606 EXPEDITION TO ARIZONA IN 1895 (ETH. ANN. 17 
EVIDENCES OF FIRE IN THE DESTRUCTION 
Wherever excavations were conducted in the eastern section of 
Awatobi, we could not penetrate far below the surface without encoun- 
tering unmistakable evidences of a great conflagration. The effect of 
the fire was particularly disastrous in the rooms of the eastern section, 
or that part of the pueblo contiguous to the mission. Hardly a single 
object was removed from this part of Awatobi that had not been 
charred. Many of the beams were completely burned; others were 
charred only on their surfaces. The rcoms were filled with ashes and 
seorize, while the walls had been cracked as if by intense heat. 
Perhaps the most significant fact in regard to the burning of Awatobi 
was seen in some of the houses where the fire seems to have been less 
intense. In many chambers of the eastern section, which evidently 
were used as granaries, the corn was stacked in piles just as it is today 
under many of the living rooms at Walpi, a fact which tends to show 
that there was no attempt to pillage the pueblo before its destruction. 
The ears of corn in these store-rooms were simply charred, but so well 
preserved that entire ears of maize were collected in great numbers. It 
may here be mentioned that upon one of the stacks of corn I found dur- 
ing my excavations for the Hemenway Expedition in 1892, a rusty iron 
knife-blade, showing that the owner of the room was acquainted with 
objects of Spanish manufacture. This blade is now deposited with the 
Hemenway collection in the Peabody Museum at Cambridge. 
THE RUINS OF THE MISSION 
The mission church of San Bernardino de Awatobi was erected very 
early in the history of the Spanish occupancy, and its ruined walls are 
the only ones now standing above the surface. This building was con- 
structed by the padres on a mesa top, while the churches at Walpi and 
Shunopovi were built in the foothills near those pueblos. The mission 
at Oraibi likewise stood on a mesa top, so that we must qualify Minde- 
lefi’s statement! that ‘at Tusayan there is no evidence that a church 
or mission house ever formed part of the villages on the mesa sum- 
mits. ... These summits have been extensively occupied only in com- 
paratively recent time, although one or more churches may have been 
built here at an early date as outlooks over the fields in the valley 
below.” 
At the time of the Spanish invasion three of the Hopi villages stood 
on the foothills or lower terraces of the mesas on which they now stand, 
and the other two, Awatobi and Oraibi, occupied the same sites as 
today, on the summits of the mesas. 
I believe that at the time of the Spanish discovery of Tusayan by 
Pedro de Tobar in 1540, there were only five Tusayan towns—Walpi, 
1 Architecture of Cibola and Tusayan, p. 225. 
