Nancy Yaw Davis

The Zuni Enigma

An excerpt

Questions persist about the relationship of Zuni to other Native Americans, including other Pueblo Indians. How can their distinctive characteristics be understood and explained? Why does Zunian have no known affiliation to any other language in North America? How did the blood allele B get to this pueblo—and not others? Why is the religious system so highly integrated and complex? The Zuni culture is one of the ten most-documented cultures of the world, yet these and numerous other questions persist.14 Indeed, the complexities of the social, religious, and political system have "occupied scholars and defied interpretation by them since the 1890s," writes Edmund Ladd, a Zunian scholar.

Of course, other Pueblo groups are also unique; together the pueblos comprise a separate cultural area, in many ways puzzling. As Alfonso Ortiz, a Tewa Pueblo Indian and professor of anthropology at the University of New Mexico, noted, "It is essential to stress that the various peoples of the Southwest fashioned unique cultural syntheses from elements of diverse provenance."

Synthesis is a good word to denote a creative ongoing process for all human cultures, but some groups seem to achieve it more easily than others, and seem more responsive to the flexibility required. This capacity for adaptation may be a marker for the whole Pueblo region, not just Zuni. The twenty contemporary Pueblo groups of the American Southwest stand out as distinctive clusters of communities derived from at least seven different language groups, sharing many characteristics, but continuing individual local traditions in pottery, jewelry, and ceremonies. Unlike the nomadic Navaho and Apache who arrived in the area much later—perhaps as late as the sixteenth century—and who live in households quite separated from each other, Pueblo peoples live in consolidated villages and have long been agriculturalists. In Chapter 9, I speculate on the possibility that the Pueblo groups as a whole share a common link to the Anasazi civilization, which may have incorporated influences from Asia at an earlier time than the one considered here for the Zuni.

Zuni Prehistory

The archeological record in the Zuni area indicates that a flurry of new pueblos was built between 1250 and 1300, but the Pueblo of Zuni in its exact present location may be quite new—perhaps as recent as A.D. 1692, after the Pueblo rebellion against Spanish and Catholic intrusion. The final selection of the exact middle at Halona on the north side of the sluggish Little Colorado River was possibly the consolidation of the six pueblos first reported by the Spanish in 1540. A brief reconstruction of the sequence of earlier occupations and influences documented by the archeological record provides a framework for later discussion of evidence of the proposed late-thirteenth-century arrival of a pilgrimage from the "ocean of the sunset world."

Clearly, the people who became the Zuni were not the first, or the only people to come to the Southwest. Between about 9500 and 5000 B.C., the general area was sparsely occupied by a population called Paleo-Indians. The famous fluted stone points—distinguished by deep central grooves—from the Clovis and Folsom sites in New Mexico are considered representative of one of the earliest populations in all the Americas. Although details about the Paleo-Indian period remain murky, the Clovis and Folsom finds indicate very early occupation in the New Mexico area.

During the next period, called Archaic, from 5000 B.C. to about A.D. 1, the population of the Southwest increased; hunting and gathering remained the main way of life. Then, midway through the Archaic period, about 2000 B.C., corn, and later beans and squash, were introduced from Mesoamerica, supplementing the diet and supporting a growing population.

Distinctive semisubterranean structures called pithouses began to appear about A.D. 200, a time when pottery was added to the cultural inventory. The people who settled in the drainage of the Zuni River about A.D. 650 became part of the developing Anasazi cultural tradition to the north.

Archeological sites in the Zuni area indicate continued links with Anasazi communities during Pueblo I, between A.D. 700 and 900. They shared, for example, similar pithouses with granaries and grinding stones. The existence of shells from the Pacific Ocean and the Gulf of California implies a trade network.

After A.D. 900, a new kind of building masonry was adopted; aboveground houses replaced pithouses, and it has been suggested that pithouses changed from dwellings to ceremonial chambers, now called kivas. Thousands of small sites associated with distinctive kinds of pottery are identified for this period, called Pueblo II.

After A.D. 1150, the people in the Zuni region shifted affiliation away from Chaco, the major Anasazi ceremonial center in the north. As that civilization mysteriously collapsed, the people in the Zuni River drainage seemed to link more closely with people called Mogollon to the west and south in Arizona. This period, called Pueblo III, continued to be a time of many small pueblos.

Then, between about A.D. 1250 and 1400, a major change in settlement patterns occurred in the Zuni area. People began to aggregate into large, well-planned, plaza-oriented communities ranging in size from 250 to 1,200 rooms. The consolidation of people is associated with intensified agricultural techniques, including irrigated terraces. Sophisticated water control supported the more concentrated populations. During this period, called Post-Chacoan, most communities elsewhere in the Southwest were abandoned, yet the population around Zuni grew; ruins of previous pueblos abound in the vicinity. What happened at Zuni?

This period, the late thirteenth century A.D., is proposed as the probable time for the arrival of Japanese pilgrims—with new language, religion, and genes. If a freeze-frame could capture that event, I believe it would reveal an entourage of people from many backgrounds arriving and deciding this was the exact middle of the universe, and then commencing to build large pueblos, drawing in straggling survivors of the Anasazi civilization.

Of course we have neither a photograph nor a written record of what happened and why such a consolidation occurred. But this is an unusually thoroughly studied area: Sophisticated tree-ring dating, dendrochronology, provides a rich record of when structures were built, and the timing, severity, and length of droughts; skeletal remains indicate significant physical changes in the population; measurements and excavations of ruins reveal major changes in settlement patterns; glaze on pottery suddenly appears.

The archeologists state the present Zuni area was probably founded about A.D. 1352 and it is one of six pueblos reported by the Spanish when they arrived nearly two hundred years later.