Ancestral Hopi Migrations

Assesses the scale and impact of ancestral Hopi migrations, including the origin and spread of Roosevelt Red Ware, and examines the archaeological record of Homol'ovi, presenting evidence that the ancient inhabitants of the Winslow, Arizona, area were immigrants from the Hopi Mesas.

Assesses the scale and impact of ancestral Hopi migrations, including the origin and spread of Roosevelt Red Ware, and examines the archaeological record of Homol'ovi, presenting evidence that the ancient inhabitants of the Winslow, Arizona, area were immigrants from the Hopi Mesas.

Southwestern archaeologists have long speculated about the scale and impact of ancient population movements. In Ancestral Hopi Migrations, Patrick Lyons infers the movement of large numbers of people from the Kayenta and Tusayan regions of northern Arizona to every major river valley in Arizona, parts of New Mexico, and northern Mexico. Building upon earlier studies, Lyons uses chemical sourcing of ceramics and analyses of painted pottery designs to distinguish among traces of exchange, emulation, and migration. He demonstrates strong similarities among the pottery traditions of the Kayenta region, the Hopi Mesas, and the Homol'ovi villages, near Winslow, Arizona. Architectural evidence marshaled by Lyons corroborates his conclusion that the inhabitants of Homol'ovi were immigrants from the north. Placing the Homol'ovi case study in a larger context, Lyons synthesizes evidence of northern immigrants recovered from sites dating between A.D. 1250 and 1450. His data support Patricia Crown's contention that the movement of these groups is linked to the origin of the Salado polychromes and further indicate that these immigrants and their descendants were responsible for the production of Roosevelt Red Ware throughout much of the Greater Southwest. Offering an innovative juxtaposition of anthropological data bearing on Hopi migrations and oral accounts of the tribe's origin and history, Lyons highlights the many points of agreement between these two bodies of knowledge. Lyons argues that appreciating the scale of population movement that characterized the late prehistoric period is prerequisite to understanding regional phenomena such as Salado and to illuminating the connections between tribal peoples of the Southwest and their ancestors.

Becoming Hopi is a comprehensive look at the history of the people of the Hopi Mesas as it has never been told before. The product of more than fifteen years of collaboration between tribal and academic scholars, this volume presents groundbreaking research demonstrating that the Hopi Mesas are among the great centers of the Pueblo world.

"As above, so below. The parallels Gary David has found between the ancient Egyptian sky-ground system involving the pyramids of Giza and the constellation of Orion, and a similar project to build heaven on earth by the Hopi of Arizona, are eerie, compelling, and deeply thought-provoking." -Graham Hancock, author of Magicians of the GodsAccording to their mythological traditions, the Hopi of northern Arizona have survived three world-ages-each created and then destroyed because of social or spiritual chaos. Weare now at the end of the Fourth World, and soon going into the Fifth. Migration legends tell of Serpent People, the Nagas, who sailed on reed rafts across the Pacific from the continent of Mu to America in order to escape a deluge that wiped out the Third World. In antiquity the Hopi performed the Snake Dance in order to bring rain. This ritual still forms a crucial part of their sacred ceremonial cycle, in which the Antelope People equally participate. Some of the main points presented in this book are:*Ancestral Hopi mariners floated eastward with the equatorial countercurrents, landed on the west coast of North America, and gradually worked their way northward to arrive in the Four Corners region of the U.S. *The Hopi emerged from Grand Canyon, transitioning from the Third World into the current Fourth World. *Starting about 2500 BC, the Hopi Snake Clan made migrations north into Canada, south to Central America, west to the Pacific Ocean, and east to the Atlantic Ocean. They perhaps even helped to build Ohio's Great Serpent Mound, which is oriented to the Pole Star and Sirius. *There the Snake Clan and the Horn Clan met with a race of giants called the Allegewi, who built astounding earthworks and possibly even created the Serpent effigy itself. The book provides evidence of the latter group's origin in North Africa.*In their 1994 bestseller The Orion Mystery, Robert Bauval and Adrian Gilbert proposed what is known as the Orion Correlation Theory. They had discovered an ancient "unified ground plan" in which the pyramids at Giza form the pattern of Orion's Belt. According to their entire configuration, the Great Pyramid (Khufu) represents Alnitak, the middle pyramid (Khafra) represents Alnilam, and the slightly offset smaller pyramid (Menkaura) represents Mintaka. *On the other side of the globe I have discovered another Orion template. The Hopi tribe had migrated around the American Southwest for millennia, finally settling in northern Arizona in about the early 12th century AD. They built huge stone "apartment" complexes called pueblos, and subsisted as farmers on the harsh high desert. In Hopi cosmology the region that corresponds to the Duat--Egyptian afterlife--is called Tuuwanasavi (literally, "Center of the World"), located near the three Hopi Mesas. Similar to the ground-sky dualism of the three primary structures at Giza, these natural "pyramids" closely reflect the belt stars of Orion. This bold but rigorously researched book reveals the genetic and cultural connections between diverse peoples, including the Hopi, Hohokam, Mimbres, Navajo, Ojibwa, and Lenni Lenape of North America, as well as the Egyptians and Berbers of North Africa. This 560-page book is packed with 900 endnotes and 265 photos, drawings, maps, and sky charts.

This book demonstrates how one tribe has significantly advanced knowledge about its past through collaboration with anthropologists and historians--Provided by publisher.

As contemporary Native Americans assert the legacy of their ancestors, there is increasing debate among archaeologists over the methods and theories used to reconstruct prehistoric identity and the movement of social groups. This is especially problematic with respect to the emergence of southwestern tribes, which involved shifting populations and identities over the course of more than a thousand years. Wesley Bernardini now draws on an unconventional source, Hopi traditional knowledge, to show how hypotheses that are developed from oral tradition can stimulate new and productive ways to think about the archaeological record. Focusing on insights that oral tradition has to offer about general processes of prehistoric migration and identity formation, he describes how each Hopi clan acquired its particular identity from the experiences it accumulated on its unique migration pathway. This pattern of “serial migration” by small social groups often saw the formation of villages by clans that briefly came together and then moved off again independently, producing considerable social diversity both within and among villages. Using Anderson Mesa and Homol’ovi as case studies, Bernardini presents architectural and demographic data suggesting that the fourteenth century occupation of these regions was characterized by population flux and diversity consistent with the serial migration model. He offers an analysis of rock art motifs—focusing on those used as clan symbols—to evaluate the diversity of group identities, then presents a compositional analysis of Jeddito Yellow Ware pottery to evaluate the diversity of these groups’ eventual migration destinations. Evidence supporting serial migration greatly complicates existing notions of links between ancient and modern social groups, with important implications for the implementation of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. Bernardini’s work clearly demonstrates that studies of cultural affiliation must take into account the fluid nature of population movements and identity in the prehistoric landscape. It takes a decisive step toward better understanding the major demographic change that occurred on the Colorado Plateau from 1275 to 1400 and presents a strategy for improving the reconstruction of cultural identity in the past.

The Safford and Aravaipa valleys of Arizona have always lingered in the wings of Southwestern archaeology, away from the spotlight held by the more thoroughly studied Tucson and Phoenix Basins, the Mogollon Rim area, and the Colorado Plateau. Yet these two valleys hold intriguing clues to understanding the social processes, particularly migration and the interaction it engenders, that led to the coalescence of ancient populations throughout the Greater Southwest in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries A.D. Because the Safford and Aravaipa valleys show cultural influences from diverse areas of the pre-Hispanic Southwest, particularly the Phoenix Basin, the Mogollon Rim, and the Kayenta and Tusayan region, they serve as a microcosm of many of the social changes that occurred in other areas of the Southwest during this time. This research explores the social changes that took place in the Safford and Aravaipa valleys during the thirteenth through the fifteenth centuries A.D. as a result of an influx of migrants from the Kayenta and Tusayan regions of northeastern Arizona. Focusing on domestic architecture and ceramics, the author evaluates how migration affects the expression of identity of both migrant and indigenous populations in the Safford and Aravaipa valleys and provides a model for research in other areas where migration played an important role. Archaeologists interested in the Greater Southwest will find a wealth of information on these little-known valleys that provides contextualization for this important and intriguing time period, and those interested in migration in the ancient past will find a useful case study that goes beyond identifying incidents of migration to understanding its long-lasting implications for both migrants and the local people they impacted.