University of Virginia Library

AGRICULTURAL TOOLS

Two simple wooden implements, the dibble and the digging stick,
have met the needs of Pueblo men ever since they first became
farmers. The one was used in planting; the other, in clearing land,
in crop cultivation, and in loosening earth for diversion dams. Examples
of both are still used in Hopi, Zuñi, and Navaho fields. They
differ in no essential from those we unearthed at Pueblo Bonito or
those previously recovered from Basket Maker caves and burial places.
Although the heavy Spanish-type iron hoe has largely replaced the old
wooden cultivator, no satisfactory substitute has yet been found for
the dibble.

Planting sticks, or dibbles, have narrow, chisel-like blades. Our lone
Bonitian specimen (pl. 71, fig. j) measures 32⅛ inches with a few more
missing from the broken upper end. It is made from an oak sapling
and the lower 6 inches are beveled from opposite sides to form the
blade, five-eighths inch wide.

With such a simple tool as this the Pueblos have always planted
their maize, beans, and pumpkins. To be sure, the planting sticks we
saw in Hopi hands were a bit wider and sturdier, but the manner of
their use has been handed down from the long ago. Grasping his stick
at the middle, the planter chops out a narrow hole 10 to 15 inches
deep, drops in a dozen or more kernels of corn, refills the hole, and
proceeds to the next. He may work kneeling on one or both knees,
chopping and drawing toward him with a rotary motion of the arms
and body. He digs down to sand of a satisfactory moisture content
and is careful to pack damp sand in upon his seeds, leaving the drier
for the top fill. Holes are dug 6 or 8 feet apart, alternating with
plantings in the previous row. Unhurried workers calmly step the
distance, but one young man we saw, undoubtedly with an eye to his
audience, sprang from a one-knee crouch two long paces to light in
the same position and with his dibble upraised for the first stroke.

Digging sticks, so-called, are an inch or two wider and somewhat
longer than planting sticks. The blade is an important feature. Pueblo
digging sticks are generally straighter than those of Basket Maker
origin and vary in length from 2 feet to over 6.

Digging sticks are primitive cultivators, a combination hoe and

shovel. With them bushes were uprooted, soil loosened, fields weeded.
They were used in building dams and embankments; in guiding floodwater
onto garden plots. Some are square-ended with a chisel-like bit;
others have a more or less knifelike blade, long or short, thinned along
its curved edge and tip. In either case the position of the cutting edge
proves these implements were thrust forward and away from the
worker as he hacked at massed roots or intrusive vegetation.

Eight of our ten Bonitian digging sticks and fragments are shown
on plate 71. Only one, c, is really complete.[1] Specimens i and k, from
which the tips were broken while still in use, are those elsewhere
mentioned as found at the feet of Skeleton 8, a female, in Old Bonitian
Room 326 (see pl. 94, left). Specimens d and g came from the adjoining
structure, abandoned Room 325, the rubbish in which was dominantly
Late Bonitian. The knob on d naturally prompts the question:
Was this purely decorative feature a characteristic distinguishing Late
Bonitian from Old Bonitian digging sticks? If so, then here may be
another cultural difference between the two groups comprising the
local population, for available data from other areas suggest that the
digging-stick knob was a Pueblo III innovation. Two other end knobs,
one of which had been detached with a flint knife, were recovered
from Late Bonitian rubbish in Rooms 226 and 327 (U.S.N.M. Nos.
335221, 335226).

Fragment e may not belong in this series, since its knob is discoidal
rather than globular and its shaft is only half an inch in diameter at
the broken end. It is so heavy I suspect it is ironwood, an Upper
Sonoran shrub native to the mountains of northwestern New Mexico.
Its surface, once glossily polished, is now checked like an alligatorbark
juniper. Specimen h, partially consumed in the fire that destroyed
Room 298, has been tentatively identified as mountain mahogany
(Cercocarpus sp.), a companion of ironwood (Forestiera neomexicana).
Specimens d, f, g, i, and k are oak (Quercus sp.), and c
appears to be also.

It will be noted that c, i, and k are equipped with square-ended
blades that seem ill-advisedly long. For example, the exposed face of
c has been flattened throughout the lower 25 inches although on the
opposite side only the last 9 were altered, being beveled toward the
cutting end. Specimen i, with a total length of 36⅝ inches, has a blade
22 inches long reduced from both sides to a midway thickness of half
an inch and to half that at a point 2 inches from the end. The cutting

edge is 1¾ inches wide. With so thin and slender a blade, even an oak
implement would have had its limitations. It could have been used for
little more than weeding.

The three fragments with rounded ends (f, g, h) were likewise
thinned from front and back though not to the same extent as those
described above. They may, or may not, represent a separate form.
They are sharpened at the end only and not along one edge. That
illustrated as g saw other service after discard as a digging stick, for
its blade is somewhat splintered and bent backward at the tip as
though from levering rocks. This one came from Late Bonitian rubbish
in Room 325; the other two, from Old Bonitian storerooms.

Hough (1919, p. 236) illustrates a "wooden hand trowel" with
which the Hopi tend their plants. By implication it is a type implement
and not a reworked fragment. The example figured, however, is
clearly no more than a shortened model of the old, knife-edged variety
of digging stick—one shortened for convenient use by a man working
on his knees. We often overlook the fact that among the Hopi, as
among other peoples, there are individuals clever enough to improvise
tools or to copy those seen elsewhere. Take, for example, the footpowered
Zuñi cornplanter, a scythelike implement of hard wood, and
the hoe fashioned from the shoulder blade of an elk as illustrated by
Cushing (1920, pl. 3, c, f, g). All three are quite foreign to the preSpanish
Southwest.

The shoulder-blade hoe is a Plains Indian type, but Cushing's specimen
could have been made by a Zuñi using the most suitable local
substitute for a buffalo scapula. A comparable Anasazi tool, invented
by the Basket Makers, had a flattened section of mountain-sheep horn
bound to the end of a wooden shaft as an extension of it. The result
was a sort of scuffle hoe designed to be shoved, or thrust, by the
operator; it should have proved more serviceable than wooden cultivators
because horn takes a keener edge. The Early Pueblos adopted
this spadelike implement but soon substituted stone for the mountainsheep
horn.

Stone hoes are represented in our collection by two specimens only
(fig. 65). One, a fragment (a), is from a fine example that must
originally have been 9 or 10 inches long. The material is an indurated
fawn-colored and laminiferous shale—a rock much favored throughout
the middle San Juan drainage by the makers of this specialized
tool. Four nicks on the cutting edge were smoothed, and minute
striations, the result of attrition in working the soil, were partly erased
during the last resharpening operation.

Our second example (b), of calcareous shale, was exhumed from
the fill between floors in Room 347. It is triangular, 5 inches long by
1 inch wide at the apex and 2 inches at its retouched bit. The latter
has been irregularly spalled and chipped and reduced in width nearly
a third by unskilled use of a hammerstone. The cutting edge, like that

of its companion, lies at right angles to the longer dimension and thus
agrees with a majority of our wooden cultivators.

A Pueblo del Arroyo specimen (U.S.N.M. No. 334817), its blade
more to one side, was reworked at the upper end to provide a 2¼-inch
"handle." In this respect it is reminiscent of several examples among
the series of stone "skinning knives" that Powell and Stevenson
purchased at the Hopi villages and at Zuñi in the late '70s. All belong

to the type under consideration, but several have had the apical third
reshaped, narrowed, and even grooved to facilitate attachment.

According to the collectors, these ancient stone implements had
previously been gathered from old Pueblo ruins by the Indians. Most,
if not all, were being utilized at the time they were purchased; a few
still bear traces of a blue-black pigment that suggests some ceremonial
connection. Similar pieces are conspicuous on the altar of the Antelope
Society at the Walpi Snake Dance, as Fewkes (1909, p. 39) remarks
in noting those he unearthed at Spruce-tree House, Mesa Verde
National Park.

A discoloration left by the binding thong is still plain upon a specimen
Holmes found in 1875 in a bin of charred corn in a Mancos
Canyon cliff house (Holmes, 1878, p. 407, pl. 46, fig. 3). I have seen
others with like markings and one that preserved the outline of a
round-ended shaft, flattened to fit the slight convexity of the implement.
There is no doubt in my mind, therefore, that these stone
"skinning knives" or "tcamahias" are Pueblo II-Pueblo III substitutes
for the mountain-sheep-horn blades of Basket Maker shovel
hoes. They are peculiar to the San Juan culture area although occasional
examples are reported from outside it. Some clearly were
mounted; others, broader toward the apex, may have been used unhafted
as trowels or hand mattocks for grubbing about plants.

Since agriculture was the principal industry at Pueblo Bonito, the
insignificant number of stone hoes unearthed there is astonishing.
If, as explorations elsewhere suggest, such hoes were more numerous
during Pueblo II times, we are left wondering whether Pueblo III
farmers reverted, in part, to the ancestral-type wooden digging stick
or adopted new agricultural practices. One wonders, too, whether
some of the esoteric powers attributed to tcamahias by living Hopi
were beginning to take form as early as Pueblo III.

Hyde's table of important stone objects (Pepper, 1920, pp. 363-365)
lists five "celts" which I assume, lacking textual description, to be
implements of the type under discussion. Two sandstone blades,
shaped by percussion, are illustrated as hoes (ibid., p. 67).

Another Pueblo Bonito fragment (U.S.N.M. No. 335626) is mentioned
at this time, not because it is part of a proved agricultural tool
but because it is grooved longitudinally on both sides in the manner
of stone long used in working the soil. The material is yellowish
claystone with jasperlike qualities; the blade is unusually sharp and
only 1⅛ inches wide. Hoes of the type we have been considering are
broadest at the cutting edge, but the sides of our fragment slope outward
at angles that would give a butt-end width of 1⅞ inches if the

implement were 6 inches long. The fragment was found in Room 318,
adjoining Room 323 whose rubbish fill was dominantly Old Bonitian
in character.

The men of Pueblo Bonito were farmers. They drew their living
from the soil. They had a few simple wood and stone tools—all they
really needed. Their annual aim, as with present-day Pueblos, was
to harvest each fall a year's supply of maize and other plant products
and have a small surplus for storage against the uncertain future.
Farming was their livelihood but, like most farmers still, each welcomed
the diversion of a little hunting now and then.