THE STONE LIONS OF COCHITI - AND OF ZUNI

By Erik K. Reed,
Regional Archaeologist.

For years, Zuni Indians from westernmost New Mexico have traveled from Zuni to a place near the Rio Grande north of Cochiti Pueblo, on pilgrimages to a shrine 200 miles from their village. Even within the past 3 or 4 years, Zunis have camped in Frijoles Canyon, on their way to this same spot. The shrine that draws the Zunis so far from home is a pair of rough figures of mountain lions, rudely carved on an outcrop of tuff, crouching side by side with extended tails. Each is about 6 feet long and 2 feet high, rudely done and in poor condition, worn and disfigured and scarcely recognizable as a lion. Indeed, they have been mistaken for lizards. They are enclosed by a low wall of unshaped stones. This shrine is on the Potrero de las Vacas, one of the long, high, narrow mesas of the Pajarito Plateau, in the rough, little-travelled southern portion of Bandelier National Monument, west of Santa Fe. It is one of the very rare instances of full-size sculpture in aboriginal North America north of Southern Mexico.

The Zunis believe that the stone lions guard the entrance to a place called Shipapolima, the dwelling place of the important supernatural being called Poshaiyanki. Why these rude statues in north-central New Mexico are so important to the distant Zunis is unknown. The ideas of the local pueblos about the lions seem to be entirely different.

The stone lions are important to, and venerated by, the Cochiti Indians who live only about 10 miles to the south. But to the Cochiti they do not represent, as far as is known, an entrance to the dwelling place of a god. The Cochitis call them the "sacred place of Mokatc". Mokatc is the panther-fetich of Cochiti hunters, and is one of the most important animals in Cochiti ritual and belief. The shrine of Mokatc was used as a place of sacred pilgrimage by a secret religious society of Cochiti, probably the hunters' society. The stone lions apparently are still objects of veneration to the Cochitis; tracks of unshod horses have been seen there within the past two or three years. The lions probably were made by the ancestors of the Cochitis who occupied the nearby ruin of Yapashi, which was probably occupied from the 13th to the 16th century.

On another mesa-point further south, the Potrero de los Idolos, there was formerly another pair of rudely carved lions. One of them was destroyed 60 or 70 years ago with dynamite by some ignorant treasure-hunter. The other lion is in fair condition. The Cochiti Indians told Adolph Bandelier in the 1880's that the lions on the Potrero de los Idolos were made by the people of Kuapa (a ruin very near, and ancestral to, Cochiti, occupied during about the same period as Yapashi).