The Sacred Oral Tradition of the Havasupai: As Retold By Elders and Headmen Manakaja and Sinyella 1918-1921

Chapter 1: The Prehistory of the Grand Canyon

| 3 Chapter 1 The Prehistory of the Grand Canyon| robert c. euler | never underestimate the importance of an artifact, even one made of so humble a parentage as the willow tree. If it were not for split-willow figurines found in the Grand Canyon in 1933, and later companion findings, we might not know that human beings visited the canyon floor some two thousand years before Christ was born. Though we don’t know much more than that about these prehistoric American Indians—there’s a limit to how much we can read from a willow twig wound around itself—we can say with reasonable certainty that they were familiar with the depths of the Grand Canyon almost four thousand years before John Wesley Powell floated the first scientific expedition down the Colorado River in 1869. They were hunters and gatherers, these American Indians, and lived in what archaeologists call an Archaic period. This much we can safely surmise. They came from the Desert West. They deposited their artfully constructed split-willow animal figures in limestone caves, probably as a form of imitative magic ritually depicting the animals they wished to hunt. Recently archaeologists located an almost inaccessible cave in the canyon that contained figurines surrounded by cairns of rock—probably a shrine. A few years ago, in excavations at prehistoric sites along the Colorado River, archaeologist Anne Trinkle Jones of the National Park Service uncovered campsites of people who lived in the canyon somewhat later than those who made the figurines. The Archaic levels 4 | part i of these shelters date from between 1135 and 85 BC. These people probably lived in those shallow caves and hunted deer, bighorn sheep, and other animals with spears. At certain seasons they also gathered edible wild plants. Domestic crops were probably unknown to them, as were the bow and arrow. Researchers also recently discovered an Archaic site apparently unique to the Grand Canyon. This is a series of pictographs—paintings on the rock wall of a cave—probably related to similar examples of a religious nature farther north, in Utah. While archaeologists have not precisely dated this site, the style of painting indicates it was done sometime between 2000 BC and AD 1. These newly discovered Archaic sites, together with the split-twig figurines such as those found in Stanton’s Cave in Marble Canyon and the earlier discovery of Archaic Pinto-style spear points on Red Butte, near the South Rim of the Grand Canyon, point to a widespread use of the gorge by American Indians before the time of Christ. It is not presently possible to use archaeological data to relate these people to any of the later occupants of the Grand Canyon, at least not with any degree of reliability. They disappeared into the mists of prehistory. Where they went and why, we do not know. But all the same, these early people contributed immeasurably to our knowledge of the Grand Canyon. Because they left those small artifacts and paintings, we know they existed, and it makes a difference of some 2,500 years in our chronicling of human use of the canyon as a living environment. Before the figurines were found, archaeologists had dated the first habitation of the canyon to about AD 500 with the advent of the Anasazi or Pueblo Indians, a people much more culturally complex than their Archaic precursors. The Anasazi, thought to be direct ancestors of the present-day Hopi of northern Arizona, probably began as a Desert Culture people in the Great Basin.1 Sometime around the year AD 1 or slightly earlier, they moved into the northern portion of the Southwest. Archaeologists refer to this period in their culture as that of the “Basketmaker,” for rather obvious reasons. Using rudimentary techniques, these hunters and gatherers added corn and squash to their agricultural capability and hunted deer, bighorn sheep, and rabbits. The Basketmaker style of life changed in several ways around AD 500. They developed new varieties of corn and planted beans. By groupingcircularpithousestheybeganvillagelife.Theymanufactured the prehistory of the grand canyon | 5 fired pottery and supplemented spear-throwing with the use of bow and arrow to kill game. This stable economic base, combining hunting and gathering with the beginnings of diversification of crops, allowed the Anasazi to intensify and expand their territory and cultural achievements. After learning to grow cotton, they added spinning and loom weaving to their repertoire, weaving...