Page:The Coronado expedition, 1540-1542.djvu/277

 It is 20 leagues to Tusayan going northwest. This is a province with seven villages, of the same sort, dress, habits, and ceremonies as at Cibola. There may be as many as 3,000 or 4,000 men in the fourteen villages of these two provinces. It is 40 leagues or more to Tiguex, the road trending toward the north. The rock of Acuco, which we described in the first i)art, is between these.

Chapter 4, of how they live at Tiguex, and of the province of Tiguex and its neighborhood.

Tiguex is a province with twelve villages on the banks of a large, mighty river; some villages on one side and some oh the other. It is a spacious valley two leagues wide, and a very high, rough, snow-covered mountain chain lies east of it. There are seven villages in the ridges at the foot of this — four on the plain and three situated on the skirts of the mountain.

There are seven villages 7 leagues to the north, at Quirix, and the seven villages of the' province of Hemes are 40 leagues northwest. It is 40 leagues north or east to Acha, and. 4 leagues southeast to says: "All the skeletons, especially of adults [in the intramural burials], were, with but few except ions, disposed with the heads to the east and slightly elevated as though resting on pillows, so as to face the west; and the hands were usually placed at the sides or crossed over the breast. With nearly all were paraphernalia, household utensils, articles of adornment, etc. This paraphernalia quite invariably partook of a sacerdotal character." In the pyral mounds outside the communal dwellings, "each burial consisted of a vessel, large or small, according to the age of the person whose thoroughly cremated remains it was designed to receive, together, ordinarily, with traces of the more valued and smaller articles of personal property sacrificed at the time of cremation. Over each such vessel was placed either an inverted bowl or a cover {roughly rounded by chipping) of potsherds, which latter, in most cases, showed traces of having been firmly cemented, by means of mud plaster, to the vessels they covered. Again, around each such burial were found always from two or three to ten or a dozen broken vessels, often, indeed, a complete set; namely, eating and drinking bowls, water Jar and bottle, pitcher, spheroidal food receptacle, ladles large and small, and cooking-pot. Sometimes, however, one or another of these vessels actually designed for sacrifice with the dead, was itself used as the receptacle of his or her remains, in every such case the vessel had been either punctured at the bottom or on one side, or else violently cracked — from Zuñi customs, in the process of 'killing' it." The remains of other articles were around, burned in the same fire.

Since the above note was extracted, excavations have been conducted by Dr. J. Walter Fewkes at the prehistoric Hopi pueblo of Sikyatki, an exhaustive account of which will be published in a forthcoming report of the Bureau of Ethnology, Sikyatki is located at the base of the First Mesa of Tusayan, about 3 miles from Hano. The house structures were situated on an elongated elevation, the western extremity of the village forming a sort of acropolis. On the northern, western, and southern slopes of the height, outside the village proper, cemeteries were found, and in these most of the excavations were conducted. Many graves were uncovered at a depth varying from 1 foot to 10 feet, but the skeletons were in such condition as to be practically beyond recovery. Accompanying these remains were hundreds of food and water vessels in great variety of form and decoration, and in quality of texture far better than any earthenware previously recovered from a pueblo people. With the remains of the priests there were found in addition to the usual utensils, terra cotta and stone pipes. beads, prayer-sticks, quartz crystals, arrowpoints, stone and shell fetiches, sacred paint, and other paraphernalia similar to that used by the Hopi of today. The house walls were constructed of small flat stones brought from the neighboring mesa, laid in adobe mortar and jilastered with the same material. The rooms were invariably small, averaging perhaps 8 feet square, and the walls were quite thin. No human remains were found in the houses nor were any evidences of cremation observed.

Mota Padilla, cap. xxxii,5, p 160, describes a funeral which wa« witnessed by the soldiers of Coronado's army: "en una ocasion vieron los españoles. que habiendo muerto un indio. araron una grande balsa ó luminaria de leña, sobre que pusieron el cuerpo cubierto con una manta, y luego todos los del pueblo, hombres y mujeres, fueron poniendo sobre la cama de leña, pinole, calabazas, frijoles, atole, maia tostado, y do lo demasque usaban comer, y dieron fuego por todas partes, de suerte que en breve todo se convirtió en cenizas con el cuerpo."