Navajo rugs, blankets and weavings
Athabascan Navajo migration southwest - page 2 of 5

The archaeology of early Navajo origins has been studied more than the other Athbascan groups because of the large amount of cultural resources management work done in northwestern New Mexico. Archaeologists divide Navajo occupation into two phases:

• the Dinetah Phase
• and the Gobernador Phase.

During the Dinetah Phase, 1450-1680 A.D., we find burned structures in the style of early Navajo structures known as forked-stick hogans, and Dinetah pottery is gray with pointed bottoms. There are other sites in the same area with hearths and plain ware pottery dated 50 - 100 years earlier, which may be Navajo or Ute; however, 1450 A.D. is considered the probable earliest date for Navajo sites. The problem of old or dead wood affects the accuracy of many of the dates.

Inside a sheltered entryway, the hogans have central hearths and mealing bins for grinding corn flour and other foods. Much like the ancestral Pueblo "pithouses" built nearly 1000 years earlier, many of these housed a large family of farmers working the soils of the mesatops and canyons. Others seem to have been the homes of single, perhaps unmarried, men living near their families. These hint at the early development of the uniquely Navajo settlement pattern in the Southwest. Traditionally, the living group or outfit, changes size during the year, with families clustering in winter and scattering in summer. The local community changes as well over the long term as families grow, children marry, and elders are lost. Bare poles are all that mark hogans once shared by families in the Gobernador. Once the forked-stick structures fail, they collapse to the ground. Unless the wood was scavenged or recycled into another home or building, the fallen house beams create a "wheel spoke" pattern.

When work on Navajo Dam and Reservoir brought archaeologists back to study what would be lost beneath the water, most agreed on the broad outlines of Navajo archaeology: The Navajo had arrived in the Southwest before the Spanish Entrada of 1540-1541; they had moved into New Mexico's canyonlands between 1500 and 1700; the pueblitos of Dinétah were built by Navajos working alongside Pueblo "refugees" during the late 1600s and early 1700s; and the Gobernador region was abandoned by about 1750. The confluence of the Los Pinos and the San Juan, where the Navajo had made their home, has now disappeared under the rising waters of Navajo Reservoir.

As archaeologists have learned new ways of working in the Gobernador, they have found Navajo hogan sites which are nearly five hundred years old. In Navajo oral history, though, their story starts long before the first hogan is built. What archaeologists see in the Gobernador is only a small part of the story of Dinétah. Each new study, whether of archaeological sites or traditional knowledge, brings us closer to the many worlds which meet here.

Dinetah phase Navajo migration southwest - page 3

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