Casa Malpais

Routes of the Kayenta-Tusayan
migration in the late 1200s CE

Great wooden roof beams were hauled about 20 miles by hand. A huge, rectangular stone kiva was built with windows and slots that allow summer solstice light to fall on intricate pictoglyphs inside. They built a network of finely engineered irrigation canals in the river valley below. But beneath the ruins are even deeper secrets — beneath lie the only catacombs found in the prehistoric West. And in the architecture and artifacts, these ruins along the Little Colorado River also hold possible clues to the birth of a new religion that evolved during the almost simultaneous collapse of major cultures all across the Southwest.

The village now known as Casa Malpais once supported between 200 and 400 people. The ruin includes many pictoglyphs and astronomically-positioned sites. One platform seems to have provided a tether for a captive eagle for ceremonies: many Ancient Puebloan people considered eagles to be divine messengers passing between the Spirit World and Earth.

The ruins include an observatory designed so that on the longest and shortest days of the year, the rising sun would illuminate specific designs on the walls. The designs on the walls include a flying parrot, a bear paw, a double spiral, a woman the Zuni say represents a sacred Corn Maiden, and many symbols for migration, the sun and other ancestral beings.

The discovery of the catacombs beneath Casa Malpais caused an archaeological sensation. Both the Hopi and the Zuni objected to disturbing the bodies of people they consider their ancestors. Appropriately, the city of Springerville agreed to seal the catacombs, with suitable prayers and offerings by Hopi and Zuni spiritual leaders.

Southwestern Cultures in 1350 CE

The waters and springs that feed the Little Colorado originate in the mountains around Casa Malpais. The river wanders across the 7,000-foot-high volcanic plateau and down through grasslands, deserts and deep canyons to the Grand Canyon. The stretch of slow, muddy river water between St. Johns and Springerville offers one of the few areas where ancient people could divert water to irrigate farmland. As a result, the region lured people for thousands of years.

The irrigation-based civilization that arose here between about 1000 and 1400 CE was influenced by the surrounding Hohokam, Mogollon and Ancestral Puebloans. Migrations from different areas were common, depending on short term weather events and encroaching marauders. The blending of cultures that happened here spurred the development of the kachina religion, which then spread throughout the Southwest as the old cultures collapsed and new ones formed.

The rise of the kachina religion may help explain the decline of the highly centralized Chaco culture with its system of wonderfully engineered roads made by a people with no horses or cattle and who never invented the wheel. Casa Malpais and the nearby ruins may have played a crucial role in this religious transformation due to their uniquely documented mingling of different cultures. In addition, the region forms the overlapping frontier dividing two of the oldest and most vital of the pueblo cultures, the Zuni and the Hopi, and two even older cultures that were fading out: the Hohokam and the Jornada Mogollon.

The Zuni believe they emerged from a previous world in the depths of the Grand Canyon. They then followed the Little Colorado River out of the Grand Canyon and across the desert to eventually reach their homeland on a cluster of mesas in western New Mexico. For centuries, they have maintained small sacred shrines in the Casa Malpais area. Zuni religious leaders make regular pilgrimages to these sites where they are within view of the surrounding sacred mountain peaks. They pray and leave tokens in nearby caves, caves whose locations remain secret. They say the Little Colorado is the umbilical cord that connects them to their origins. They call the place where the rivers meet near Casa Malpais "Zuni Heaven."

The Hopi, related through language to the Aztecs of central Mexico, believe they also emerged from a previous world drowned by the Creator because of the foolishness and wickedness of human beings. Immediately after emergence, the different Hopi clans set off on epic migrations, seeking the best spiritual place for them to live.

They explored the two continents they found themselves on and found many lush places. However, all of them finally circled back to the Hopi mesas, realizing they would lose their way spiritually in those other, easier places to live. They realized the harshness of their homeland would hold them to their prayers and right way of thinking. Some Hopi oral traditions hold that several clans came directly to the Hopi mesas from the area around Casa Malpais, including the Stick, Butterfly, Turkey, Spider, Road Runner, Coyote, Kangaroo Rat, Boomerang, Fire, Bamboo, Reed, Greasewood, Hawk and Parrot clans. The Hopis call the area around Casa Malpais Wenima and say that the kachinas lived there, which reinforces the evidence of pottery shards and pictoglyphs found at the site.

This has prompted some archaeologists to argue that the kachina religion emerged from the cultural cross-fertilization that happened at Casa Malpais and the other 9 known pueblos in the area. This new religion would have challenged the centralized theology of Chaco which had made possible the organization of that society and construction of their huge settlements, massive irrigation works and expertly cobbled roads radiating outward from Chaco for hundreds of miles. That highly centralized Chaco system may have faced a crisis, which the prayers of the Chaco-oriented priests failed to avert. The moving of the center of Chaco culture to Aztec may have helped ease the environmental problems for a few years but eventually, Mesa Verde, Yucca House, the Hovenweep area and Aztec would be abandoned and most of those people would migrate down to the Pajarito Plateau before continuing on down the hill to the Rio Grande Valley.

The failure of the older traditions to deal with the climatic disaster would have spurred the spread of the kachina religion. The decline of Chaco coincides with the spread outward from the Casa Malpais area of kachina motifs on pottery found in villages and burials. Moreover, the rise of the decentralized kachina religion coincides with the decline of centralized, irrigation-based civilizations throughout the Southwest. Some of the pottery technology and design motifs found at Casa Malpais have been attributed to clans returning from a migration to the south. Those migrants brought a new religious vision and interfaced with the old along the northern Mogollon Rim. The results of that are found all across today's Puebloan world. And like Pottery Mound, Casa Malpais, too, did not survive the coming changes.

Sites of the Ancients and approximate dates of occupation: