Kivas of the San Juan Drainage

TO one who has tramped or ridden all day across the sandy plains of the Navajo or Hopi reservations without finding a spring or a decent water hole, there is no need of explaining the importance of mother earth and the rain gods in the theology of the Indians of that region. The scanty vegetation draws its sustenance from the soil; the pockets in the rocks store the precious fluid that keeps flocks and herds alive; and from the crevices in the cliffs man draws the life-giving nectar of the gods and goes on his way with a prayer of thanksgiving on his lips. Is it any wonder that the Indians who drew their sustenance from that scanty soil centuries ago and their still primitive descendants look upon the earth as their cherishing mother and upon the rain clouds as benign beings coming from the four quarters of the earth to bless mankind? Man must ever worship some power which he recognizes as superior to himself, must personify it, clothe it with life and initiative and capacity to understand his petitions. In so far as the attributes of that power are beyond his comprehension, superstition holds sway and the primitive imagination runs riot, filling religious observances with all sorts of fantastic forms and concepts. The early inhabitants of our southwestern plains were evidently struggling toward a truer comprehension of the phenomena manifest about them and a determination of their relationship to those phenomena. They grasped germs of great truths and filled in the background with a strange mixture of half truths and imagination that custom welded into divine laws that the gods insisted must be carried out with great precision. As an expression of belief in the sustaining power of mother earth, the greater number of the ceremonial chambers of the ancient and modern population of the Pueblo country are sunk beneath the

Biology · Drainage · Archaeology and Natural History · Ecology · Geology

• Prehistoric Households at Turkey Creek Pueblo, Arizona

  Julie C Lowell•Prehistoric Households at Turkey…•2022

  Add to list

• Communal spaces

  Jennifer Nisengard•2006

  Add to list