HUNTING BASKETS IN ARIZONA 



By NEIL M. JUDD 

 Curator, Division of Archeology, U. S. National Museum 



Archeologists sometimes go on wild goose chases. My last field 

 trip was just such a one and there have been others before. Archeo- 

 logical wild goose chases result from the fact that reported discov- 

 eries, once run to earth, are not always what they seemed to the 

 original observer or. with equal likelihood, they are not always what 

 the archeologist hopes they might prove to be. 



For example, when I first learned that a number of old baskets had 

 been seen lying about in caves in the rugged Natanes Plateau of east- 

 ern Arizona, there flashed before my mind's eye that same familiar 

 mirage which sooner or later beckons to every student of the pre- 

 historic Pueblos: A cave dwelling just as its aboriginal inhabitants 

 left it, undisturbed by modern hands. Too, there was the vaguest sort 

 of possibility these baskets might be relics of the ancient Basket 

 Makers whose slab-sided pit-houses so frequently underlie habitations 

 of the later Pueblo tribes. 



There was some justification for this latter thought, however fan- 

 tastic it subsequently proved to be. The so-called Basket Makers, first 

 farmers of the Southwest, had changed from a nomadic to a semi- 

 sedentary mode of life upon acquisition of maize. Their cultural re- 

 mains, recovered by painstaking excavators from sand-filled caves in 

 southern Utah and northeastern Arizona, provide a fairly compre- 

 hensive index to the degree of civilization these ancient folk had at- 

 tained 1,500 years before Spanish conquistadores began the written 

 history of the New World. And artifacts peculiar to the Basket Mak- 

 ers had been found in the Guadalupe Mountains of southern New 

 Mexico. Between the Guadalupes and Navajo Mountain, on the 

 northern Arizona border, lie 500 miles of semiarid land— broad desert 

 valleys, deep canyons, towering mesas, gnarled mountain masses gray- 

 green with oaks, junipers, and pines. Somewhere in these far-flung 

 miles the primitive Basket Makers should have left footprints as they 

 plodded southward from the basin of the Rio San Juan. Who could 

 say but that an echo of that distant migration might be found in the 

 very caves of which I had heard? 



My first intimation of these, and the baskets they sheltered, came in 

 early February, 1930, while I was engaged with an aerial survey of 



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