Page:American Anthropologist NS vol. 22.djvu/399

 DISCUSSION AND CORRESPONDENCE

WHO MADE THE KAYENTA-NATIONAL MONUMENT RUINS

THE Kayenta region, Arizona, and the Navajo National Monument to the west of it are dotted with extensive ruins, among which are the cliff ruins of Keetseel and Betatakin. These regions are as yet scarcely touched. The only published works extant are Dr. J. Walter Fewkes' "Preliminary Report on a Visit to the Navajo National Monument, Arizona," Bull. 50 of the Bureau of American Ethnology, and Kidder and Guernsey's " Archeological Explorations in Northeastern Arizona," Bull. 65 of the same bureau. What peoples made the ruins is a matter of considerable speculation.

Pictographs on the canyon walls undoubtedly often show Hopi maidens with their whorled hair representing the pumpkin blossom of fertility. My Hopi helper, Clarence Taptuka, and his wife's relatives also readily identify the glyphs on the rock walls near the ruin on Man's Head point northwest of the Marsh Pass Indian school to be the signs of the Snake, Spider, and Rabbit clans of their people. Ceremonial object No. 65 of Kidder and Guernsey (op. cit., p. 145) they identify as an ear pendant of their people, representing the spreading pumpkin blossom, used in the Kachina dances and in the Butterfly ceremonies. Also they readily identify the sunflowers and cones, found by Kidder and Guernsey and the bird figured by them (above, pp. 143-147), as paraphernalia used by their people.

Mr. Taptuka states:

The bird is used in the Kachina dances. It is usually placed on some con- spicuous place on the dancing mask. The cones are used to represent ears on the mask, also worn in certain Kachina ceremonies (as Tacab (Tenebiji) is dressed on plate xxvi of the Twenty-first Annual Report, Bureau of American Ethnology). Usually only one is worn on the mask, on the right side. False hair is then wrapped around this pretended ear and let fall over it in front so as to obscure it and the string attachments that hold it to the mask. The wearing of one ear on a mask is to illustrate a myth of the long ago which states that a certain maiden, who was making her toilet, had one whorl of her hair done up to represent the pumpkin blossom when she was attacked by an enemy from whom she escaped with her hair only half arranged.

The sunflowers are used only in the Bean ceremonies. They are used some- what like a forehead star is sometimes used by white people. They are used in

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