Zuni Village of the Great Kivas Tour

Tuesday afternoon we went with a tour guide to see an ancient village site. I immediately asked our guide, Kenny Bowekaty, if Zuni was the name the people gave themselves. No, the people refer to themselves by the name of their religion, Ashiwi. The symbols on Kenny’s business card, the intertwined spirals, are found in rock art and on pottery throughout the area.

It turns out that this is a symbol also found throughout the Aztec world, and Kenny believes it was carried south by a group of Zuni who went south in their search for the Middle Place, the center of the chest of Mother Earth, and never came back.

The site we visited was occupied by Ashiwi coming to Halona:Wa from the Chaco Valley. They had moved there in their quest to find the Middle Place, but having received word that a group of the people had found the correct place they came to join them. Kenny, who is an archaeologist as well as a traditional Ashiwi and holds membership in religious societies, said their religion had changed enough over the long separation that the Ashiwi in Halona:wa didn’t immediately accept them, so they settled here, upstream in the Nutria valley.

First we visited the village, but the part we walked through was not where anyone lived. This was a ceremonial place. There were a few dwellings further west where the religious leaders lived. What you are seeing here is a central ceremonial plaza.

The rest of the people lived on the top of the mesa,

on the mesa across the valley, or in the valley itself.

It was incredible to do this tour with Kenny. He had done excavation and stabilization here. In the 1930’s when Frank Roberts had excavated he identified this room as being living quarters, as it was bigger than the other rooms. But Kenny said he was wrong. This was most likely a room where older society members, who could no longer do the physically demanding dances, could watch in privacy. That wall in the back of this room was reconstructed by archeology students learning about ancient construction techniques.

What looked like piles of stone came alive as Kenny described the passages and tunnels that were here to allow the religious ceremonies to proceed.

When Kenny was born his paternal grandfather chose him to be the one to take his place in the religious societies. Since Kenny’s father was in the military and his mother was attending college Kenny was sent to be raised by his grandparents. His grandmother spoke no English. The Zuni were never forced to go to boarding school. His grandmother chose not to go. His grandfather went and learned to speak, read and write English. But he was not forbidden to speak his own language or to participate in his own culture. The Zuni people say they are still practicing their religion the same way they have done for millennia and feel their culture is the most like the ancient ways of all the nations.

There were pottery shards here, too. Some collected on a rock,

and this one, just laying in the dirt for a thousand years!

After we walked through the remains of the village we followed a path up the side of the mesa to see petroglyphs. These predated the village, you could tell by the technique used to make them. They were pecked out with two stones, one that acted as the hammer, the other the chisel. These are images of centipedes. The Ashiwi came from the center of the earth. Their ancestors were salamanders. They came from the water world to the wind world where they found the centipedes. They could see light through the cracks, but they were too large to fit through them. One salamander talked a centipede into going up to see if that light was the daylight world. The centipede did and came back to report that it was the daylight world, but he had not liked all that light and he bit the salamander. He told the salamander that he would die after as many days as he had legs.

To this day the Zuni do not kill centipedes, but if they are going to kill one, they make sure it has lots of legs!

This petroglyph was a geometric design, like many you see. Kenny had a theory that these were made by women who accompanied the men on their fall and winter hunting trips, but stayed in camp during the day. He thought that the women might be trying out designs for future pots. He gathered pictures of petroglyphs and compared them to pictures of ancient pottery and found that the majority of the designs were on both pots and rocks.

The largest image here is the ancestor salamander.

Off to the right are the flute player (Kokopelli) and the horned toad. The horned toad lives in the southern desert but he always is in a place with water, a lush oasis. Horned toad came to the Ashiwi and asked to join their Rain God society because he could bring the rain by playing his flute. The people didn’t know him and didn’t trust him and so said no. Horned toad went back to his desert. A terrible drought came and the Rain God society could not get it to rain. Crops were dying, rivers and even springs were drying. In desperation a delegation went to the desert. They found horned toad and told him if he would bring the rain they would let him join their society. He played his flute and the rain came and since then the Ashiwi changed their rain ceremony. The people in the society have a procession into the kiva, they are singing and dancing as they come. But when they reach the kiva there is already one man inside. The rest enter silently while that man plays the flute. When the others are all inside they resume their rain dance. I think Kokopelli is the human version of the horned toad.

This site also had a solar calendar. Kenny came up when they were doing work in the summer and saw that on the solstice the edge of the sunbeam created by the smooth rock, which sits out from the rock with the spirals, just illuminates the crack between the spirals.

The quality of the petroglyphs was exceptional and Kenny had stories about most of them.

These were the only images there that were made by grinding rather than pecking, and so are probably more the age of the village below than the other, much older figures.

In the 1960’s the Zuni dammed the Nutria to make a more reliable water source. Some of the crew that worked on the dam would climb the side of the mesa on their breaks. They collected minerals they found…

and created these gorgeous pictographs of the Zuni gods. Normally you are not allowed to photograph any religious items, but Kenny said these had long ago been photographed and compromised so we could. I noticed that he did not tell us anything about what these images are.

Kenny wanted to include these pictographs on the tour, but there was no easy way down the mesa from there. Kenny asked some young people working in the Youth Conservation Corps if they would make a path down. They made a very nice path.

In one place they removed all the small rocks wedged between two large boulders to make this tunnel.

There is so much more information that Kenny shared. I will not forget this tour; a beautiful and fascinating place and a beautiful and fascinating man.