Beads and frog fetish found at Pueblo Bonito
“Turquoise beads and pendants are the diamonds, the radium, the manna from heaven for the Southwestern Indian. I cannot think of anything that is as precious to the white man as good, sky-blue turquoise is to an Indian. And the stones from ancient ruins exceed in beauty and quality any of those in circulation today…Bonito abounded in turquoise. In this respect it is the richest Southwestern site ever excavated.”*
Situated in the northwestern corner of New Mexico, Pueblo Bonito is an excellent example of the heights achieved in art and architecture during the Pueblo III period. Beneath its foundations rest the ruins of Pueblo I and II cultures. Basket Maker III ruins are also found in the immediate vicinity.
The construction of Pueblo Bonito began in the ninth or early part of the tenth century on the original site of a Pueblo I pit village. In the beginning it was merely a cluster of primitively built masonry houses. As the population increased, the buildings expanded crescentically to the right and left. Probably in the second quarter of the eleventh century, a new group of wandering clans arrived at Bonito. Their original migration patterns, though unproved as yet, seemed to come from the north.
The new people were more sophisticated than the original Bonitans and probably came in greater numbers. Almost immediately their cultural ethic began to dominate. They built dwellings around the core of the old village. Later, they made changes, even to the point of razing their own houses to clear the way for architecturally advanced homes. They twice enlarged the pueblo and greatly increased its internal and external security against marauding bands of nomadic Indians. These newcomers (referred to by archeologists as ‘Late Bonitans’) are considered to be dynamic and progressive, while ‘Old Bonitans’ are remembered as unyielding and old-fashioned. It was the Late Bonitans who took the pueblo to its pinnacle of material culture, making it a legend in its own time as far south as the beaches of Southern California and in the steamy jungles of Vera Cruz.
Neil Judd, the principal excavator of Pueblo Bonito theorizes that the Old Bonitans continued in residence longer than the Late Bonitans because all of the cultural materials recovered came from Old Bonitan rooms. Some were clearly used for living while others were obviously storerooms. Finally, eight of them, dwellings and storerooms, were appropriated for burials by the last to inhabit this pueblo. Both religious and secular objects stored at the time were abandoned when the first interior burials occurred. In its heyday Bonito could have housed at least 1500 people, and undoubtedly buried its dead with a bounty of beads, pottery and baskets in a cemetery outside the village proper. But successive generations of accumulation, blowing sand, and flooding of the dangerous Chaco arroyo that leaves tons of silt on the floor of the canyon, have combined to protect the burial treasures of these ancient ones.
Late Bonitan houses seem to have been cleared of their contents by the dwellers themselves and suggest an unhurried departure from the pueblo. None of their rooms were used for burials, but a number came to be used as dumps for household sweepings and refuse. These dumps, both at Bonito and elsewhere in pueblo country, have provided archeologists with a wealth of information about daily life.
They yield up pot shards, beads, and utensils that help define the culture. The trash heaps at Bonito tell a story of families moving around the pueblo and a gradual drifting away of much of the population. It seems that the departure of the Late Bonitans was voluntary, as opposed to flight under enemy attack. A population evacuated under forced circumstances leaves much of their material culture behind. Late Bonitan rooms were emptied of all their contents suggesting a leisurely departure.
The most plausible theory of this migration is a great reduction in the amount of fertile land. Hunger spurs discontent and has continually influenced the migrations of clans in the southwest. Several factors seem to come into play here:
1. Late Bonitan homes stripped of all furnishings.
2. Old Bonitans crowded into a small corner of their original village.
3. Old Bonitan rooms transformed into tombs for one hundred dead that could not be buried outside the walled pueblo.
4. Old Bonitan abandonment at a later date of utensils, blankets, pottery and ceremonial equipment suggests a population decimated by famine and migration, then enemy attack.
Ariel view of the remains of Pueblo Bonito
*Ann Axtell Morris: Digging In The Southwest
Coming Next Week: The Beads of Pueblo Bonito
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