 | The material culture of Pueblo Bonito |  |
WEAPONS
The sample of Zuñi weapons Coronado sent from
Hawikuh was not quite complete. He should have
added half a bushel of assorted rocks and cobblestones.
For rocks were one of the chief defensive
weapons of the Pueblos, as Coronado himself had ample reason to
know. Twice during the assault on Hawikuh he was floored by rocks
thrown from the housetops and was saved only by his steel helmet
and the prompt action of his army master (Winship, 1896, p. 557).
When a company of Spaniards under Vicente de Zaldívar stormed
the stairway to Acoma in January 1599, according to witness Pérez de
Villagrá (Espinosa, 1933, p. 236), the defenders "sent down a shower
of arrows and stones . . . a veritable deluge of stones, clubs, and
arrows." Some 250 years later the inhabitants of Mishongnovi turned
back a Navaho attack by identical means (Bourke, 1884, p. 310).
Wherever we find record of Pueblo hostilities during the Spanish
colonial period and later, only three weapons are mentioned: arrows,
rocks, and clubs. Arms could scarcely be simpler. Thus there is only
or variety, from those Coronado seized at Hawikuh. We
have already examined the remains of bows and arrows from Pueblo
Bonito; we know the local supply of sandstone spalls was unlimited.
Let us now turn to evidence of other weapons.
Clubs.—With a willow wrapped once around and extended to form
a short handle, a grooved cobble was effective either in offense or
defense. The lower three illustrated on plate 24, c, are igneous rocks,
varying in weight from 8 to 16 ounces. The lesser end of one has been
slightly modified by pecking, but otherwise it and the other two are
quite unaltered except for the encircling groove. Castañeda and other
chroniclers of the Conquest period testify that the Pueblo warrior,
armed with a cudgel, was an antagonist to be respected in close combat.
Wooden clubs have been found in pre-Spanish ruins throughout
the Pueblo area and no doubt a hafted ax, maul, or grooved cobble
proved an effective substitute upon occasion.
As mentioned elsewhere, the fragment shown as figure e, plate 71,
could be part of a club as logically as the handle of a planting stick.
Indeed, its slender, flexible shaft, its flattish head, and the fact that
it is of a fine-grained, dark, heavy wood rather than oak, all weigh in
favor of the first possibility.
Pepper (1920, pp. 161, 199) reports from Room 32 and the second
story of 39b, respectively, an elk-antler club and one of elk bone. The
former is 19 inches long with a hole for a thong drilled through the
smaller end. Most of such specimens probably were used without
embellishment but in the American Museum of Natural History,
exhibited as from Cave 30, Allen Canyon, Grand Gulch, Utah, is a
superb elk-antler club (H-13397) having a rounded butt, a long yucca
wrist cord, and a buckskin-covered handgrip.
Daggers (?).—The longer, straighter bone awls like figure d2, plate
33, are sometimes described as "daggers." They could have been so
used, of course, but nowhere do I find convincing evidence that the
Pueblos ever employed such an instrument. Daggers do not appear
on Spanish lists of Indian weapons. The Pueblos were close fighters
but not close enough for stabbing.
Spears (?).—The Coronado expedition in 1540 had opportunity to
become acquainted with every instrument of warfare known to the
Pueblos. Therefore, what the narrators of that expedition failed to
mention probably did not exist at the time. Castañeda includes neither
daggers nor spears in his enumeration of Pueblo arms.
Blades of the size illustrated on plate 28, whether notched or unnotched,
are popularly called "spearheads." Actually, they were knives.
is conceivable that the eastern Pueblos, trading and warring with those
tribes, gradually adopted the weapon. In Canyon de Chelly on September
9, 1849, Lieutenant Simpson (1850, p. 108) saw a hundred or
more Navaho warriors "armed with bows and lances." But a chipped
spearhead mounted on a shaft for thrusting has never, so far as I am
aware, been found in a Pueblo ruin. Thus it seems very likely that
the illustrations in Simpson and other midnineteenth-century publications
that represent Pueblo and Navaho men armed with lances reflect
a post-Conquest borrowing from the Spanish or from Plains tribes.
From these observations we once more infer that the Bonitians
differed very little, if at all, from historic Pueblo peoples. In their
fields and on the chase they used the same implements as the latter;
they shared the same environment; their physical and economic problems
were the same; their reactions to those problems and that environment
were unquestionably identical.
When the Bonitians took to the warpath, if they ever did, they
carried clubs, bows and arrows, and shields. In defense of their homes
they used arrows, thrown rocks, and clubs. We have no historical
record, no archeological evidence, of other Pueblo weapons. Late
Bonitian shields were probably 30-inch basketry disks like those from
Canyon del Muerto, Mesa Verde, and Aztec Ruin (Morris and Burgh,
1941, p. 51).
Bows and arrows and clubs were also employed on the chase. For
ceremonial purposes animals had to be taken without external loss of
blood, but the same beasts were run down and clubbed or shot with
arrows when fresh meat was the prime objective. The Bonitians, we
may be sure, also set various snares and traps for birds and small
mammals. Feathers from diverse birds, and from different parts of
the same bird, were always taken ritually; they had prescribed places
on prayer plumes, altars, or the bodies of participants in ceremonials.
Therefore, even though our excavations disclosed no recognizable
fragment, traps of various kinds were surely made and used by the
Bonitians just as such traps are known to have been made and used
by Pueblo peoples during the past 400 years. Pueblo implements of
the field and chase have always been simple of design and limited in
diversification.
| The material culture of Pueblo Bonito | |