Kachina and the Cross (13 page)

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Authors: Carroll L Riley

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BOOK: Kachina and the Cross
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with the Suma and Jumano-Teya, spoke a Tanoan language, or closely related languages, probably most closely related to Tiwa and Piro-Tompiro. As discussed in chapter 3, I tend to accept this latter position, but it should be emphasized that language relationships in this area are decidedly unclear.
Whatever the language situation, the Manso seem to have been the lineal descendants of the archaeological El Paso phase of Jornada Mogollon, itself related to the great Casas Grandes culture to the south and west. The El Paso phase collapsed (as did Casas Grandes tradition in general) sometime around or perhaps a bit before A.D. 1450. The collapse of the Casas Grandes interaction sphere left in its place a series of marginal agricultural and hunting-gathering peoples in the Casas Grandes-Janos region and in the stretch of Rio Grande around El Paso and on southward to the Rio Carmén. Only at La Junta, at the junction of the Rio Grande and the Conchos, did substantial towns with considerable agriculture continue on into Spanish times, and even there the sophisticated pottery was replaced by simple brown wares.
The Mansos at the time of Oñate had given up the substantial adobe structures of the El Paso phase of the Jornada Mogollon. It is generally thought that they no longer made the polychrome and black-on-white ceramics of their El Paso ancestors. It seems possible, however, that some of the pottery typical of El Paso phase sites persisted beyond the collapse of the El Paso phase as a recognizable entity, perhaps into the sixteenth century. A site in the Hueco Bolson, northeast of El Paso, which contains El Paso Polychrome, yielded a thermoluminescence date of A.D. 1561, though the excavator, Michael Whalen, doubts its validity. Another survivor was perhaps the durable and popular Chupadero Black-on-white, produced farther to the north but widely traded in protohistoric southern New Mexico.
The major difficulty for modern archaeologists in discovering Manso sites is that they are often impossible to recognize with any certainty, at least from surface survey. Without pottery, they basically resemble Archaic sites. When simple El Paso brown wares are found, they resemble the Mesilla phase of Jornada Mogollon culture, dating some centuries earlier. It may even be that by Manso times, the tradition of pottery makingwhether plain ware, black-on-white, or polychromehad ended. Nor are we sure whether the Manso practiced agriculture, though a statement in the Espejo account of 1582 suggests that they at least grew maize. A great deal more archaeology, directed specifically at the Manso, is needed.
What is known of Manso culture is very scanty. Gallegos's account from the Chamuscado expedition tells of receiving "two bonnets made of numerous macaw feathers." This certainly implies trade, which is not too surprising considering that the Manso were on a major north-south trade route. Luxán, the
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following year, tells of receiving "mesquite, corn and fish, for they fish much in the pools with small dragnets" from those Mansos that he called Tanpachoas. According to Luxán, they were similar to the Otomoacos and Caguates (Suma), but it is not clear if they spoke the same language as the two latter groups. Espejo claims to have met some one thousand Indians in the El Paso area, though it must be remembered that Espejo's numbers tend to be somewhat inflated. The Indians lived in scattered settlements or rancherías, probably made up of
jacal-
type houses: mud-plastered brush structures that date back thousands of years in the Southwest. The Indians performed their ceremonial dances for the Spaniards and presented them with mesquite, beans, and fish.
The Manso costume was mentioned briefly in some of the accounts. According to Luxán, men wore some sort of penis sheath or strap. Benavides, who described the group in some detail, said that the men were naked but that women wore two deerskins gathered at the waist, one in front and the other behind. Both Luxán and Oñate noted the use of "Turkish bows," apparently some sort of composite bow. Later southwestern Indians backed their bows with sinew or with yucca fiber held on by piñon gum. Possibly one of those methods was employed here.
The social organization of the Manso is unknown except that with a basically hunting and gathering economy and residence in scattered rancherias, it was likely a band organization consisting of no more than a few families. Except for the dances noted above, nothing is known of their religion.
The trade that I mentioned briefly in chapter 3 was still an important part of the southwestern economy in 1598. It is true that the Spanish conquest, devastation, and subsequent colonization of the west coast of Mexico had impacted the trade routes running northward through the Sonoran statelets and on into the Cibola-Zuni towns. The statelets themselves were still actively trading as late as the time of Ibarra in the decade of the 1560s. Indeed, trade to eastern Sonora, though not exactly flourishing, was still reported as late as 1630. Feathers of the scarlet macaw had been in demand from at least Chaco Bonito phase times (see chapter 2). The source of the birds in Chaco times was probably southeastern Mexico and may have followed a trade route up the arid northern interior of Mexico. It seems quite possible that the route went by way of the Casas Grandes Valley, even though the city of Casas Grandes developed as an important center only after the fall of the Chaco culture. Archaeological finds from the post-Chaco period at Pecos, Gran Quivira, the Garcia site (Pojoaque Pueblo), and Picurís as well as sites in southwest Arizona indicate that at least some of the birds reaching the Southwest during the Pueblo IV period were scarlet macaws. A likely source would have been Casas Grandes,
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where these macaws had been bred from perhaps A.D. 1200 on into the fifteenth century.
But Casas Grandes, too, had fallen by the time of the first Spanish entradas into the Southwest, and most of the southern trade was routed to the region west of the Sierra Madre Occidental. That various parrots and macaws were being traded northward from the Sonoran area is well known from early Spanish accounts, but the species cannot be determined from the historical records. I have an idea that this west coast trade was mainly in military macaws (
Ara militaris
) and the thick-billed parrot (
Rhynchopsitta pachyrhyncha
).The military macaw ranges into the mountains of Sonora on the southern edge of Sonoran statelet territory, while the thick-billed parrot's range extends through the northern part of the Sierra Madre Occidental, occurring as far north as southern Arizona and New Mexico. However, it must be pointed out that actual archaeological specimens of the military macaw are very rare in the Southwest except at Casas Grandes.
Be that as it may, it seems likely that much-desired scarlet macaw feathers continued to reach the Southwest; in fact, finds at Pojoaque most likely postdated the Casas Grandes period, and those at Pecos and Picurís may well have done so. The nearest home range of the scarlet macaw is the lowlands of southern Tamaulipas, southward on the Mexican east coast, and Oaxaca on the west coast. There seems a good chance that
Ara macao
specimens and feathers continued to be traded from the south and east along a route that was later utilized for the Camino Real, even after the collapse of Casas Grandes.
The post-Columbian trade into the Pueblo area not only involved parrots and macaws but also shell, which had been in great demand for centuries. Especially desirable were the tubular olivella shells that came both from the Gulf of California and from the Pacific coast of California. Glycymeris shell, made into bracelets, came from the Gulf of California, as did coral and a number of other shells. Abalone (
Haliotis
sp.) was traded from the California coast. Some of these shells were transshipped eastward to the Plains, where such itemsalong with pottery, turquoise, obsidian from sites in the Jemez Mountains, Glazes V and VI (E and F in the Rio Grande sequence), and maizewere exchanged for bison products, Osage orange (
bois d'arc
) bow wood, and riverine shells such as
Lampsilis purpurata
, a freshwater bivalve used mainly in pendants and beads. Alibates dolomite, a flinty material used for various stone tools that came from quarries in the northern Texas Panhandle, was popular at Pecos, but relatively little was traded farther west.
This trade with the Plains was still flourishing in Oñate's day, as indicated by information received by Zaldívar in 1599 and comments in the Valverde report
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of 1602. Pecos at that time seemed especially important for the trade to the Plains, but the Salinas Tompiro towns were surely also involved. As the seventeenth century wore on, eastern Apachean groups would increasingly become the middlemen for this trade to the Plains, and by 1598 they may have begun their slow squeeze-out of the Jumano. As the Sonoran area collapsed in the early seventeenth century, the supply of shell and parrot/macaw feathers dwindled, though the lower Colorado and west coast routes continued to be open throughout much of the century.
In the east, a new pattern of trading developed within two or three decades after Oñate. This was a partnership arrangement between the Spaniards and the Pueblo Indians. Turquoise continued to be traded, and even shell, but increasingly Spanish goodsincluding metal objects, cloth, and jewelryentered the trade picture. By the end of the seventeenth century this kind of trading operation was beginning to penetrate northward to the Utes.
Within the Southwest, a trade situation like that of pre-Coronado days extended into the Spanish period. The cotton grown by the Hopi, often dyed with bright colors obtained from the central Arizona area, continued to be in demand among the Rio Grande Pueblos, as did the extraordinary Jeddito bichrome and polychrome pottery. Around 1550 an eastern contribution to native pottery, the beautiful Sankawi Black-on-cream, developing out of the earlier Biscuit wares, became popular in the upper Rio Grande. Glaze E (Glaze V at Pecos) persevered at various Pueblos. It should be stressed that these names for ceramic wares are the modern archaeological ones. We do not know what the sixteenth-century Pueblos called them.
Turquoise from the Cerrillos mines was traded both east and west, and the mineral fibrolite continued to be popular throughout the Pueblo world. Fibrolite, or sillimanite, is a fibrous, schistose mineral that has an extraordinary hardness and takes an exceedingly high polish. Depending on the minerals in the makeup, fibrolite can be brown or red with black or dark green inclusions, or it may be bluish black, mottled black and white, or gray. Fibrolite was extremely popular in the Pueblo Southwest, especially for making axes. The nearest outcroppings of this much desired material are in the mountains north of Pecos Pueblo, and that pueblo seems to have controlled the trade in fibrolite.
Generally, the material culture of the Pueblos of Oñate's time was not significantly different from that of the Coronado period. As discussed under trade, the Hopi Indians manufactured the Jeddito potteries, and these wares were copied by the Zuni. Among the eastern Pueblos, Glaze E was being manufactured south of the Chama region, while in the Tewa area Sankawi Black-on-cream was still being made. With the addition of a red underbody, it would develop into the
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seventeenth-century Tewa Polychrome. Pueblos from Taos to the Salinas group manufactured various micaceous plain wares for use at home and for trade into the western Plains.
There is little indication that the earlier Spanish expeditions to the Southwest had significantly changed the culture, material or otherwise, of either the Pueblo Indians or their nomadic neighbors. Although Coronado probably brought some of that utility pottery known by archaeologists as the "olive jar," and the senior officers of the expedition may well have carried a setting or so of Spanish majolica pottery, there is absolutely no evidence that these, or any other Spanish pottery, influenced the native pottery traditions. The copying of Spanish pottery forms by Pueblo Indians would not appear before the seventeenth century. No metallurgical tradition caught on in the Southwest. The Pueblo house type was not significantly affected by Spanish or Mexican Indian architectural ideas. The beehive ovens that are a feature of later historical pueblos were basically introduced in the seventeenth century or perhaps even later. The idea of heating the interior of houses with fireplaces rather than hearths also seems to have been a seventeenth-century idea. Weaving practices were probably much the same in 1598 as they had been in pre-Spanish times. Only after Oñate was the weaving of wool added to that of cotton, and minor Spanish-introduced technical improvements made to the Puebloan loom. A number of Spanish objects, however, did remain in the pueblos from Coronado's time. For example, a trunk and a book (subject unknown) were found by the Espejo party at Zuni. The latter group also reported seeing crosses. These may actually have been star symbols, since a star with four points was common in Pueblo iconography and symbolized the morning star with its kachina and twin war-god implications. We have no other evidence that Christianity took hold in the sixteenth-century Southwest, and the possibility of it seems vanishingly remote.
The economy of the Pueblo world of 1598, like that of previous decades and centuries, was based on agriculture of maize, beans, squash, and cotton, the latter crop grown only in part of the area but traded widely. Another old domesticate was the bottle gourd, used primarily as a container. It seems likely that Spanish watermelons and cantaloupe melons had taken hold in the Pueblo area from Coronado's time. Oñate reported melons at a time when his own colonists could hardly have planted and reaped their own crops. It is also possible that domesticated chile peppers had arrived in the Southwest before Oñate; Obregón mentions that chile seeds were brought to Pecos by Espejo, and a few years later Castaño lists "herbs, chile and calabashes" at that pueblo. This plant, however, really took hold in the seventeenth century.
Domesticated animals in Oñate's time were limited to the dog and the turkey both many centuries old in the Pueblo area. According to one nearly contemporary

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