GILA CLIFF DWELLINGS Administrative History

Bandelier, Hewett, And Hough

Bandelier's long survey was exhaustive and included all of the American Southwest and substantial portions of northwestern Mexico. The cliff dwellings on the upper Gila, not far from the Gila Hot Springs, were described in the document that he eventually prepared for the Archaeological Institute of America and that was published in 1892 as his Final Report of Investigations among Indians of the Southwestern United States, Part II. By 1907, when Gila Cliff Dwellings were made a national monument, he had written the only formal description of the site, based on a four-day visit in January 1884.

His official report of the dwellings included measurements of wall thickness and the diameter of ceiling beams, a sketched plan, a room count, and an assessment of the architecture's condition which he deemed "quite well preserved." The site was evaluated for its defensive capabilities, a common explanation for cliff architecture, and its vulnerability to siege was noted. In addition, Bandelier made some very general comparative observations: a hearth was similar to those at Pecos; the construction of the roofs was "of the pueblo pattern." These and other similarities concerning the sandals, baskets, prayer-plumes and prayer-sticks that he found—combined, of course with the unilineal evolutionary ideas of his mentor Morgan and with his own observations made at the Santo Domingo and Cochiti pueblos—contributed to Bandelier's conclusion "that their makers were in no manner different from the Pueblo Indians in general culture."

In fact, he thought that the architecture, which in his estimation only accidently approached two stories, might even provide a useful model for the development of terraced houses among the northern Pueblos.

Years later this 1892 description prompted Edgar L. Hewett, who was temporarily employed by the Smithsonian as an assistant ethnologist, to include a picture of the cliff dwellings in a 1904 Smithsonian report entitled "A General View of the Archaeology of the Pueblo Region," and to indicate in the text that the site was "of sufficient importance to demand permanent preservation." [21]

Following Hewett's initial report, the Smithsonian published a series of bulletins to consolidate archeological data from the Southwest and to further facilitate the protection of sites. Bulletin No. 35, Antiquities of the Upper Gila and Salt River Valleys in Arizona and New Mexico, which was written by Walter Hough and published in 1907, reprinted Bandelier's report on the Gila Cliff Dwellings as well as that of Henshaw. Most of the sites recorded, however, were (1) those that had been noted by Hough's colleague Jesse Walter Fewkes around the Casa Grande ruins in Arizona and along the nearby rivers, including the Gila as far as Safford, and (2) those observed during Hough's own Gates-Museum 1905 expedition, which had been designed to extend the earlier work of Fewkes by surveying tributary waters of the Gila in eastern Arizona and western New Mexico—specifically the Blue River and headwaters of the San Francisco. [22] That Hough didn't ascend the main stem of the Gila instead is a historical happenstance, shaped perhaps by difficult geography, roads, finances, and the limited knowledge of his guide.

As a partial result, when the Forest Service participated in 1908 with a survey sponsored by the Bureau of American Ethnology to locate and protect historic and prehistoric sites and places of scientific interest on public lands, Gila Forest Supervisor Frank Andrew could report inaccurately but without challenge that the only such site was Gila Cliff Dwellings, which was already protected by proclamation. [23] In 1911, at the national park conference held at Yellowstone National Park, it was then further misreported that Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument "consists of a group of hot springs and cliff houses in the Mogollon Mountains, neither very large nor very important, but are located in a district in which few prehistoric ruins are found." [24] Just the phrase about hot springs, which do not exist on the national monument, suggests how little the site was known.

Some other inaccuracies of that assessment could have been demonstrated with journal entries that Bandelier made during his brief visit to the upper Gila, informal documents that only emerged into public view gradually, starting in the 1960s. The official report regarding archeological sites on the upper Gila differed from the journal entries by degrees of concision and formality, with a consequent loss of detail. For example, Bandelier excluded from his official document local reports of artifact collecting and his own observations about the rifled condition of the cliff dwellings. More importantly, Bandelier left out descriptions of other sites visited near the cliff dwellings, including what is the TJ Ruin, for which he described the following location:

The ruins are directly opposite Mr. Jordan Rogers' [sic] new ranch, on a perfectly bare hill, about sixty-five meters high over the river. The main Gila there hugs the hills close. The ascent is rather steep, and there is a good deal of loose lava rock, but a good trail, though steep, leads up to it.* This trail is not old, it leads to the Gilita [East Fork] and to a cattle ranch situated on that stream. On the very brow of that hill, facing south, south-southwest and southwest to west even, the ruins are situated, completely overlooking the whole valley, an admirable position for defence and observation, as it is a depressed plain, perfectly bare, so that for nearly a mile, on the elevation itself, not a mouse could move without being seen from the pueblo. The latter is small.... [25]

There Bandelier measured a broken mano, sketched a few sherds, and noted that the walls of volcanic rock laid in earth had all fallen, obscuring the plan of the ruin. He saw enough of the architecture, however, to comment on its similarity in style and design—on a smaller scale—with ruins in the Mimbres Valley. Apparently, the scale was sufficiently smaller so that Bandelier did not include this site in his final report. [26]