Casa Grande Ruin

A free download from http://www.dertz.in


Casa Grande Ruin

The Project Gutenberg EBook of Casa Grande Ruin, by Cosmos
Mindeleff This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and
with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away
or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
Title: Casa Grande Ruin Thirteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of
Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1891-92,
Government Printing Office, Washington, 1896, pages 289-318
Author: Cosmos Mindeleff
Release Date: January 10, 2006 [EBook #17487]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CASA
GRANDE RUIN ***

Produced by Louise Hope, Carlo Traverso, and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced
from images generously made available by the Bibliothèque nationale
de France (BnF/Gallica) at http://gallica.bnf.fr)

* * * * *
CASA GRANDE RUIN
BY
COSMOS MINDELEFF
* * * * *
CONTENTS
Introduction 295 Location and character 295 History and literature 295
Description 298 The Casa Grande group 298 Casa Grande ruin 306
State of preservation 306 Dimensions 307 Detailed description 309
Openings 314 Conclusions 318
ILLUSTRATIONS
Plate LI. Map of Casa Grande group 298 LII. Ground plan of Casa
Grande ruin 302 LIII. General view of Casa Grande ruin 305 LIV.
Standing wall near Casa Grande 307 LV. Western front of Casa Grande
ruin 309 LVI. Interior wall of Casa Grande ruin 310 LVII. Blocked
opening in western wall 312 LVIII. Square opening in southern room
314 LIX. Remains of lintel 317 LX. Circular opening in northern room
319
Fig. 328. Map of large mound 301 329. Map of hollow mound 304 330.
Elevations of walls, middle room 315
* * * * *
CASA GRANDE RUIN
By Cosmos Mindeleff
* * * * *

INTRODUCTION.
LOCATION AND CHARACTER.
The Casa Grande ruin, situated near Gila river, in southern Arizona, is
perhaps the best known specimen of aboriginal architecture in the
United States, and no treatise on American antiquities is complete
without a more or less extended description of it. Its literature, which
extends over two centuries, is voluminous, but of little value to the
practical scientific worker, since hardly two descriptions can be found
which agree. The variations in size of the ruin given by various authors
is astonishing, ranging from 1,500 square feet to nearly 5 acres or about
200,000 square feet in area. These extreme variations are doubtless due
to difference of judgment as to what portion of the area covered by
remains of walls should be assigned to the Casa Grande proper, for this
structure is but a portion of a large group of ruins.
So far as known to the writer no accurate plan of the Casa Grande ruin
proper has hitherto been made, although plans have been published;
and very few data concerning the group of which it forms a part are
available. It would seem, therefore, that a brief report presenting
accurate plans and careful descriptions may be of value, even though
no pretention to exhaustive treatment is made.
HISTORY AND LITERATURE.
The earlier writers on the Casa Grande generally state that it was in
ruins at the time of the first Spanish invasion of the country, in 1540,
and quote in support of this assertion Castañeda's description of a ruin
encountered on the march.[1] Castañeda remarks that, "The structure
was in ruins and without a roof." Elsewhere he says that the name
"Chichilticale" was given to the place where they stopped because the
monks found in the vicinity a house which had been inhabited by a
people who came from Cibola. He surmises that the ruin was formerly
a fortress, destroyed long before by the barbarous tribes which they
found in the country. His description of these tribes seems to apply to
the Apache.

[Footnote 1: Castañeda in Ternaux-Compans. Voyage de Cibola.
French text, p. 1, pp. 41, 161-162. (The original text--Spanish--is in the
Lenox Library; no English translation has yet been published.)]
The geographic data furnished by Castañeda and the other chroniclers
of Coronado's expedition is very scanty, and the exact route followed
has not yet been determined and probably never will be. So far as these
data go, however, they are against the assumption that the Chichilticale
of Castañeda is the Casa Grande of today. Mr. A. F. Bandelier, whose
studies of the documentary history of the southwest are well known,
inclines to the opinion that the vicinity of Old Camp Grant, on the Rio
San Pedro, Arizona, more nearly fill the descriptions. Be this as it may,
however, the work of Castañeda was lost to sight, and it is not until
more than a century later that