University of Virginia Library

PUEBLO DEL ARROYO, CHACO CANYON,
NEW MEXICO

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

(With 55 Plates)

I. INTRODUCTION

"A few hundred yards further down the canyon," wrote Lt. James
H. Simpson in his journal (1850, p. 81), "we fell in with another
pueblo in ruins, called by the guide Pueblo del Arroyo."

Simpson was a topographical engineer attached to the command of
Col. John M. Washington on a military reconnaissance of the Navaho
country in the late summer of 1849. The troops left Santa Fe on
August 16 by way of Santo Domingo and Jemez and 10 days later
camped about a mile from Pueblo Pintado, a conspicuous ruin at the
head of Chaco Canyon.

The following day, August 27, camp was made about 2 miles west
of Pueblo Wejegi and within sight of that noble landmark, Fajada
Butte, or Mesa Fachada as Simpson recorded the name. Next morning
Colonel Washington led his troops out of the canyon at this point
and continued westward after giving Simpson permission to examine
other ruins reported to be even larger than Wejegi and Pintado. For
the day's adventure the lieutenant was accompanied by R. H. Kern,
the artist, a Mexican guide by name of Carravahal, and seven members
of the New Mexico militia. The ruins of Una Vida, Hungo
Pavie, Chettro Kettle, and Pueblo Bonito provided so much of interest
that the sun was already low on the western horizon when Lieutenant
Simpson and his companions came finally to Pueblo del Arroyo.
After only a cursory examination the party hurried on, hoping to
overtake the main command before dark.

The day before, while interrogating the expedition's several guides
about the origin of Pueblo Pintado, Simpson concluded that Carravahal
was better informed on the subject than either of the Indians.
From what was written of him I infer the Mexican was a talkative

individual and entirely uninhibited. He had ready names for 8 of
the 10 ruins visited, and 5 are Mexican names. Some may have been
inspirations of the moment, but others surely were familiar to Mexican
traders and militiamen previously drawn to Chaco Canyon by its
Navaho population. It was from a former soldier or merchant, no
doubt, that Josiah Gregg learned of these same ruins and ventured
a notation in which Pueblo Pintado is mistakenly called Pueblo
Bonito (Gregg, 1845, p. 284). Although Gregg's reference is the
older, Simpson's descriptions are based on first-hand knowledge. For
this reason I prefer to retain the names he recorded at the time.

Nowhere in his journal does Simpson mention an arroyo in Chaco
Canyon, but at least the beginnings of one were present on August 28,
1849. Otherwise Carravahal would not have been so quick in designating
the subject of this study "pueblo of the arroyo."

In our second and third reports (Bryan, 1954; Judd, 1954) data
are presented in support of the belief that what Carravahal saw was,
in fact, a succession of shallow pools, some few of which may have
been joined by caving of the bank between. Conditions tending toward
such an intermittent channel are pictured by our older Navaho neighbors,
reminiscing on the scenes of their boyhood. As these elders
describe it, Chaco Canyon was a green paradise as late as Simpson's
time. Perennial grasses, willows, and cottonwoods still flourished;
drinking water could be had anywhere with a little digging; occasional
pines grew in the rincons and on the mesas above. Within 28 years,
however, all this was to be changed and the valley transformed into
a wasteland. Within 28 years floodwaters were to carve a steepwalled
gully that lowered the water table beyond reach of surface
vegetation. Unwatered, the native ground cover would wither and
die, erosion would accelerate, and Chaco Canyon once again would
lose its major attraction as a place for human habitation.

When W. H. Jackson, noted photographer of the Hayden Surveys,
journeyed this way in the spring of 1877 he camped at the only water
in sight, a mud hole in the stream channel about 250 yards west of
Pueblo del Arroyo (Jackson, 1878, p. 446). A stone's throw southeast
of the pueblo he measured the depth of the channel as 16 feet and
remarked that this was about twice that of an older, inactive course
nearer the ruin (ibid., p. 443). This older course may well be the
arroyo Simpson saw 28 years earlier. In that case Jackson's "old
arroyo" is the one that gave our ruin its name, and the main channel
had been deepened 8 feet, and probably more, between 1849 and 1877.

The floodwaters that carved this "old arroyo" had also exposed

Fig. 1.—Map of northwestern New Mexico showing location of Pueblo del Arroyo.

a buried wall south of the ruin—a long, straight masonry wall not
visible on the surface. Below that wall "and extending out into the
main arroyo to a depth of 14 feet . . ., is an undulating stratum of
broken pottery, flint-clippings, and small bones firmly embedded in
a coarse gravelly deposit," the bottom of a prehistoric arroyo. Here
then, was a succession of three watercourses: one formed in the unknown
past, refilled and covered over, a second that presumably
began shortly before 1850, and a third and deeper course that had
developed out of the second and within a quarter century. The keeneyed
Jackson missed very little!

In 1924 Kirk Bryan, studying the geological history of Chaco
Canyon in connection with our Pueblo Bonito investigations, chanced
upon a new exposure of the prehistoric arroyo discovered by Jackson
and plotted its course up and down the valley a distance of approximately
5 miles. Potsherds collected on the bed of this buried channel
fixed its existence as more or less contemporary with the decline of
Pueblo Bonito. Indeed, as Bryan (1954, p. 47) points out, development
of that ancient arroyo was undoubtedly a primary reason for
abandonment of Pueblo Bonito, Pueblo del Arroyo, and other Chaco
Canyon villages in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.

Late in the winter of 1887-88 Victor Mindeleff visited Chaco Canyon
in connection with his study of Pueblo architecture, but his monograph
(Mindeleff, 1891) includes no reference to Pueblo del Arroyo.
Nevertheless, he took a number of photographs, and some of them we
are privileged to publish herein through the courtesy of the Bureau
of American Ethnology, Smithsonian Institution. Evidence of previous
digging by unknown persons, and holes broken through walls,
are to be seen in Mindeleff's photographs (pl. 15).

In 1920, the year of the National Geographic Society's reconnaissance
of Chaco Canyon, there stood near the southeast corner of
Pueblo del Arroyo an L-shaped building sometimes identified as "the
store" and, again, as "the hotel." It was built in 1897 or 1898 as
a boardinghouse for personnel of the Hyde Exploring (or Exploration)
Expeditions and later served as guest house. A smaller, rectangular
building occupying a comparable location at the northeast
corner of the ruin, and since removed, had been a bunkhouse for the
Expeditions' freighters and riders.

Organized in 1896 for exploration of Pueblo Bonito and other
prehistoric ruins, the Hyde Expeditions found themselves in the
Indian trading business two years later when they undertook to
supply their Navaho workmen with foodstuffs and clothing. The

trade flourished and by 1901 a dozen stores were in operation
throughout the area and the expeditions' wagons were "encountered
on every road in the Chaco region, hauling merchandise from the
railroad to the interior and returning laden with blankets woven by
the Navajos, wool and hides." (Holsinger, MS., p. 70.)

Headquarters of the Hyde Expeditions were in Chaco Canyon until
1900 or 1901 when they were transferred to Thoreau, on the Santa Fe
Railway. Richard Wetherill was field manager of the company, and
his residence still stands, a few feet from the southwest corner of
Pueblo Bonito. The large room adjoining the residence on the west
was his store or trading post. Wetherill was killed in 1910 at the
mouth of Rincon del Camino, a mile west of Pueblo Bonito, and
thereafter his Chaco Canyon holdings passed to a succession of
owners and lessees.

In 1920 and 1921 the old Wetherill homestead and buildings were
leased by Edward Sargent, of Chama, N. Mex., who grazed several
flocks of sheep in the Chaco country each winter.[1] His herders were
provisioned from a supply depot in charge of Ed Doonan, who lived
in the one-time "hotel." Mr. Doonan's predecessors had cleared and
roofed several rooms in the nearby ruin for storage and for other
purposes (pl. 3, upper). Gus Griffin maintained a small store here
during the mid-1920's.

Our investigations at Pueblo del Arroyo were begun in 1923 and
continued during the three following summers. Work started along
the outer south side (pl. 2, upper). We removed the blown sand and
earth and dumped the rocks not needed for reconstruction purposes
into the arroyo in hope of checking its further encroachment.

An entirely unexpected discovery during these initial activities was
a series of small, secondary rooms improvised between eight buttresses
built to brace the leaning south wall. These small rooms and
their fittings differ so markedly from those comprising the pueblo
proper I defer further consideration of them for a later chapter
wherein all extramural structures are discussed together.

These external accretions, and much within the village, do not
really belong in Chaco Canyon; they indicate, rather, the presence of
peoples from the north, from beyond the San Juan River. Pueblo del
Arroyo itself is too Chacoan to be considered of foreign inspiration
or construction but there can be no doubt that the cultural pattern of

its builders came to be dominated, if not supplanted, by that of immigrants
from the San Juan country. The same infiltration was apparent
also at Pueblo Bonito (Judd, 1954).

While our explorations at Pueblo Bonito were in progress we commonly
referred to one phase of these northern influences as "the
Chaco-San Juan" because, on pottery in particular, it appeared to be
an adaptation of San Juan techniques and designs to Chaco practices
in the manufacture of earthenware vessels. Although the initial blending
probably represented no more than appropriation of ideas carried
by traders traveling to or from the San Juan, whole families and
even groups of families migrated to Chaco Canyon later, sometime
during the eleventh century.

Northern influences are particularly evident at Pueblo del Arroyo.
The pottery we recovered there is in large measure characteristic of
that area in southeastern Utah and southwestern Colorado drained
by the McElmo and Mancos Valleys. The dominant wares at Pueblo
del Arroyo, therefore, if not imported from the north, were made
locally by potters who had learned their craft along the Mancos and
the McElmo. In a recent study that includes this very region, Deric
O'Bryan (1950, p. 103) dates the Mancos Mesa Phase at about
A.D. 900-1050 and the McElmo Phase at about 1050-1150.

These approximations, and especially the latter, agree closely with
our tree-ring data. Derived as they are from annual growth rings
of trees felled for construction purposes, tree-ring dates from a given
building provide an approximation of the age of that building. However,
such dates are not always to be taken at face value because timbers
were often salvaged from abandoned houses and reused. The
labor of felling a tree with stone axes and transporting its trunk by
manpower to the building site explains why old logs should have been
reclaimed whenever possible. Nevertheless, there must be significance
in the fact that the 31 datable timbers we recovered at Pueblo del
Arroyo were all cut between A.D. 1052 and 1103 (Douglass, 1935,
p. 51). Smiley (1951, p. 19) extends the bracket to 1117.

Ten timbers from the middle section of the village show a range
of from 1052 to 1090. Evidences of alteration and reconstruction are
more numerous here than elsewhere. Changes in Kiva E, it is interesting
to note, necessitated a new north wall in Room 46 but left one
of the original ceiling beams undisturbed. That beam, dated 1072, was
propped up, at the time the change was made, with another log cut
20 years earlier. In the south wing, where 17 beams gave cutting
dates between 1067+x and 1103, it is noteworthy that 11 were felled

during four years, 1100-1103. Five timbers from the unexcavated
north wing bear dates of 1065, 1075, 1101, 1101±2, and 1117. Our
31 tree-ring dates suggest, therefore, that Pueblo del Arroyo was built
when the Mancos-McElmo culture flourished north of the San Juan.
That carriers of this culture came to dwell in Pueblo del Arroyo is
proved both by the predominance of their characteristic pottery and
by the presence of an adjacent, uncompleted McElmo Tower. No
Chaco group could have made that pottery, and none would have
undertaken construction of a building so foreign to its established
architecture as a triple-walled tower.

In general the masonry of Pueblo del Arroyo corresponds with
Type III at Pueblo Bonito (Judd, 1927b, p. 562; 1954, p. 19). There
are, however, marked divergences here and there. Some walls appear
to have been built of second-hand materials; some exhibit more or
less banding with dressed blocks of friable sandstone while others
may include sections composed of selected laminate sandstone in
the manner of Bonitian Type IV. Although Pueblo Bonito architecture
is reflected in the construction of Pueblo del Arroyo the
reflection is blurred and imperfect. As a whole, Pueblo del Arroyo
masonry impresses one, to quote Ruppert, "as being the product of
many individuals each of whom built according to his personal preferences
but with left-over materials, the choice building stones having
been utilized elsewhere."

In ground plan Pueblo del Arroyo consists of a block of massed
rooms with eastward extensions at each end and the extensions connected
by a semicircular series of one-story structures enclosing a
court (fig. 2). The outer west wall of the pueblo is 268 feet long.
The block of rooms comprising the south wing measures 75 feet
north and south by 131 feet east and west, and portions of fourthstory
walls still stand. A corresponding wing on the north is a trifle
shorter but wider. The area occupied by the building and its court is
thus slightly more than 1⅛ acres.

While both wings were rectangular blocks of rooms standing three
or four stories high, the massed structures between the wings were
terraced down from the higher west side to a single story overlooking
the court. Ground-floor rooms, being dark and poorly ventilated, were
utilized primarily for storage; those in the upper stories, for residential
purposes. In the pages that follow, the letters B, C, and D will
indicate rooms in the second, third, and fourth stories, respectively.

We estimate 120 secular rooms on the ground floor of Pueblo del
Arroyo and these, together with 86 known second-story and 64 known

Fig. 2.—Ground plan of Pueblo del Arroyo. (From the original survey by Oscar B. Walsh.)

third-story rooms and 14 suggested by surviving fourth-story walls,
would give a total of 284 for the village as a whole. On the basis
of three rooms and five individuals per family, we estimate a maximum
population of 475.

Of those comprising the pueblo proper, we excavated 44 groundfloor
rooms and 7 kivas. Fourteen rooms, 11, 17, 18, 19, 22, 33, 38,
42, 45, 48, 49, 50, 52, and 53, were numbered but not excavated.
These and all unnumbered rooms were purposely left for the future.
Our final season, that of 1926, was devoted entirely to structures
beyond the west wall—structures to be considered in chapter IV. Our
descriptive text will not cover all excavated rooms, but available data
on those omitted are given at the end of this volume. Here, too, if
not in the text, we will identify rooms previously opened by unknown
persons.

In the village as originally constructed there was only one outside
door as far as I know, that in the west wall of Room 24, and this had
been sealed early. If a gateway once opened into the court from the
east, as Holsinger thought (MS., p. 51), it was not disclosed by our
corner-searching. Pueblo del Arroyo, therefore, was a walled town,
and the only conceivable reason for a walled town in Chaco Canyon
was fear of aggression. The same fears were felt at nearby Pueblo
Bonito where the town's defenses had been strengthened repeatedly
as the years passed. Recurrent enemy attacks and discontent caused
by a dwindling food supply are two understandable motives for the
decline and disruption of Pueblo del Arroyo.