Navajo rugs, blankets and weavings
Gobernador phase Navajo migration southwest - page 4 of 5

Nowhere is this clearer than at Three Corn Pueblito. The last tree cut for a ceiling beam at this fortification was felled in 1737. When Three Corn was abandoned a few years later, 63 of the pueblo's pots were smashed on top of the community's cemetery. Most were Gobernador Polychrome jars and bowls and Dinetah Grey storage jars, now broken into hundreds of pieces. Some of the broken pots were jars and bowls made in the Zuni and Acoma pueblos, at Jemez' ancestral villages and retreats from the Spanish, in the Keresan pueblos of the middle Rio Grande, in the Tewa villages of the upper Rio Grande, and out on the Hopi Mesas. Centuries-old heirlooms were thrown to the ground along with nearly new pots. A single broken saucer came to Three Corn Pueblito by way of the Spanish Manila galleon trade from the Chinese pottery-making cities of the Ch'ing dynasty.

Clay-covered and pitched basketry jars were used by many cultures of the Southwest for carrying and storing water. Dinetah Grey, the most common Navajo pottery in the Gobernador, may be made as early as the mid-1400s. It remained in use at hogan sites and pueblitos through the 1700s. The Spanish Colonial oil or wine jar came to the Gobernador via the Camino Real from northern Mexico, then out to the Navajo country on a Spanish expedition or through trade. The jar was probably more valuable to the Navajo than its contents.

Spindlewhorls from the Rio Grande Pueblos and the Gobernador were used in "plying" spun thread, or twisting two or more threads together to make a strong fiber cordage for weaving. The Spanish encomienda system forced the Pueblo communities to provide both labor and finished goods to the missions and estancias. As the Spanish, and later the Mexicans, increased their demands for valuables to ship south, particularly cotton and woolen cloth, more Navajo "black blankets" entered the trade market. By 1812, the Navajo woolen goods were described as "the most valuable in the New Mexico province.

Cradleboards have been found in the Gobernador. Traditional Navajo today still make cradleboards from juniper or cedar wood. The cradleboard, a gift of the Holy People, embodies a child's mother, the earth, in the long boards. The crossboards are their father, the sun. Blankets of clouds and ties of sheet lightning and lightning bolts hold the child fast. Over their head, a shade bent like a rainbow keeps them safe.

Burials at Three Corn Pueblito and Frances Canyon Pueblito contained hundreds of European trade beads. Strings of small green, purple, blue, and red glass beads manufactured in the early and mid-1700s were the most common, but some types are as much as 100 years older. Although the Navajo lived far beyond any regular trade route, some goods moving up the Camino Real on supply wagons from New Spain (at first every three years, then yearly) eventually made their way to the Gobernador. Olivella shell beads and abalone shell pendants, valuable aboriginal trade goods, were found as well, along with bone, shell disk, and stone beads.

Two "potmetal" crosses were placed in the grave of a child buried at Three Corn Pueblo. One has an image of Christ on one side and the Virgin Mary on the reverse. Given to acolytes and converts at the Spanish missions, these may have been used simply as decorative pendants in the Gobernador. Spanish attempts to establish missions among the Navajo failed first in the early 1600s, and again in the mid-1700s even though the Navajo had moved closer to Spanish settlements to escape Ute and Comanche raiders.

southwest Navajo migration - page 5

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