ETHNOZOOLOGY OF THE TEWA INDIANS 



By Junius Henderson and John Peabody Harrington^ 



GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS 



*" I 'HE fauna of a region, like its flora and geology, bears an inti- 

 J|[ mate relation to the culture of its human inhabitants.^ A 

 nomadic people is generally of necessity dependent on ani- 

 mal life for sustenance, while a sedentary people, if numerous, 

 remaining for a long period in permanent habitations, must be 

 dependent more largely on direct products of the soil, except perhaps 

 when hving on the seashore, where almost inexhaustible fisheries 

 furnish abundant food, or near the range of such animals as the 

 caribou or the now nearly extinct American bison. A large number 

 of people remainmg constantly in one place and depending the year 

 round on the game of the region would soon destroy their food supply. 

 A nomadic tribe, wandering liither and tliither, is constantly pene- 

 trating new game preserves and allowing the game in the old pre- 

 serves to increase in abundance. 



The ancient peoples, the remains of whose dweUings are found so 

 abundantly in the country of the Tewa Indians, northwest of Santa 

 Fe, New Mexico, were surely too •numerous to have derived any 

 considerable part of their sustenance for even a few months from 

 the native mammals, birds, and other animals of the region, even if 

 game were much more abundant than now, a condition wliich may 

 well be doubted. If the simultaneous occupancy of only a small pro- 

 portion of the ruins be supposed, there still would not have been 

 enough game to support the population. However, it is probable 

 that wild game formed an important supplement to the products of 

 their cornfields and the native plants. 



Bandelier ^ says of the region about the Rito de los Frijoles : 



Game of all kinds, deer, elk, mountain sheep, bears, and turkeys, roamed about the 

 region in numbers, and the brook afforded fish. 



In a footnote he adds : 



All the kinds of game mentioned were abundant around the Rito de loe Frijoles in 

 former times, but the communal hunts of the Pueblos, and later on the merciless 

 slaughter of the Apaches, have greatly reduced it. 



1 The ethnological portion of this memoir is the work of Mr. Harrington, the zoological, that of Pro- 

 fessor Henderson. 



^Springer, Frank, The Field Session of the School of American Archaeology, Science, n. s., xxxn, 623, 

 1910. 



3 Bandelier, A. F., Final Report of Investigations among the Indians of the Southwestern United States, 

 Carried on Mainly in the Years from 1880 to 1885, Part n, Papers Archasol. Inst. Amer.,Amer. scr., iv, 141, 

 1892. 



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