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Updated: June 17, 2025
In modern pictography a representation of the heart is often depicted at the blind extremity of this line, as if, in fact, there was a connection with this organ and the tubes through which the breath passes. In the Sikyatki pottery, however, I find only this one specimen of drawing in which an attempt to represent internal organs is made.
Comparatively speaking, it was a large, compact, well-built pueblo, and, from the great piles of débris in the neighborhood, would seem to have been occupied during several generations. The pottery found in the neighborhood is the fine, ancient Tusayan ware, like that of Sikyatki and Shuñopovi.
This style of decoration is only sparingly used on Sikyatki ware. The crosshatching is provisionally interpreted as a mosaic pattern, and reminds one of those beautiful forms of turquois mosaic on shell, bone, or wood found in ancient pueblos, and best known in modern times in the square ear pendants of Hopi women.
There are many ruins situated on the periphery of Tusayan which are connected traditionally with the Hopi, but are not here mentioned. Of these, the so-called "Fire-house" is said to have been the home of the ancestors of Sikyatki, and Kintiel of certain Zuñi people akin to the Hopi.
None of these figures, however, have yet been found on ancient Tusayan ceramics. Taken in connection with facts adduced by Hodge indicative of a recent advent of this vigorous Athapascan tribe into Tusayan, it would seem that the use of the Tacab katcina pictures was of recent date, and is therefore not to be expected on the prehistoric pottery of the age of that found in Sikyatki.
The jar illustrated in plate CXLV, b, is ornamented with highly conventionalized figures on four sides, and is the only one taken from the Sikyatki cemeteries in which the designs are limited to the equatorial surface.
Although there is other evidence than this of the use of square ear-pendants, set with mosaic, among the ancient people and traditions point the same way this figure of the head of a woman from Sikyatki leaves no doubt of the existence of this form of ornament in that ancient pueblo.
I find no mention of Sikyatki in early historical documents, nor can the name be even remotely identified with any which has been given to a Tusayan pueblo.
Evidences of the use of a white pigment as a slip were found on one or two fragments of fine pottery from Awatobi, but no decoration of this kind was observed on the Sikyatki vessels. The red ware is the same as that found in ancient Cibola, while one or two fragments of glossy black recall the type common to modern Santa Clara.
From good evidence, I suspect that the arrival of this phratry was comparatively late in Tusayan history, and it is possible that Sikyatki was destroyed before their advent, for in all the legends which I have been able to gather no one ascribes to Sikyatki any clan belonging to the phratries which are said to have migrated from the far south.
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