Archaeologica.org

All -

I know that this is hyped up video.


but the essential message is real.

http://salonesoterica.wordpress.com/200 ... -prophecy/

I wish to promulgate the point

That NewAge touchy/feely is out.

Direct, continuous contact with our world is in.

And there is plenty of room to move, here.


hoka hey


john

john wrote:All -

I wish to promulgate the point

That NewAge touchy/feely is out.

Direct, continuous contact with our world is in.

And there is plenty of room to move, here.

hoka hey

john

That's a beautiful video, John. The wise words of the Hopi Elders over such wonderful natural backdrops, some of them showing spirit in a tangible form. Thank you.

And I agree with you. I think the Hopi Elders would be vastly amused to be thought of as New Age, with their traditions older than dirt.

Why do the Hopi and the Navaho live in holes in the ground when they have all around them multi story apartment house ruins with large scale water storage and irrigation systems surrounding them?
Could they not learn anything technical from these predecessors?

Are you sure you've got that right, KB?

I thought the Hopis lived in stone houses - although their shamans go into a sort of hole in the ground during their rituals, to commune with the earth.

i'm not at all certain, but i thought they lived in mud brick hogans.

We need John to tell us. He's the Hopi expert.

kbs2244 wrote:Why do the Hopi and the Navaho live in holes in the ground when they have all around them multi story apartment house ruins with large scale water storage and irrigation systems surrounding them?
Could they not learn anything technical from these predecessors?

All -

First, to straighten out the pueblo (Hopi)/hogan (Navajo) confusion.

Two entirely different peoples, two entirely different architectures.

If I remember correctly, the Navajo are relatively quite recent

Athabascan - read Northeastern American - immigrants to the Southwest.

The Hopi are of far, far older Ute-Aztecan stock

OK.

Pueblo architecture consists of multistory communal, rectangular buildings
built of mud brick with some drystone wall work (note: this is Coconino
sandstone territory, so there is a damn near infinite supply of somewhat rectangular pieces of weathered out sandstone to be had for the picking up of it). These buildings are flat-roofed. The roofs - and the intervening floors - are constructed by setting tree-poles into the walls as rafters, then constructing a roof or floor of wattle and adobe (mud). The roofs were used for drying food, solcializing, etc.. Staircases as we know them were nonexistent; the Hopi used wooden pole ladders to get from story to story. The interior wall were whitewashed with a form of gypsum. These pueblos, or villages were generally built on top of a mesa with an eye to defensibility.
Very early structures - Canyon de Chelly for example - were almost entirely drystone work, and were built into the great overhanging cavelike rockshelters of the canyon cliffs. They were reached by a series of tree pole ladders (a tree whose limbs had been trimmed to stubs which served as rungs).

Now the hogan. The hogan is a single family, single room, surface built brush and mud shelter. Popular perception has the hogan as octagonal - actually over its history it has had many geometries ranging from almost circular to pentagonal, etc., etc.. Hogans were originally built by erecting a domelike structure of tree trunks, then creating walls and roof of adobe wattlework. Hogans are build on the "flatlands" as the Navajos are can be characterised as pastoralists, vs. the Hopi, who can be chacterised as hunting agriculturalists.

Now for the kicker. The Hopi are a society organised by clan. Each clan had a Kiva - I have a recollection somewhere that sometimes two clans might share a Kiva. Unlike their almost Western looking rectangular pueblos built above ground, the Kiva was a circular room built below ground. Later note: brain fart on my end; earlier Kivas tended to be circular, latter Kivas tended to be rectangular. Entrance and exit was acheived by means of a ladder which led through the central smokehole. The myth cycle of the Hopis begins with, and is memorialised by the use of the Kiva for spiritual purposes. Sacred items necessary to the cycle were stored in the Kivas, and altars were built into same. Each Kiva has its own ceremonial cycle. Once again, I'll recommend Frank Water's "Book of the Hopi" for those who want to get into this to some depth, because its way too big to get into here.

Finally, I just remembered a fairly amazing description of the Hopi Snake Dance ceremony by - of all people - Theodore Roosevelt. I'll see if I can hunt it down................


hoka hey

john

Bingo.

found it -


http://www.worldspirituality.org/hopi-snake-dance.html



j

If you really want to wipe yourself out -


http://www.gutenberg.org/files/19856/19 ... 9856-h.htm

http://www.kstrom.net/isk/maps/houses/hogan.html


j

I am not talking about their religious side here.
That is another discussion unless it relates to a genocidal style uprising that wiped out the more advanced peoples.
The evidence just looks like a huge regression in both the social and the technological parts of the society.
They reverted to small family groups living in very primitive huts and could not understand the need for, or perhaps understand how to, maintain the very large scale irrigation systems.

kbs2244 wrote:I am not talking about their religious side here.
That is another discussion unless it relates to a genocidal style uprising that wiped out the more advanced peoples.
The evidence just looks like a huge regression in both the social and the technological parts of the society.
They reverted to small family groups living in very primitive huts and could not understand the need for, or perhaps understand how to, maintain the very large scale irrigation systems.

kbs2244 -

Two different peoples.

Two different cultures.

Two different times.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navajo_people


hoka hey

john

The Navajo seem to be survivors. But it says they were parallel with the Pueblo people.

Navajo oral history seems to indicate a long relationship with Pueblo people[3] and a willingness to adapt ideas into their own culture. Trade between the long-established Pueblo peoples and the Athabaskans was important to both groups. The Spanish records say by the mid 16th century, the Pueblos exchanged maize and woven cotton goods for bison meat, hides and material for stone tools from Athabaskans who either traveled to them or lived around them. In the 18th century the Spanish report that the Navajo had large numbers of livestock and large areas of crops. The Navajo probably adapted many Pueblo ideas, as well as practices of early Spanish settlers, into their own very different culture.
The Spanish first use the word Navajo ("Apachu de Nabajo") specifically in the 1620s, referring to the people in the Chama valley region east of the San Juan River and northwest of Santa Fe. By the 1640s, the term Navajo was applied to these same people. The Spanish recorded in 1670s they were living in a region called Dinetah, which was about sixty miles (100 km) west of the Rio Chama valley region. In the 1780s the Spanish were sending military expeditions against the Navajo in the southwest and west of that area, in the Mount Taylor and Chuska Mountain regions of New Mexico.
Navajos seem to have a history in the last 1,000 years of expanding their range, refining their self identity and their significance to others. This probably resulted from a cultural combination of Endemic warfare(raids) and commerce with the Pueblo, Apache, Ute, Comanche and Spanish people, set in the changing natural environment of the Southwest.

john wrote: Finally, I just remembered a fairly amazing description of the Hopi Snake Dance ceremony by - of all people - Theodore Roosevelt. I'll see if I can hunt it down................

I've a feeling you may already know this, but DH Lawrence also wrote about his experience of one of these ceremonies (after all, he lived in Taos for a while) - think it's in one of the collected essays type books. I'm no Hopi expert by a long shot, though I've certainly found them interesting enough to acquire the odd book (hmmm... excuse the pomposity of that statement - it's the Uto-Aztecan association that caught my attention) notably one of traditional Hopi sexual tales, which prove that as a people they had/have a well-developed sense of humour.

kbs2244 wrote:The Navajo seem to be survivors. But it says they were parallel with the Pueblo people.

Navajo oral history seems to indicate a long relationship with Pueblo people[3] and a willingness to adapt ideas into their own culture. Trade between the long-established Pueblo peoples and the Athabaskans was important to both groups. The Spanish records say by the mid 16th century, the Pueblos exchanged maize and woven cotton goods for bison meat, hides and material for stone tools from Athabaskans who either traveled to them or lived around them. In the 18th century the Spanish report that the Navajo had large numbers of livestock and large areas of crops. The Navajo probably adapted many Pueblo ideas, as well as practices of early Spanish settlers, into their own very different culture.
The Spanish first use the word Navajo ("Apachu de Nabajo") specifically in the 1620s, referring to the people in the Chama valley region east of the San Juan River and northwest of Santa Fe. By the 1640s, the term Navajo was applied to these same people. The Spanish recorded in 1670s they were living in a region called Dinetah, which was about sixty miles (100 km) west of the Rio Chama valley region. In the 1780s the Spanish were sending military expeditions against the Navajo in the southwest and west of that area, in the Mount Taylor and Chuska Mountain regions of New Mexico.
Navajos seem to have a history in the last 1,000 years of expanding their range, refining their self identity and their significance to others. This probably resulted from a cultural combination of Endemic warfare(raids) and commerce with the Pueblo, Apache, Ute, Comanche and Spanish people, set in the changing natural environment of the Southwest.

kbs224 -

More info.

http://www.iaiachronicle.org/archives/N ... ry2005.htm

hoka hey

john

Well, I guess I am not as much interested in where they came from as to why they seemed to be so selective as to what they learned and who from.
The Pueblo culture was obviously more advanced, but the just co-existed with it.
But the Spanish brought sheep and they jumped all over the idea.