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TUZI_120720_014.JPG: Tuzigoot National Monument in Arizona
TUZI_120720_018.JPG: Names and Places:
"As far as could be learned, neither the Apache nor the Yavapai of the Clarksdale region had any name for the ruin itself..."
-- From: Tuzigoot, Caywood and Spicer, 1935
When archeologists Caywood and Spencer sought a name for the project site, Ben Lewis (a Tonto Apache on the excavation crew) suggested Tu zighoot (TWO-see-WHOODT), meaning "crooked water."
Everyone present liked the "ring" of the word, and thus the name was adopted. However, as often happens in translations, Caywood and Spicer spelled and pronounced the word as Tuzigoot (TWO-zee-goot), which is nonsensical in Apache.
Yavapai elders call the area Aha-gahlahkvah, which also means "crooked water."
TUZI_120720_023.JPG: The Culture of Tuzigoot:
When archeologists Caywood and Spicer excavated Tuzigoot, they saw a mix of styles and traits. They could not attribute the village to a specific culture and concluded instead that influences from the south, west, and north were at work.
Today Tuzigoot is usually considered a southern Sinagua site, based on village plan, room sizes, burial treatments, and farming methods. However, some scholars, looking at regional patterns in new ways, prefer to think of Tuzigoot as part of what they call the Central Arizona Tradition.
They argue that the Verde Valley, and much of central Arizona's transition zone, was inhabited by local populations with Mogollon cultural heritage. Through time, these groups adopted traditions like those of their neighbors.
But, they remained recognizably different. They produced elaborate stone ground tools and plain pottery, practiced both floodwater and dry farming, and had a mixed subsistence strategy that emphasized hunting and the cultivation of agave, cactus, and cotton, in addition to corn.
TUZI_120720_027.JPG: Trails To and...
When Tuzigoot reached its peak around 1300, perhaps 6,000 to 8,000 people lived in a complex network of villages with associated farming areas.
Around them, the region had become a very populated place and other farming groups were on the move. Compared to many places, the Verde Valley was a pocket of abundance with reliable water sources.
To continue to flourish, people likely had to accept and integrate immigrants, cope with population growth, and deal with their neighbors (both within and outside the valley). Their options: share and economize; accommodate, isolate, or fight; or relocate.
... From Tuzigoot
By the late 1300s, disease, conflict, disrupted trade networks, depleted soils, and changing, unpredictable weather patterns all could have contributed to decisions to leave.
Hopi say Tuzigoot and the numerous other villages in the Verde Valley were built and occupied by clans migrating in waves from Palatkwapi (The Red Land to the South). The villages here were springboards to their settlement further north, ultimately at villages on the Hopi Mesas. In their view, Tuzigoot was simply one stop in a larger journey, and not the final destination for these people.
TUZI_120720_030.JPG: People and Place:
The Verde Valley has been a shared landscape and home to various indigenous groups. The Wipukpaia (Northeastern Yavapai) and the Dil zhe e (Tonto Apache), both traditionally semi-nomadic hunter-gatherers, are still here. Ancestral Puebloan clans built numerous villages in the valley and farmed for centuries before migrating to other homelands.
For Hopi, the Verde River drainage was one of the primary south-to-north migration routes, known as Payunawit, "Back and Forth Design the River Along." Payanawit links Hopi people to their ancestral past, represented by Archaic, Sinagua, and Hohokam archeological cultures.
Oral traditions of the O'odham and Piipaash (Maricopa) of southern Arizona link them to the Verde Valley as groups moved and mixed.
TUZI_120720_033.JPG: Homelands:
When farming groups migrated from the valley, others -- more reliant on hunting and gathering -- remained. They are represented today by the Wipukpaia (Northeastern Yavapai) and the Dil zhe e (Tonto Apache). Both share the belief that Montezuma Well is their place of origin.
Scant archeological evidence exists to suggest how long each group has been in the Verde Valley. Yavapai consultants say that wherever the Hopi lived, the Yavapai also lived; they identify Yavapai sites next to Ancestral Puebloan sites and have stories of Hopi clans that came from the south.
Yavapai sites, as well as Apache, are not easily identified. The hunter-gatherer lifestyle demanded portable and lightweight things; these mobile minimalists lived very lightly on the land. They were able to survive environmental changes and social pressures through flexibility, at least until the arrival of Euro-American settlers in the 1860s.
"... the people that used to live here are still thriving, they didn't abandon their places, they are still connected spiritually."
-- Jerome Zunie, Pueblo of Zuni
TUZI_120720_037.JPG: Hilltop Living:
In modern Puebloan worldview, the village is a "center place" surrounded by shrines. In Hopi tradition, the highest points would be occupied first by the most important people in the village.
On its rocks perch, Tuzigoot was flanked by farming areas with extensive field systems and shelters. As the village grew over the centuries, a central plaza area emerged. The plaza enclosed by rooms made the village more "pueblo-like" in form. Related households surrounded Tuzigoot to make a community. Nearby hilltop "sister" villages may have formed when families split off from the main village.
Living on hilltops, people had a line of sight between households and could monitor their world. By building where they did, no farmland was sacrificed, and they avoided the mosquitoes and floods that living next to the river invited.
TUZI_120720_041.JPG: Construction Details:
People used materials at hand to build the pueblo. This exhibit wall replicates the methods they employed to build sound walls with what they had.
Large boulders served for foundations. From there, they laid up double walls that tapered with height, and then filled the space between with rubble. Rounded river stones and irregular blocks of limestone required large amounts of mud mortar -- up to 3 or 4 inches (7 or 10 cm) between every rock -- to be stable. Mortar accounted for half or more of a wall's volume. Their masonry was massive -- 24 to 30 inches (61 to 76 cm) thick.
Juniper logs, placed butt end up, formed support posts. For roof beams they chose cottonwood and pine. A woven matting of reeds, willow branches, juniper bark, and grasses, placed on rafters, finished the ceiling, and provided insulation. Then, they sealed the roof with mud. The ceiling in this museum is similar.
Is it rebuilt?
During the 1930s, it was common to reconstruct walls and roofs as part of an excavation. Five rooms in Tuzigoot were reconstructed; one remains today.
Reconstructions may help us visualize the past, but they alter or even destroy the original ways of building. They make it difficult for future archeologists to study construction techniques, sequences, and building materials.
Today, the National Park Service has a policy of not reconstructing but stabilizing buildings in their existing state.
TUZI_120720_044.JPG: In the numerous axes recovered (127), there was evidence of the reluctance to discard an axe once it had received its original shaping. Economy of materials and labor dictated attempts to repair every broken tool for as long a period as it was mechanically possible.
TUZI_120720_047.JPG: Room Details:
A family might have had only one room in the pueblo -- about 200 square feet (19 sq m). This was roomy compared to pueblos farther north; living and storage space may have been shared here.
People devised ways to make their homes durable, comfortable, and safe. Thick walls insulated rooms; interior plaster was 3 to 4 inches (8 to 10 cm) thick in some places. Smoke from a small hearth in the floor exited through a roof entry hatch in a ceiling about 5-1/2 feet (170 cm) high, adequate for people who averaged 5 feet 2 inches (160 cm) tall.
At least 31 rooms in Tuzigoot showed evidence of burning -- a condition often seen in pueblos dating between 1100 and 1400. At some of these sites, computer modeling, thermal alteration studies, and full-scale fire testing are helping determine the origin of structural fires and whether they may have been natural, accidental, or intentional.
TUZI_120720_052.JPG: Making of the Monument:
Grace Sparkes was a woman with a mission. As a member of the Yavapai County Board of Public Welfare, she realized that support from civil work programs, which had achieved the excavation of Tuzigoot and construction of this museum, was neither stable nor guaranteed. In 1934, Grace began lobbying for a national monument.
In 1937, a National Park Service-sponsored proposal for a Tuzigoot National Monument was approved, but there would still be hurdles. The land, originally owned by the United Verde Copper Company, had been sold to the Clarkdale School District for the sum of $1 to pave the way for the civil work projects. The school district in turn deeded the site to the government. However, an Arizona State statute prohibited a school district from doing just that.
Undeterred, Sparkes got the state legislature to sponsor a bill to authorize the deed. It passed in three days. On July 25, 1939, she received notice that President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the proclamation creating Tuzigoot National Monument. The National Park Service took over the protection and management of the fully developed site.
Grace Sparkes was inducted into the Arizona Women's Hall of Fame in 1985.
TUZI_120720_058.JPG: Visitor Center
TUZI_120720_073.JPG: The Ruins Of Tuzigoot
For thousands of years, the Verde River Valley has been a human melting pot. Hunters and gatherers came first, searching for wild game and grasses. Traders followed, digging salt and minerals, and then settlers farming the fertile bottomlands.
A tribe of southern Sinagua built their masonry homes on this ridge about AD 1000 and established a thriving agricultural community. Inexplicably, they left in the early 1400s, more than a hundred years before the first Europeans rode into the valley.
A 1/4-mile trail winds up and through the remains of the Tuzigoot pueblo. (The sign asks visitors to stay off the walls and on the walkway, to help preserve the remnants of this earlier civilization.)
TUZI_120720_081.JPG: Pueblo Rooms:
You are looking into a typical room built probably in the late 1300s during the final expansion of Tuzigoot. This is one of the seven rooms comprising a unit separated from the main pueblo by a plaza, the grassy area to the left of the ruins.
Most rooms in the pueblo sheltered single families and were used mainly for sleeping and eating. Some rooms had stone or clay-lined fireplaces for cooking and warmth but outside fire pits were also used. Trough-style stone metates and two-handed manos for grinding corn were found in the ruins.
Sinagua builders used soft, porous limestone for the walls which required constant repair. This is still a concern today and most pueblo rooms have been stabilized. A few of the original interior walls are still intact.
TUZI_120720_093.JPG: The Bountiful Verde Valley:
In contrast to the rugged northern mountains and harsh southern desert, the Verde Valley must have seemed a paradise to the people who settled here around AD 700. Antelope, deer and small game were plentiful and grasslands above the river supplied mesquite beans, wild legumes, grape and amaranth seeds.
Through the valley flowed the Verde River where fish and turtles could be caught: mallards and Canadian geese alighted, attracted by the water and wild grains.
Dry farming -- using available rainfall -- provided some crops on the foothills, and streams were diverted for irrigating lowland farms.
Early dwellings were pit houses dug beside the river, but succeeding generations moved into caves or rooms hollowed from cliffs; many built masonry homes on the ridges.
By AD 1300, there were about 50 major pueblo sites, many surrounding by smaller satellite pueblos, in the middle of Verde Valley.
TUZI_120720_099.JPG: Late Pueblo Architecture:
The pueblo at Tuzigoot grew slowly over a 400-year period, beginning first with a series of small rooms in the center of the hilltop. Apparently, there was no overall plan and rooms were added as the population increased. The pueblo extended about 500 feet long on a north-south axis along the ridge top with the main section about 100 feet wide.
Limestone and sandstone deposits from the ridge provided the building materials for the walls, while juniper, pine and cottonwood trees were hauled up the hillsides for roof support posts. In time-honored fashion, new room were built on the ruins of old ones.
Entry to most rooms was by way of ladders through roof top hatches and the contiguous design was a good example of prehistoric thermal efficiency.
At its most productive time -- the late 1300s -- the Tuzigoot pueblo contained 86 ground floor rooms and, possible, 15 second story rooms, with about 225 people living here.
TUZI_120720_113.JPG: Life and Death at Tuzigoot
The southern Sinagua Indian tribes -- as other cultures before and after -- left behind a wealth of information about themselves in what they threw away. This hillside pictured above and the one opposite on the west slope were trash sites which have yielded valuable clues about Sinagua customs and lifestyles.
We know they planted crops of squash, corn and beans; used wild grasses for dyes, medicines and weaving materials; hunted game animals with obsidian-tipped arrows; and produced a rock-tempered, plain brown pottery.
Few adults lived beyond age 40. When they died, they were buried in the hillsides with only a few personal possessions. Generally, their heads were covered with rush matting and their bodies wrapped in cotton cloths. At Tuzigoot, 408 such burials have been found.
TUZI_120720_119.JPG: Grinding tool
TUZI_120720_132.JPG: Lakes of the Valley:
About eight million years ago, while the ancestral Verde River was still cutting through the hard Kaibab limestone, a series of faults split the valley. The surrounding mountains were thrust higher and a necklace of wide, shallow lakes formed.
When erosion crumbled the natural dam at the southern end of the valley, the lakes slowly emptied, leaving the Verde area looking much as it does today.
Frequent evaporation of the dry lakes (playas) deposited deep beds of salt that would be important for future settlers and traders. Calcium carbonate, washed down from the Colorado Plateau by the rivers and streams, formed thick deposits of freshwater limestone, eventually used to build the Tuzigoot pueblo.
TUZI_120720_138.JPG: Inside Living:
The part of the pueblo you're about to enter probably represents early construction but it was rebuilt several times by the Sinagua and still required constant stabilization. The rooms above you follow the ridge top.
In a typical late-pueblo room, storage cists were frequently set in a corner of the room and clay vessels for storage were submerged in the floors. Looms for weaving were attached to the walls. Roof top entrances provided light and ventilation.
When Sinagua children died, they were buried in stone-lined crypts beneath the floors of the pueblo rooms. It was hoped their spirits would be incorporated in succeeding generations.
TUZI_120720_152.JPG: Bug carcasses
TUZI_120720_160.JPG: Roof Top Living
Roof tops were additional living spaces for the southern Sinagua. From here, they could see many miles over to the distant mountains, watch the morning sun light up the land, test wind directions, look for rain in the clouds overhead and wonder about the moon and stars at night.
Roofs were fine places to grind dried kernels of corn, weave sandals and baskets from yucca plants and stretch animal hides to dry. Flint knapping -- striking stones against each other -- to make or repair stone tools was another constant occupation.
Perhaps roof tops were used most often as places to watch for traders bringing goods or neighbors bearing news of the outside world.
TUZI_120720_179.JPG: Desiccated mouse
TUZI_120720_216.JPG: Trade
Trading with neighbors in prehistoric time was essential as few tribes were self sufficient.
The Sinagua acquired Anasazi black-on-white and Hopi black-on-yellow pottery, parrots from Mexico (probably for ceremonial purposes), and seashells from the Gulf of Mexico. Hohokam traders from the south and northern Sinagua and Anasazi came here for salt from the lake deposits, argillite -- a soft, red stone valued for ornaments -- and copper ore from the Black Hills.
Traders brought news of other tribes along with their goods. Changes in customs and ideas frequently followed the trade routes.
We still have much to learn about the people and practices of early trading ventures. Was there only informal bartering between neighbors or did tribes set up trading posts in other villages? Did they have trading fairs? What was their medium of exchange -- a bag of salt for two pots?
TUZI_120720_222.JPG: Minerals in the Mountains:
The colorful outcrops on Mingus Mountain in front of you yielded copper ore, argillite, and malachite and azurite (for paints and coloring) used by prehistoric people for trade goods or ornaments.
Long after the Sinagua abandoned this pueblo, mining companies arrived to extract ore from some of the richest copper deposits in the world: Jerome, the town built for the miners, is visible on the upper mountain slopes.
The process of extracting copper included crushing the ore, mixing it with water to form a slurry, and then removing the metal. The slurry residue (tailings) was pumped into the lowlands, forming the orange expanse below you. The area is periodically flooded to control dust.
TUZI_120720_225.JPG: The Plaza
Life for prehistoric peoples was lived mainly out of doors.
The area in front of you -- the only relatively flat site on the ridge top -- - was probably a community gathering place. Residents made their household goods, pottery and ornaments here and traders displayed their goods for barter. Plazas provided space for dancing, playing games of skill or chance, or exchanging the latest news. Festivals with neighboring pueblos or religious ceremonies might have taken place, also.
TUZI_120720_228.JPG: The Mystery of Their Leaving:
Much of life in the Tuzigoot pueblo remains a puzzle to us, but the largest missing piece is what happened after 1400? Why did the Sinagua - successful builders and farmers - leave the beautiful Verde Valley? Did the rains stop for a few years or diseases strike them? Were there internal conflicts?
For over 400 years the Sinagua survived, yet we do not know what became of them. No separate Sinagua tribe exists today.
Tuzigoot National Monument is one of the many national historic sites set aside by the American people that the National Park Service manages and preserves for future generations.
AAA "Gem": AAA considers this location to be a "must see" point of interest. To see pictures of other areas that AAA considers to be Gems, click here.
Wikipedia Description: Tuzigoot National Monument
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Tuzigoot National Monument, near Cottonwood, Arizona, preserves a 2 to 3 story pueblo ruin on the summit of a limestone and sandstone ridge just east of Clarkdale, Arizona, 120 feet (36 meters) above the Verde River floodplain. The National Park Service currently owns 58 acres, within an authorized boundary of 834 acres .
Tuzigoot is Apache for "crooked water", from nearby Peck's lake, a cutoff meander of the Verde River. Historically, it was built by the Sinagua people between 1125 and 1400 CE. Tuzigoot is the largest and best-preserved of the many Sinagua pueblo ruins in the Verde Valley.
Tuzigoot is located on land once owned by United Verde/Phelps Dodge. The corporation sold the site to Yavapai County for $1, so that the excavation could be completed under the auspices of federal relief projects. The County in turn transferred the land to the Federal Government .
Tuzigoot was excavated from 1933 to 1935 by Louis Caywood and Edward Spicer of the University of Arizona, with funding from the federal Civil Works Administration and Works Project Administration. In 1935-1936, with additional federal funding, the ruins were prepared for public display, and a Pueblo Revival-style museum and visitor center was constructed.
Franklin D. Roosevelt designated Tuzigoot Ruins as a U.S. National Monument on July 25, 1939. The Tuzigoot National Monument Archeological District was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on October 15, 1966 .
The ruins are surrounded by the tailings pond of the former United Verde copper mine at Jerome. The tailings have recently been stabilized and revegetated .
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