324 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS [VOL. 5° 



Grande, or in the direction Kino approached it, would bring one to 

 the neighborhood of Florence, or about opposite the mounds near 

 the railroad station. Evidently this was the place where Escalante 

 and his two companions left the main force and swam the river to 

 examine ruins on the opposite side. 



The Pima Indians call these ruins Va a ki, r but also sometimes 

 designate them Civan a va a ki, to which is prefixed the name of some 

 chief or other great man. Thus Casa Grande is called Sial'tcutuk 

 civan a va a ki, the ancient (?) house of chief (?) Morning Green 

 (Blue). The meaning of the word Civan a is unknown. The older 

 Pimas gave this name or some modification of it to Kino and Font, 

 the latter of whom translated it "Hombre Amargo," Bitter Man, civ 

 in Pima meaning bitter. It has been customary to consider Civan a 

 as the proper name of a chief, but this is not wholly warranted, espe- 

 cially as the word prefixed to va a ki is employed to designate several 

 other ruins besides Casa Grande, where it is also used with a special 

 name of a chief, as Black Sinew, String, and White Feather. The 

 author supposes that Civan a is an old, perhaps archaic, word for 

 chief or ruler. 



Conclusions 



The scientific results of the work at Casa Grande in the winter of 

 1906-07 cannot be sufficiently elaborated in a short preliminary arti- 

 cle, but they may be in part briefly stated as follows : 



Many rooms have been discovered in the surrounding mounds on 

 a level below that of the lowest floor of the main building. These 

 rooms, like Casa Grande, are enclosed by a common wall, the 

 rectangular enclosed area being called a compound. Some of 

 these newly discovered houses are larger than Casa Grande 

 itself, but not one of them has the same number or distribution of 

 rooms. The houses are so constructed that their roofs were on a 



1 The significance of the word va a ki is also obscure, ki in Pima and Hopi 

 means house ; va a ki recalls the Hopi patki, a name applied to those Hopi clans 

 which are said to have come to Walpi from Palatkwabi, or the Giant Cactus 

 country, supposed to border the Gila and Salt rivers. The Hopi claim that 

 some of the Patki clans built the Great Houses of the Gila, Verde, and Tonto 

 valleys is trustworthy and can be verified by archeology. As the Pimas hold 

 that the former inhabitants of the Tonto Basin spoke their language, it is 

 logical to conclude that the ancestors of some of the now composite Hopis 

 were practically in the same culture as the ancestors of some of the Pima clans, 

 and that they were the Ootam or builders of the Great Houses of the Gila and 

 Salado valleys. 



