Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 26, 2025
It has been said that in ancient times, before the twin mounds of Küküchomo were erected, the people of Sikyatki were greatly harassed by the young slingers and archers of Walpi, who would come across to the edge of the high cliff and assail them with impunity.
"This was a two-year famine and almost everybody left Walpi and wandered from village to village, living wherever they could get food. There had been more rain and better crops in some of the other places. "Ever since then some Walpi people have scattered among other villages, where they married, and some went as far as the Rio Grande villages, and some perished on the way.
Moreover, it is probable indeed, quite certain that most of the portable objects were carried from the abandoned pueblo to the present village when the latter was founded; but the old cemeteries of Walpi contain many ancient mortuary bowls which, when exhumed, will doubtless contribute a most interesting chapter to the history of modern Tusayan decorative art.
On the First Mesa we find Walpi, Sichomovi, and Hano, the latter not Hopi but a Tewa village built about 1700 by immigrants from the Rio Grande Valley, and at the foot of this mesa the modern village of Polacca with its government school and trading post. On Second Mesa are Mashongnovi, Shipaulovi, and Shungopovi, with Toreva Day School at its foot.
They make pottery, cloth, and baskets, and are a busy people. There are seven villages built on three mesas in the northern desert. One of the largest, Orabi, has a thousand inhabitants. Walpi numbers about two hundred and thirty people, all living in this one great building of many rooms. They are divided into brotherhoods, or phratries, and each brotherhood has several large families.
We solved the difficulty by renting a room in one of the pueblo houses. We followed the two-mile trail up the steep cliff to Walpi and found ourselves in a human aerie. Nobody knows how many centuries have passed since this tribe first made their home where we found them now.
He told of Walpi, a village out on the end of a great promontory, its only access a narrow neck of land less than a rod wide, with one little path worn more than a foot deep in the solid rock by the feet of ten generations passing over it, where now live about two hundred and thirty people in one building.
Many, possibly the majority, of modern customs at Walpi are inherited, but others are incorporated and still others, of ancient date, have become extinct. As much stress is laid in this memoir on the claim that objects from Sikyatki indicate a culture uninfluenced by the Spaniards, it is well to present the evidence on which this assertion is based.
No adequate punishment was inflicted on the inhabitants of Walpi for the destruction of the town of Awatobi, and although there were a few military expeditious to Tusayan no effort at subjugation was seriously made. Tusayan was regarded as an asylum for the discontented or apostate, and about the close of the seventeenth century many people from the Rio Grande fled there for refuge.
Several of these metates were taken by Indian women, who prized them so highly that they loaded the stones on burros and carried them ten miles to Walpi, where they are now applied to the same purpose for which they were used over two centuries ago.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking