David Roberts. Smithsonian. Volume 22, Issue 12, March 1992.
A prehistoric village in Arizona, known as Casa Malpais, had been surveyed by archaeologists but John Hohmann was the first to explore the natural caverns of the area. He discovered numerous centuries-old burial sites, and began a controversy over what was to be called the ‘Mogollon catacombs.’
“I thought it would be a quick in-and-out job,” john Hohmann told me as we stood on the rim of a basalt cliff and looked at the ancient ruins below. In the summer of 1990, the 37-year-old archaeologist had come to east-central Arizona to investigate this prehistoric village. Known to white settlers for more than a century as Casa Malpais (Spanish for “House of the Badlands”), it had been surveyed by previous archaeologists but never excavated.
Casa Malpais sits on a series of basalt terraces backed by a south-facing cliff, above the Little Colorado River. To Hohmann’s eye, the rubble-strewn ruin was recognizable as a late Mogollon pueblo, dating from around the 13th century. A rectangular great kiva, one of the largest in Arizona, was its dominant feature. Camouflaged by thickets of saltbush, the dim outlines of the pueblo room-block protruded; Hohmann estimated that there were more than 40 individual rooms in its rectangular grid. A descent for a closer look into the past One unusual geological feature piqued Hohmann’s curiosity. The basalt flow that formed the terraces on which the Mogollon village rests had fractured eons ago, opening deep fissures in the bedrock. As he walked across the surface, Hohmann peered into the subterranean darkness through small openings that capped those fissures. The earlier archaeologists knew about the caves but neglected to explore them. Hohmann decided to take a closer look.
With his assistants, Christopher Adams and Diane White, Hohmann rigged a series of rappels. Leery of rattlesnake dens, he roped down into the darkness, carrying with him not only a flashlight but a .22 revolver. As soon as he had entered the first cavern, Hohmann realized he had stumbled upon an astounding phenomenon. The natural fissures-some as large as 50 feet high and 100 feet long-were divided by carefully built stone walls sealing off smaller chambers. And those chambers had evidently been used for human burials. Although many of the crypts had been severely looted, Hohmann, Adams and White were eventually able to estimate that 200 to 300 bodies had been interred in the eerie grottoes.
What else could one call those natural caverns fashioned into formal burial crypts but catacombs? Nothing of the kind had ever been found in the prehistoric Southwest. Indeed, as far as Hohmann and Adams knew, no Indian catacombs had ever before been identified in the United States.
Despite their excitement, the three young scientists sat cautiously on their knowledge for eight months. In April 1991, at the annual meeting of the 2,000 members Society of American Archaeology in New Orleans, Hohmann and Adams made a poster presentation of their Casa Malpals work. An impromptu news conference ensued.
“I thought it might make page 15 of the New Orleans newspaper,” recalls Hohmann with bemusement. Adams adds, “The day after the meeting, we were getting on the plane. I picked up the New York Times, and there it was. We were sitting on the plane with 30 of our colleagues, who are going, ‘What is this crap? What are you guys talking about?'”
The storm of publicity that crossed the country soon turned into a storm of controversy. Hohmann and Adams had unwittingly laid themselves open to criticism on at least three separate grounds. Some of their fellow archaeologists took exception and said the crypts really didn’t qualify technically as “catacombs”-“the C word,” as Hohmann now ruefully calls it. Certain scientists sneered at the purported uniqueness of Casa Malpals. Paul Fish, curator of archaeology at the Arizona State Museum, for example, was quoted by a Tucson newspaper as saying, “I don’t want to be too negative in print or to suggest that this is some kind of scam, but the use of fissures is something that these people [prehistoric inhabitants of the Southwest] did whenever the opportunity was presented to them.”
The flamboyance of Hohmann’s public performance also raised professional hackles. The widely distributed wire-service story from New Orleans opened with a vignette in which the archaeologists “crept over rocky precipices, past dozing rattlesnakes and through sacred rooms deep in the wilds of Arizona”; the story quoted Hohmann as saying that he “felt a bit like Indiana jones.” Back in Arizona, the two men held David Roberts writes from his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, but he likes to get out of doors (especially in the Southwest) as often as possible. Another news conference, at which Hohmann appeared as he usually dresses for the field-wearing a fedora and a safari shirt, toting a hefty sheath knife and his holstered .22. Soon the newspapers had nicknamed him “Arizona John.”
The most serious backlash, however, sprang out of the ongoing debate over archaeological appropriation of native-American burial sites. No issue in American science is more volatile at the moment than the clash between Indians, on the one hand, and museums and scholars, on the other, over the tens of thousands of prehistoric graves that have been dug up during the past century and a half. Hohmann and Adams had not even hinted at excavating the Casa Malpais catacombs. But they had gone public without first consulting Arizona’s tribal groups, and in the charged atmosphere of the day, merely to announce their discovery was to wade into the ideological crossfire.
The controversy had yet another dimension. Far from lying “deep in the wilds of Arizona,” Casa Malpais stands within the city limits of Springerville (though on state land), only two miles from the town’s main drag. Generations of Springerville residents played in the Mogollon ruins as kids; boys hunted rabbits with their BB guns along its terraces, while girls picnicked inside the great kiva. The main business of Springerville (pop. 2,000) is lumbering, and in July 1990 the mill at Stone Forest Industries, the town’s chief employer, shut down. Economically depressed, with a high unemployment rate, the town cast about for new sources of revenue.
Already on the table was a proposal to turn Casa Malpais into a recreational park to attract tourists. To comply with the National Historic Preservation Act, the site had to be thoroughly assessed for its archaeological significance before any development could take place. Thus the town of Springerville hired Hohmann and Adams, who work for the Phoenix branch of Louis Berger & Associates, a consulting firm that specializes in contract archaeology.
Contract archaeology is an industry that has sprung up in direct response to the new sensitivity to ancient remains. Less than a generation ago (as many Springerville residents like to point out) the town might have developed the ruins any way it pleased; archaeologists might have dug in the catacombs without worrying whose sensibilities they offended. Early in 1991, however, a stringent Arizona state law went into effect. It requires that whenever scientists come upon the remains of human burials on state land, all 20 Indian tribes in Arizona must be given a chance to claim cultural affinity with those remains. If a tribe does claim affinity, it must be consulted as to the disposition of the remains before any work can begin.
Two peoples, the Hopi and the Zuni, at once claimed cultural affinity with Casa Malpais. These pueblo-dwelling tribes had occupied their present villages-the Hopi atop three mesas in northeastern Arizona, the Zuni along a river in western New Mexico-long before the Spanish came to the Southwest in the 16th century. With the claims of affinity, the already explosive situation grew even touchier. The real possibility loomed that the people of Springerville might find their commercial aspirations at sharp odds with the Hopi and the Zuni, as the hapless archaeologists, caught in the middle, twiddled their thumbs while they wondered whether they would ever be able to pursue what might turn out to be one of the great discoveries of their generation in the Southwest.
As soon as the newspapers blazoned the catacombs discovery, scores of visitors from as far away as Switzerland and Australia began to show up dally in Springerville. To accommodate their curiosity, Hohmann and Adams trained local volunteers to lead tours of the site. During the first four months of the program, more than 12,000 people walked though the great kiva and gazed at the pueblo room-block.
But the catacombs were strictly off-limits. And since it was the catacombs that had brought them to Casa Malpais in the first place, some visitors were miffed. As the disgruntled bartender in one of the local watering holes complained to me one night, “Yeah, I took the tour. I was disappointed. I wanted to see the graves, the burial chambers.”
Ensuring adequate security for Casa Malpais had already become a major headache. Camped in a trailer atop the plateau that overlooks the site, a guard keeps watch 24 hours a day, seven days a week. There is also an aerial surveillance program. Fences surround the site, with signs warning visitors to approach only on guided tours.
The Mogollon, as scholars designate the people who built Casa Malpais and hundreds of other settlements in southeastern Arizona and southwestern New Mexico, flourished from at least A.D. 200 to the end of the 14th century. What happened to them after the latter date remains a mystery. No archaeologist has yet discovered a definite physical link between the Mogollon and any living people; by far the best evidence of such an ancestral link comes from the folklore and oral traditions of the Hopi and the Zuni.
Why not ask someone who knows?
Leigh Jenkins, cultural preservation officer for the Hopi tribe, recalls a Four Corners symposium organized by the federal Bureau of Land Management, to which he was invited, he says, as a kind of afterthought. “What happened to the Anasazi?-that was the big question,” says Jenkins. The Anasazi, a culture that flourished in the Four Corners region, occupied the sites now known as Chaco Canyon, Mesa Verde and Canyon de Chelly. “The experts had all these professional answers. They talked about drought, warfare, migration. Finally I said, ‘They didn’t go anywhere. They’re still around. I can tell you exactly where.'”
Just as the Hopi preserve age-old oral traditions linking themselves with the Anasazi to the north and east, so Hopi folklore speaks of Mogollon haunts to the south. “At least seven of our clans have an interest in that site,” says Jenkins of Casa Malpais, “based on petroglyphs and oral traditions. ”
Hohmann and I had come to the Hopi Second Mesa to talk to Jenkins about the catacombs. Elsewhere in Arizona, Indian objections have shut down digs altogether. Determined to forestall such a fate, Hohmann, Adams and White had resolved to consult the Indians at every step of their work. They would excavate no room without asking Hopi and Zuni permission; they would ask Hopi and Zuni elders to visit the site and offer interpretive hints; and they offered to train Indians as apprentices in archaeology.
The tribes were clearly upset at the attention the news media were paying to the catacombs. As Jenkins told us, “You need to look at the way native people feel about burials. I don’t think any Hopi would ever go down there [into the catacombs] without special spiritual preparation. Casa Malpais is not just a site of rocks and walls. Even the water is alive and remembers the history of the region.”
Zuni spokesmen, too, told Hohmann that the less said about the catacombs the better. The underground chambers must remain closed to tourists, journalists and scientists alike. Gratified to find themselves consulted, the Hopi and Zuni welcomed continuing, responsible research above ground at Casa Malpals.
And the closer Hohmann and Adams looked at the site, the more extraordinary were their findings. As Adams restored the great kiva, a chamber used for religious and ceremonial purposes, its inherent beauty and sophisticated engineering emerged. The pueblo room-block turned out not to have some 40 rooms, as Hohmann had initially estimated, but 60 to 80. An unusual network of tunnels and apertures formed a ventilation system. Excavating only rooms that had already been pothunted, the archaeologists found such artifacts as a stone bowl with froglike figures (right, center), a superb polychrome ceramic pipe, a small bone-and-reed whistle or flute, coiled fiber baskets, a ceramic pot with handles, and a macaw feather suggesting trade with Mexico).
From excavated roof beams, Hohmann and Adams got consistent tree-ring dates of between A.D. 1250 and 1300. Adams and White, both experts in ceramics, were dazzled by the variety of potsherd styles, some of which argued for occupation as late as 1300. One kind of sherd, on which green designs were painted over a white slip, was particularly intriguing (above). It is informally called “proto-Zuni glazeware” for its resemblance to Zuni pottery made in historic times, and its occurrence at Casa Malpals reinforces arguments, based on oral traditions, for an ancestral connection between the Zuni and the Mogollon.
One small but exquisite object baffled Hohmann, Adams and White. Made of green soapstone, it looks exactly like a golf tee (below). When some Zuni men were asked to look at it, they at once offered a pair of explanations. The “tee” might be a pedestal on which to place a sacred object, they said, or it could be a tool carried in a medicine bag: a medicine man would wet the tip and use it to dab up a bit of pollen and place it on the body of a sick person. Sometimes the experts disagree Here was tangible fruit from the collaboration between Indian informants and Western-trained archaeologists. Yet sometimes the aid of the Hopi and Zuni only added to the mystery. Casa Malpals is rich in petroglyphs: graceful italic V shapes suggesting bighorn sheep, long extinct in the area; what may be water symbols and lightning sticks; elklike beasts and humanoid figures; a strange “centipede” with giant pincers; a swastika very like a Hopi direction symbol. Archaeologists have always been reluctant, however, to interpret rock art. Not so the Hopi and Zuni whom Adams and Hohmann led to the petroglyphs. The fascinating thing about their interpretations was that the Hopi explanation for a given design was often quite different from the Zuni version.
Away from the central pueblo and great kiva, Hohmann, Adams and White were coming across still more surprising things. A large enclosure on a lower terrace, four of whose five openings match the cardinal directions, might have been a dance plaza. The whole of Casa Malpais is surrounded by a stone wall, which Hohmann thinks served ritual rather than defensive purposes (walled or not, the village appears to be vulnerable to attack from the plateau at its back). Several stone staircases-one of them a spiral winding through a narrow crevice up to the plateau-lead purposefully through the site. Some of the catacombs seem to have been capped by aboveground “sacred chambers,” as Hohmann tentatively calls them. And a freestanding 30-foot pinnacle (above), with hand-and-toe holds carved into one of its vertical sides, may have been a platform for captive eagles; a stone that could have been used to tether the birds was found on top.
In April 1991, as he worked on a routine survey grid on one end of the room-block, Adams made a startling discovery. A flat rock that at first appeared to line the floor of one room in fact sealed a hole: a faint draft of air blew around its edges. Adams pulled the rock loose to see what was under it. The orifice was too small to stick his head through, but by lowering a video camera on a pole he could get an idea of the dimensions of the cavity. In a brilliant piece of sleuthing, Adams used the video footage to discover the actual Mogollon entrance-it lay yards away, at the bottom of what the scientists called Room 6. 4n underground treasure of artifacts in July, after obtaining Hopi and Zuni permission, Adams went down the “hatch.” Though the space beneath was cramped and claustrophobic, full of fine dust laced with cactus spines carried inside by small rodents, Adams quickly realized that a sizable network of underground rooms lay between the apparent floor of the pueblo and the roof of the catacombs. Here was a discovery rivaling that of the catacombs themselves-for prehistoric underground structures have rarely ever been found in the Southwest. What the rooms had been used for remains a puzzle, but in the first weeks of exploring underground, Adams found provocative artifacts: a metate covered with turquoise dust so fresh it looked as if it had been ground yesterday, a gypsum mirror, a woven basket on a ledge, a stone ax-head made of fine-grained basalt, many tiny bone beads, a black-and-white pottery jar decorated with butterflies.
One day in August, Edward B. (Ned) Danson showed up at Casa Malpais. Seventy-five years old, a patriarch of Southwestern archaeology (he happens also to be the father of Ted Danson of TV’s Cheers), Danson had done the pioneering work at the site in the late 1940s, when he had quickly reconnoitered it as part of an ambitious survey of the region for Harvard’s Peabody Museum. Danson had also been instrumental in making Casa Malpais a National Historic Landmark.
The visit was a nostalgic one for the retired scholar, and the chance of a lifetime for Hohmann and company, to whom Danson was a legend. Proudly, they took him on a tour of his” site, Hohmann appending every other sentence with a deferential “sir.” As he stood among the ruins, Danson smiled and addressed his guide: “You’ve got your life’s work cut out for you here, don’t you? This is too good a find not to do it thoroughly.”
“We’re going to do it right, sir,” said Hohmann.
“Thank you.”
Later, out of earshot of Hohmann, Danson told me, “It’s an amazing site. I don’t think we yet know how Important it is.”
If Hohmann and Adams had a special obligation to establish their credibility with the Hopi and Zuni, they faced an equally delicate challenge to win the trust of the citizens of Springerville-who were, ultimately, their bosses. Almost overnight, the discovery of the catacombs had seemed to explode in the town’s face. A story in the Arizona Daily Star, headlined “‘Catacombs’ flap,” quoted unnamed sources suggesting “that Hohmann exaggerated the significance of the ruins to lure tourists to Springerville.” The mood in town grew sour. Some locals were inclined to agree with the Star’s debunking. “I’m not sure there are any graves up there,” said Rich Rogers, a jeweler whose parents were Springerville pioneers. “I’ve been all through those caves as a kid, and I never saw any.”
Like most small ranching towns in the West, Springerville tends to be mistrustful of outsiders. The locals did not immediately take to Arizona john and his sidekick with the hippie-length black hair. Gradually, however, the townspeople came to accept the besieged archaeologists, and then even to confide in them some of their own secret lore. Adams found old-timers who were willing to show him pots they had legally dug on private land or to share their hints about other sites. A few revelations were mind-boggling: for example, Adams was shown undisturbed prehistoric relics the likes of which have never been seen elsewhere in the Southwest-but only on the condition that not even a description of them appear in print.
One day, as Adams was completing a Casa Malpais tour for the public, a visitor lingered. jumpy and agitated, he told Adams he wanted to speak to him, but only if Adams would guarantee immunity. He would tell Adams only his first name.
Now a New Mexican, the visitor had grown up in Springerville. Walking across Casa Malpais through the underbrush one day in 1960, he had felt a strange, hollow sensation underfoot. Taking a large rock, he smashed it through what turned out to be the artificial wooden roof of a large catacomb. Inside, the man found walled-off crypts containing some 70 adult skeletons, many bedecked with dazzling grave goods.
Working alone over two years, the man looted the grave goods and sold them to a trader from Santa Fe. The catacomb was so rich that the trader made monthly flights to Springerville, rendezvousing at night with the pothunter’s pickup at the local airport. Unaware of archaeological niceties, the man burned ancient roof beams in campfires and demolished stone walls.
The trader put him in touch, the man said, with a Navajo living in Mexico who wanted to buy the skeletons. Most Navajo will have nothing to do with human graves; this shadowy person may have been a “skinwalker,” a Navajo witch, for he told the pothunter that he wanted the bones to grind them into a powder that could be used to cause one’s enemies to fall ill. In due time, the Springerville man removed all of the skeletons and sold them to the Navajo.
A new door opening in anthropology” Thirty years later, as he had taken Adams’ tour of the site, the man had been overcome with remorse. In 1960, however, if you didn’t own a large ranch you had a tough job simply feeding your family. It was the best excuse the man could give for his grave robbing. Adams was convinced of the veracity of this remarkable and appalling tale, for the man showed him photographs he had taken of himself on the site. It is still not clear how the tension provoked by the discovery of the catacombs will ultimately be resolved. It could yield a lasting collaboration between native Americans and scientists. Says Leigh Jenkins: “There’s a new door opening here in anthropology-a partnership in which living cultures like the Hopi provide a link to past cultures.” But Owen Bobelu, a Zuni tribal councilman, says, “I’m a scrutinizing person. And archaeologists are one group of people who like to keep their knowledge to themselves. I think john and Chris need to give us even more information about everything they find. Give us more. Give us depth.”
At least one thing about the catacombs is clear-they promise to revolutionize our ideas concerning the pre-history of the Southwest. Previous researchers had never suspected a burial phenomenon remotely like that of the catacombs. What else about the Mogollon have we got dead wrong? What have we yet to learn?
One of the most important questions is how widespread the catacombs are. Could Casa Malpais be unique? If not, as most experts think, then what burial sites lie out there awaiting rediscovery, threatened not only by science’s probing light, but by the looter’s reckless shovel?
Basalt flows laced with natural fissures and caverns such as those of Casa Malpais are common across eastern Arizona and western New Mexico. During my visit to Springerville last summer, I asked a number of locals about these formations. Following a tip, one afternoon I hiked across a plateau on national forest land about a dozen miles from Springerville, then came to an extensive broken cliff. The basalt terraces below were wildly honeycombed with subterranean caverns.
I had only a few hours, no rope and a poor flashlight, but I clambered through several of those gloomy grottoes. One of them had a metal ladder tied in place to facilitate entry past the difficult upper ten feet of the abyss. A narrow crevice then led down, down, until I stood a hundred feet below the entrance, on a ledge covered with fine dirt; dark holes beyond my flashlight’s beam adumbrated deeper crannies. From charcoal graffiti on the walls, dating back to 1931, I deduced a long history of local exploration. A wire-mesh screen in the dirt meant someone had sifted for artifacts. I found no bones and no stone walls, but there was no telling what six decades of pothunters had removed from the cavern, nor what secrets the recesses of the neighboring fissures held.
As I climbed back to the surface my blood tingled with a faintly illicit excitement. The enigma of the Mogollon catacombs has only begun to unfold.