully chosen and prepared building stones. Late Bonitian
dwellings are noteworthy not only for the quality of their masonry
but also for an almost measured regularity, neatly squared corners,
and ceiling timbers selected with discrimination, cut, and peeled while
green. The Late Bonitians unhesitatingly razed living rooms to provide
space for kivas within the house mass.

All these features are to be seen in ruins of southeastern Utah and
southwestern Colorado. Even though allowance be made for the

superior workability of Chaco Canyon sandstone, a Chaco-like quality
is apparent at many sites throughout that area. This assertion is based
partly upon personal recollections gained during an apprenticeship
there in 1907 and 1908 and, in larger measure, upon the more seasoned
opinions of other investigators.

Jeancon (1922, p. 31) noted resemblances to Chaco masonry and
room arrangement while excavating a large pueblo on the Piedra
Parada, or Chimney Rock Mesa, near Pagosa Springs, Colo., in 1921.
A year later Roberts (1922) not only confirmed Jeacon's observation
but also remarked a striking similarity between Chimney Rock pottery
and that from Chaco ruins. He added: "The Piedra Parada ware
appears to be of an earlier development, however," the first recorded
suggestion, so far as the present writer knows, that the beginnings
of Chaco culture might lie north of the San Juan. Kidder (1924,
p. 68) likewise remarked the apparent relationship between pottery
from certain ruins north of the San Juan and that from small-house
sites in Chaco Canyon.

At Lowry Ruin, where he obtained tree-ring dates between A.D.
1086 and 1106, Martin (1936, p. 204) recognized both Chaco masonry
and Chaco pottery. Building I, at Site 39 on the La Plata, is described
by Morris (1939, p. 53) as a compact, Chaco-type structure
erected upon the remains of a P. II house. Among debris of occupation
in Building I, Morris noted pottery fragments comparable to
Chaco-like sherds he had recovered from lower levels in the West
Pueblo at Aztec. Other examples could be cited but these few will
serve to indicate the existence of a strong cultural bond between some
of the Early Pueblo III communities north of the San Juan and their
contemporaries to the south. Another tie is the "great kiva."

As illustrated at Aztec Ruin, Pueblo Bonito, Chettro Kettle, Casa
Rinconada, and elsewhere, the great kiva is an important diagnostic
of Chaco culture at its height. Its beginnings, however, lie in the
humble surroundings of B.M. III and P. I villages whose inhabitants
dwelt in pits or, at best, in post-and-adobe surface structures. The
two at Martin's Site 1 in the Ackmen-Lowry area, southwestern
Colorado (Martin, 1939), that at Morris's P. I Site 33 on the La
Plata (Morris, 1939), and the one at Roberts's B.M. III village,
Shabik'eshchee, in Chaco Canyon (Roberts, 1929), are indubitably
precursors of the P. III examples mentioned above. Although that
at Shabik'eshchee lacks the wall and bench masonry of Martin's two,
it is so similar in other respects there can be no question that it
served a like purpose. The great kiva so conspicuous at Pueblo
Bonito was of late construction, since we found Mesa Verde and
Little Colorado River potsherds beneath its floor.

Thus the great kiva, both early and late, and its associated domestic
architecture and ceramics, seem to me to be products of
Anasazi cultures evolved among the canyons and mesas along the
lower Utah-Colorado border and carried thence south and east by
migrant groups. In their search for more fertile fields, or greater
security, some of these groups obviously traveled farther than others;
some bypassed Chaco Canyon altogether. The evidence before us
does not suggest a common point of departure for all these migrant
peoples or simultaneous emigration. Pueblo I-III remains, differing
in no appreciable degree from their kind in Chaco Canyon, are to
be seen many miles to the south.

In the autumn of 1921 Pete Havens and I had visited a number
of lesser ruins in the vicinity of Gallup, source of many fine examples
of Chaco-like pottery in local collections. Both early and late vessels
were represented. We also observed Chaco-like masonry at several
sites, including three in a nameless canyon extending southeast from
Manuelito. Here, occupying a south promontory, was a conspicuous
ruin with two rows of second-story loopholes commanding the landward
approach. Near another late P. III ruin, similarly situated, we
found a great kiva noteworthy both for its size and the quality of its
stonework. Although we never returned for a second, unhurried
examination, it is still my impression those ruins evidence a late,
perhaps even a post-Bonito, shift of clans from the Chaco country.
On the trash pile of another ruin a few miles farther south and east
I gathered an assortment of potsherds that includes both San Juan
and Tularosa black-on-white, Little Colorado polychrome, and ancestral
Zuñi (U.S.N.M. No. 317192).[7]

It was in this same general area, between the Rio Puerco of the
West and headwaters of the Zuñi River, that Roberts carried to completion
three brilliant studies in sequential Pueblo history. Through
architecture and ceramics he traced the degree of civilization represented
at Kiatuthlanna (1931), at the Village of the Great Kivas
(1932), and in the Whitewater district (1939, 1940) back to earlier
stages of development in the Chaco and beyond. His conclusions are
thus diametrically opposed to those of Gladwin (1945) and Martin
(1936, 1939), who see the Chaco culture spreading in the opposite
direction, from south to north.

Beginning with what he calls "the White Mound Phase," approximately
A.D. 750 to 800, Gladwin (1945) pursues Chaco-like elements
through his Kiatuthlanna, Red Mesa, Wingate, and Hosta Butte

Phases to Chaco Canyon itself. He describes the Hosta Butte Phase
as a period of small P. III settlements, each of from 20 to 30 rooms,
constructed and occupied between A.D. 1010 and 1080. The "Bonito
Phase" followed. He groups in the Hosta Butte Phase half a hundred
small-house sites along the south side of Chaco Canyon, several of
which we identified in 1925, on the basis of surface sherd collections,
as either earlier than Pueblo Bonito, or later. Black-on-white vessels
classed as Red Mesa and Wingate have their counterparts in our
Transitional ware. But more of these controversial subjects, pottery
and architecture, in the several reports to follow!

Gladwin believes the Chaco culture died out in Chaco Canyon. He
knows of no Classic Chaco site later than 1130, which is our latest
Pueblo Bonito date, and neither do I. Apparently the unity of purpose
that built the Chaco towns and perfected the way of life practiced
therein was not transferable. It did not take root with equal vigor
elsewhere. But the evidence available at this writing suggests to me
a dissociation and dispersal rather than stagnation and decay. Our
data indicate that the two peoples who dwelt in Pueblo Bonito, having
surpassed their contemporaries in communal achievement, had
abruptly terminated their compact and separated. The Old Bonitians
were content to remain in their ancestral home but the Late Bonitians
moved on, presumably seeking fields where erosion was not a problem.

Chaco-like qualities in ruins north of the San Juan suggest to me
a common heritage rather than influence from Chaco Canyon. Toward
the south, however, the opposite is true. A Chaco influence
that predominated from Pueblo I to Pueblo III times is undeniable
at the scene of Roberts's Whitewater study; late contacts from the
same source are evident also at his Village of the Great Kivas
(Roberts, 1932). Reports have it that there is a small Classic Chaco
ruin on the Navaho reservation about 7 miles west of San Mateo and
others farther north, along the Continental Divide.

Constructional features in the two circular pre-Zuñi kivas that
Hodge (1923, p. 34) excavated near Hawikuh are unquestionably of
late Chaco origin. Superior masonry underlying Ketchipauan, one
of Coronado's Seven Cities of Cibola, is thought to represent the same
period as the two kivas. The older portion of Zuñi has always
seemed to me, in some indefinable way, a reflection of Pueblo Bonito,
and if I were to seek the lost trail of the Late Bonitians I should turn
first of all to the Zuñi Mountains and their surroundings.

Our seven summers of field work in Chaco Canyon left many questions
unanswered and many riddles unsolved. If descendants of the
Late Bonitians survive in present-day pueblos, the fact has not been

made known. We found no Pueblo myths that lead positively and
exclusively to Chaco Canyon. Roberts (1931, p. 8) relates a Zuñi
myth in which the Winter People, in their search for The Middle,
traveled north to Chaco Canyon and Aztec, thence east to the Chama
River, down the Rio Grande, and finally reached their goal in Zuñi
Valley—a myth at variance with archeological fact. So-called traditions
of the Navaho that purport to prove contact with the Bonitians
are, I am almost convinced, chiefly tales told by old men around winter
fires. I heard several such, no two alike, but hesitate to denounce
them all as without foundation. Whenever I am tempted to do so I
recall the fragments of pointed-bottom cook pots we found in Late
Bonitian rubbish—pots that, in all probability, were made in the
Gallina country, ancestral home of the Navaho.

Analysis of our data shows that Pueblo Bonito is the product of
two distinct peoples. These I have called the "Old Bonitians" and
the "Late Bonitians" because the names by which they knew each
other have been lost. The Old Bonitians were the real founders of
the community; the Late Bonitians, eleventh-century immigrants.
The two peoples were co-occupants for a hundred years or more, and
yet the houses they built and lived in, the tools they made and used,
differ so much that physical, linguistic, and mental differences between
the two may be presumed. The Late Bonitians were aggressive;
they usurped leadership of the village immediately upon arrival. In
contrast, the Old Bonitians were ultraconservative; they clung tenaciously
to their old ways, their old habits and customs. The Late
Bonitians created the Classic Chaco culture, most advanced in all the
Southwest. The Old Bonitians, dwelling next door, lagged a century
behind. They were intellectually dormant. They were a Pueblo II
people living in Pueblo III times!

PARTIAL LIST OF TRAIT COMPARISONS
(Based solely on findings of the National Geographic Society)

           

Item	Old Bonitian	Late Bonitian
Masonry	Spalled slabs, wall width	Veneered rubble
Ceilings	Cottonwood and pinyon beams, chico brush and adobe	Pine beams and poles, willows or juniper shakes, cedarbark and adobe
Doors	Somewhat oval; rounded jambs and corners; high sill	Rectangular; secondary jambs and lintels frequent; low sill
T-shaped doors	2	30
Clothes racks	None	7

Plate 6

Upper: Cylindrical vases and pitchers piled in middle of Room 28 and, above them, west wall
of Room 28B. In foreground, rounded top of partition between Rooms 28 and 28a. At lower left,
door with steps to court level; at right, open door to Room 51a.

Lower: Debris of reconstruction under Room 55 buried the pottery piled in Room 28. At
right, above left edge of post, the right jamb of blocked door to Room 32.

(Hyde Expedition photographs by George H. Pepper, courtesy of B. T. B. Hyde.)

Plate 7

Upper: Late Bonitian vessels on drifted sand, southeast corner of Room 28. (Hyde Expedition
photograph by George H. Pepper, courtesy of American Museum of Natural History.)

Lower: With its blocking removed, the door connecting Rooms 28 and 32 reveals the later
north wall of Room 28 (foreground) built against the original Old Bonitian masonry; beyond,
two Mesa Verde mugs in Room 32. (Hyde Expedition photograph by George H. Pepper,
courtesy of B. T. B. Hyde.)

Plate 8

Upper: A Zuñi looks through the south door of Room 299B, whose secondary jambs and
lintel once supported a sandstone door slab. (Photograph by Neil M. Judd, 1923.)

Lower: An elevated doorway in the Hopi pueblo of Mishongnovi. (Photograph by O. C.
Havens, 1924.)

Plate 9.—A, Turquoise necklace and ear bobs in situ, Room 320. (Photograph by O. C.
Havens, 1924.) B, Remains of a presumed cradle. (Photograph by Neil M. Judd, 1921.)
C, A "ring-bottomed" vessel from Room 249. (Photograph by B. Anthony Stewart.)

PARTIAL LIST OF TRAIT COMPARISONS—concluded

                                                                             

Item	Old Bonitian	Late Bonitian
Pole shelves	4	12
Wall pegs	2	16
Wall pockets or cupboards	12	103
Fixed work slabs	None	6
Storage pits and bins	13	20
Beads: olivella	Spire removed	One or both ends removed
"saucer-shaped"	None	Few
stone	About 90 percent	About 10 percent
figure-8	Few	About 90 percent
Chama, etc.	Few	Common
Tubular bone "beads"	6	37
Bone "pins"	None	32
Copper bells and fragments	2	17
Red claystone	10 lots	31 lots
Galena	3 lots	4 lots
Mica	None	7 lots
Hematite	4 lots	5 lots
Selenite and calcite	5 lots	30 lots
Azurite and malachite	13 lots	18 lots
Metates, troughed with open end	Thin, tabular, wide border; no metate bin	Thick, massive, rarely shaped; single or multiple bin
Sandstone saws	1	6
Deer humeri scrapers	5	15
Deer phalanx scrapers	1 (?)	12
Bone chisels	None	6
Cylindrical baskets	16	3
Tumplines	Twisted or braided yucca fiber, oval end loops	Woven band, triangular eyelets
Pottery: cook pots	Plain body, banded or coiled neck, direct rim; later, "exuberant" neck decoration	Over-all corrugated coil, flaring rim; geometric pinched decoration frequent
bowls	Hemispherical; direct, tapering rim; own designs	Same as Old Bonitian but own designs; later, some rim flattening
pitchers	Full body, rounded bottom, sloping shoulders; over-all or 2-zone decoration	Small body, often concave base, tall cylindrical neck; 2-zone decoration
ladles	Half-gourd shape	Bowl-and-handle
storage jars	Tall, egg-shaped; high shoulders with occasional bulge; low neck	Squat to globular; higher neck; inset or down-raking handles
cylindrical vases	16, all with L.B. decoration in 4 burial rooms	1
Arrowheads: A type	25 percent	75 percent
B type	76 percent	24 percent
Earthenware pipes and fragments	1	9
Elliptical basket trays	4	None
Bifurcated baskets and fragments	5 in 2 burial rooms	None
Earthenware models of bifurcated baskets	2	3