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Updated: May 23, 2025
The explanation of these circular kivas advanced by Nordenskiöld and the Mindeleffs, that they are survivals of round habitations of nomads, has much to commend it; but whether sufficient or not, the geographic limitation of these structures tells in favor of the absence of any considerable migration of the prehistoric peoples of the upper Colorado and Rio Grande watersheds southward into the drainage area of the Gila-Salado.
Although it is well known that the ancient inhabitants of the great houses of the Gila-Salado drainage buried some of their dead within their dwellings, or in other rooms, and that the same mortuary practice was observed in ancient Zuñi-Cibola, up to the time of my excavations this form of burial had never been found in Tusayan.
Although as yet our knowledge of the cliff houses of the upper Gila and Salado and their numerous tributaries is very fragmentary, and generalization on that account unsafe, it may be stated provisionally that no circular kivas have yet been found in any ruins of the Gila-Salado watershed.
The one important difference between the northern and the southern tier of cliff houses is the occurrence of the circular kiva, which has never been reported south of the divide between the Little Colorado and the Gila-Salado drainage. If a kiva was a feature in southern cliff houses, which I doubt, it appears to have been a rectangular chamber similar to a dwelling room.
The rectangular kiva is the ancient form, or rather the original form; the round kiva is not a development from it, but an introduction from an alien people. It never penetrated southward of the Colorado and upper Rio Grande drainage areas because the element which introduced it in the north was never strong enough to influence the house builders of the Gila-Salado and tributary valleys.
In the exhibit of the Mexican Government at Madrid in 1892-93 a fine collection of ancient pottery from Oaxaca was shown, and I have drawings of one of these ladles with the same parallel marks on the handle that are found on Pueblo ware from the Gila-Salado, the Cibola, and the Tusayan regions.
No ruins of circular dwellings occur in the Gila-Salado drainage area, where likewise no circular kivas have been observed. Moreover, the circular form of dwelling and kiva is distinctively characteristic of prehistoric peoples east of Tusayan, and the few instances of their occurrence on its eastern border can readily be explained as extra-Hopi.
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