Aztec Ruins Administrative History

AMERICAN MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY COLLECTION
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The basketry in the American Museum collection from Aztec Ruin, of which there are at least 74 examples of various types and completeness, has never been studied. A twilled ring basket with concentric-diamond pattern and several relatively insignificant coiled fragments, a plaited rush bag, and a meshwork basket-like container were mentioned by Morris after the season of 1917, but he delayed further discussion of this category of objects in anticipation of better specimens to be uncovered in later work. [18] He included basketry in the gross enumerations of specimens recovered in each of the rooms. [19] Morris's definitive study of Anasazi basketry done in collaboration with Robert Burgh 24 years later did not include Aztec Ruin specimens. He stated that, although 24 coiled baskets had been recovered there, he did not have time to do the necessary cleaning and meticulous retracing of patterns to include these materials in that publication. [20] The only other recognition the Aztec Ruin basketry has had are a published photograph of one large plaited basket associated with a set of antlers from Room 95 in the North Wing and a badly worn coiled basket, which was recovered in Room 178 in the West Wing with the so-called Warrior's Grave and its large basketry shield. [21]

Included in the American Museum basketry assortment from Aztec Ruin are 25 close-coiled baskets or remnants. This count is one more than Morris's statement above. Some are so tight, firm, and bright that they seem to deny their 700- or-800-year age. Present also are five sausage-shaped plaited bags, six rim frames laced with yucca strips, one cylindrical reed basket, two plaited plaques, three coiled plaques, 12 plaited yucca baskets or their fragments, two baskets covered with a hardened red clay, and three meshwork containers still stuffed with tinder-dry corn husks. A very unusual item is a basketry ladle or dipper coated with red clay, which has a pebble rattle enclosed in the handle. This came from Room 189, cleaned out late in Morris's tenure at Aztec Ruin. The ladle was sent to the American Museum because of its uniqueness.

Although Morris wrote that all specimens were from the Mesa Verdian reoccupation, it seems probable that examples of Chacoan basketry arts are present in the American Museum collection. [22] He contradicted this in another passage by assigning the objects covered with red clay to Chaco refuse. Five additional specimens came from Room 48. Included with the Chaco trash was a cylindrical reed basket. Neil M. Judd found both basketry covered with red clay and cylindrical baskets at Pueblo Bonito. [23] Since Pueblo III Chaco basketry carried designs distinctive from those of Mesa Verde, it should be possible with careful analysis to more precisely determine cultural affiliation of the Aztec Ruin basketry.

Eighty-five sandals exhibiting various degrees of wear in sizes suitable for children and youths to those for adults are in the American Museum collection. Another 19 are at Aztec Ruins National Monument and the Western Archeological and Conservation Center, most having been recovered during American Museum work. The large number of these objects is due to the dry environment within the rooms. By contrast, Judd recovered just 15 fragmentary sandals during his work at Pueblo Bonito. [24] Morris borrowed some of the Aztec sandals for a proposed study of the entire Anasazi sandal craft from Basketmaker II through Pueblo III. It was a project never completed. Analysis of the Aztec sandals would fill out data concerning late Anasazi costume and weaving skills.

Two kinds of footgear are in this assortment. The coarser were twilled of pliable strips of undecorated yucca in an over-two-under-two weave. The finer type was of twined yucca or dogbane fiber cordage tightly woven to create an exceedingly thin, hard foot cover. Although these sandals appear fragile, they must have been fairly durable. Many of the Aztec specimens have black, brown, red, or yellow designs on the under surface. These resulted from use of dyed weft threads. The surface next to the wearer's foot was enriched by supplementary warps and wefts variously wrapped around each other.

A third kind of possible footgear, which thus far is unique to Aztec Ruin, are what Morris speculated were two pairs of snowshoe pads. These were willow loops crossed by yucca-strip lacing and padded with either corn husks or grass bundles. [25] Whether or not they were intended to get a wearer across a snow field is debatable.

Another aspect of the weaving skills of the residents of the West Ruin to be studied is the collection's 67 cotton textile fragments and 13 examples of cotton cordage. Generally white, some textiles also carry red or brown patterns. The quality of the cloth varies from fine to coarse and appears to have been constructed by several weaving techniques. The cotton itself would not have been grown in the vicinity.

Two assortments of wooden objects are in the New York collection. These should be examined forthwith. After recovery in 1918, the artifacts were stored away virtually unnoticed. Research since then has greatly enhanced their interpretive value. In 1947, a large find of comparable articles was made at Chaco's second great house, Chetro Ketl. It was not published until 1978. [26] Some similar, but not identical nor as numerous, objects were removed from Pueblo Bonito in the 1920s by the National Geographic Society but also were not described in print until 30 years later. [27] But it is the Chetro Ketl material that makes it most obvious that the Aztec examples were physical accoutrements of rituals practiced in Chaco at least by the late eleventh century and perhaps diffused some time in the twelfth century to the settlement on the Animas. Analysis of the Aztec sample would be an important contribution to interpretation of Anasazi ceremonialism as expressed by the Chacoans. Can these articles be attributed to a particular cult or group, perhaps with modern Pueblo counterparts?

The most exciting of the wooden objects are what may have been altar paraphernalia, headdresses, or items carried processionally. The American Museum crews retrieved 14 specimens in Room 72 of the North Wing. This is a unit in the first tier of rooms north of a large kiva within the house block that had been Chacoan originally but was remodeled by Mesa Verdians. Morris reports that when a wall of an adjacent chamber collapsed, it opened up the ceiling of Room 72. That allowed some five cubic yards of cultural materials and vegetal debris to pour down from the second story. The wooden specimens were part of a spill of what Morris considered Chacoan rubbish. Later refuse was dumped over this stratum. Pack rats disturbed the stratigraphy by dragging some of the wood upward through the secondary fill. [28] Considering the relatively crude excavation techniques of the times, it is more than likely that small pieces of the wood, especially those without applied color, were shoveled out with the fill. Excavators found several other specimens of the same style in two north rooms showing little or no domestic use. Perhaps the dark, inner chambers next to the village wall were storage chambers, and Room 72 overlooking Kiva L's hatchway was the dwelling of a clansman charged with caring for the ritual gear.

What were reclaimed are small, thin, flat pieces of wood that had been worked into various forms and had been painted. [29] Included are disc-shaped pieces with serrated green edges, flattened crescents, perforated rectangular slabs with blue, green, and white patterning, and curvates. Four green pieces reminiscent of leaves of a fan are attached to a central stave. Another fan form is green and red. Both fan-like specimens may have been representations of bird tails or perhaps nonfunctional arrows. A more obvious bird tail is made up of two wood pieces striped with green and blue pigment and tied together with yucca cord. An unpainted human arm of thin wood is attached to a green hand. Part of a human body is green. A wooden sandal last is blue, red, and green on both surfaces. [30] One smoothed wooden cylinder has black and red decoration.

A second grouping of related wooden objects consists of an estimated 45 ceremonial sticks such as also have been reported from Pueblo Bonito. George Pepper found 375 of these items in one room; Judd's excavations uncovered 16. [31] The Chetro Ketl collection likewise includes a few examples. [32] These are long slender rods worked in various ways at one end and tapered at the other. Seven of the Aztec specimens are bow shaped rather than straight. Some rods have knobs on one end. Bits of cloth adhere to a few. Incised spiral lines decorate others. Excavators found the ceremonial sticks in Rooms 111 and 112 in the North Wing adjacent to or two rooms removed from Kiva L, a large Chaco-style construction.

In addition to the ceremonial staffs, another kind commonly known as prayer sticks, or pahos, have straight shafts topped by a carved serpent head. These have been found throughout the Anasazi territory.

Although unimposing because of their mundane nature, the wealth of inflammable and perishable materials from Aztec Ruin now in storage at the American Museum offers a marvelous opportunity to gain some understanding of how the Anasazi ingeniously coped with a rigorous close-to-the-earth mode of life. Articles made from bark, sticks, mammal hides, sinew, rabbit fur, turkey feathers, grass, cotton, and two principal plants -- domesticated corn and wild yucca -- reveal how they were able to implement their lives. From such raw resources, the inhabitants of the West Ruin created weapons, clothing, blankets, toiletries, cordage, ties, cigarettes, fire hearths, pot rests, cradle boards, arm splints, sandal lasts, matting, farm tools, objects with religious significance, and many things whose meaning is lost. A variety of dried plants and animal remains testify to what was being stockpiled for consumption and discarded as garbage. No Chaco great house has yielded such a bewildering array of this kind of raw data; the perishables which banked the rubble of the Mesa Verde cliff houses were dissipated a century ago by looters and collectors.

Morris got off to an exhilarating start at Aztec Ruin with finding several burials in Room 41 of the East Wing of individuals who had been adorned with quantities of primitive jewelry. These were necklaces, bracelets, pendants, anklets, and mosaic inlays of stone, bone, and shell. Morris made another discovery of interest in this regard the following season of a grave in a North Wing room containing someone of unquestioned importance. He had been outfitted with a 12-foot strand of 865 white bird bone tubes alternating with 444 black beads, a strand 13 feet long of white stone beads, and assorted turquoise, abalone, lignite, and olivella shell ornaments. These goods of adornment enlivened Morris's reports of almost seven decades ago. [33] They now would benefit from modern photography, reanalysis, and comparisons with subsequent jewelry finds, such as those made in Pueblo Bonito, Chetro Ketl, and Salmon Ruins.

The remainder of the American Museum of Natural History collection consists of a sample of bone awls and scrapers, stone projectile points, tcahamias; grinding, polishing, and pecking stones; manos, metates, pot covers, mauls, axes, and mortars. [34] One set of artifacts consists of a few adobe bricks, which Morris took from a late eleventh-century site on the property of Oren Randall near Estes Arroyo. [35]

Although Morris states that he sent all human remains recovered at Aztec Ruin to New York, the catalogued entries there total just 71, two of which came from locations away from the monument. Morris recorded 186 burials. [36] It must be assumed that some specimens were too fragile or fragmentary to be retained. Physical parts of 35 children or adolescents point to a high rate of infant mortality comparable to that noted elsewhere among the Anasazi population. In addition to 13 fairly complete skeletons of persons of all ages, a few still wrapped in feather cloth and rush matting, the Aztec Ruin physical anthropological specimens in New York include crania, jaw bones, hair, foot bones, miscellaneous long bones from a number of individuals, and one example of charred brain matter. At the American Museum, the human remains were withdrawn from the general archeological collection to be put with physical anthropological materials. Associated objects, such as jewelry, cloth, matting, or in one case, wooden splints around a broken arm, were kept with the primary specimen lot. The human remains have never been studied or exhibited.

Finally, a few small clues to Anasazi awareness of the world beyond their territory are in the Aztec Ruin collection at the American Museum. Feather, three skulls, and a skeleton of macaws, two tiny globular copper bells, and three beads of rolled sheet copper somehow worked their way northward from central or northern Mexico at a time from two to three centuries before the rise of the Aztec Indians for whom this distant settlement erroneously was named. The assumption is that these trade goods reached Aztec Ruin during its Chacoan era as a result of the flourishing trade network now known to have connected north central Mexico to the Colorado Plateau. This point needs to be verified, old data permitting, because of the absence generally of such commercial contacts between Mexico and the more geographically and culturally isolated Mesa Verde branch of the Anasazi.

Aside from consideration of the physical attributes of the various kinds of objects, it would be informative to plot out their proveniences within the house block to ascertain whether meaningful use patterns can be established for the structure. For instance, do the 110 stone tools and assorted beads and bits of colored stone and turquoise found in the fill of Room 110 in the South Wing imply some sort of workshop? Can various stockpiles of raw resources, such as potter's clay, cedar bark, bundles of corn husks, or hanks of cordage, be related to chambers that might have been a part of the collection and distribution system of the Chaco Phenomenon? Can religious articles be tentatively assigned to particular kivas or surrounding rooms of clan members? Once they have been adequately defined, can Chacoan and Mesa Verdian refuse be used to map tenancy patterns through time?