Research Items

Abstract

ANCIENT INDIAN CULTURES ON THE SAN JUAN RIVER.—A dispatch from, the New York correspondent of the Times, published on March 6, gives some interesting details of the results of excavations conducted by Mr. Earl H. Morris in New Mexico and Arizona during a period of seven years. Five stages of culture were found, of which the most important were the first and third. To the first the high antiquity of 4000 B.C. is attributed, but on what ground is not stated. This culture came from the south; it corresponds in many respects with that of the present Indians of Northern Mexico, but although weaving and agriculture were practised, no pottery was made. In the third stage masonry appears, and a high degree of art in making pottery and in weaving and dyeing is shown. In the following decadent periods artistic skill disappeared with the loss of the earlier cultural standards. In the fourth or Chaco period the people became more essentially cliff dwellers, with large communal homes in caves containing as many as a thousand rooms. These cliff dwellers were sun worshippers and buried with their dead a supply of sandals, food, and weapons. A large number of skeletal remains and skulls were discovered, exhibiting divergences which will probably afford evidence as to the sequence of racial differences.