Canyon
de Chelly
Outstanding
Features
These awesome canyons sheltered prehistoric Pueblo
Indians for 1,800 years and served as an ancestral stronghold of the
Navajo Indians. With its beautiful, steep-walled canyons and many
ruins of prehistoric Indian dwellings nestled below towering cliffs
or perched on high ledges, this monument typifies the colorful Southwestern
Indian country. Adding to this atmosphere are the present-day Navajo
Indian homes that are scattered along the canyon floors. Within the
National Monument are perhaps 800 prehistoric and historic Indian
village sites, representing various stages of Pueblo and later Navajo
cultural development.
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- White House Ruins
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Canyon de Chelly was established
as a national monument by an act of the United States government
on April 1, 1931. The monument is unique in the National Park
system because the legal title to the 130 square miles is vested
in the Navajo tribe and not the National Park Service. Hiking
in the canyon without an authorized guide is thus limited to
the White House Trail. Kini-na-a-kai (White House or Casa Blanca)
was discovered by Lt. J.H. Simpson during his 1848 expedition
through Canyon de Chelly. The name is derived from the white
plastered walls on the upper portion of the ruin. Both levels
of the ruins may have contained as many as 80 rooms, but over
the past 800 years, stream erosion has left only 60 rooms and
4 kivas. Fifty to sixty people may have lived here between A.D.
1040 and 1275. |
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- Located up the main canyon, about
6 miles from Parks Service headquarters, White House is
on of the largest, best preserved, and most accessible
ruins in the monument.
- Behind the back walls of the lower
ruin the smooth cliff face rises 35 feet to the floor
of the cave above. Marks on the face indicate that that
at one time the rooms of the lower building stood several
stories high, and its roof came to with 4 feet of the
cave floor above.
- The upper ruin contains 10 rooms and
has a large room nearly in the center of the cave. The
outside front wall of this room is 12 feet high and still
has the coating of white gypsum clay plaster with a decorative
band of yellow clay for which the ruin was named.
- At the western edge of the lower ruin
are the partial remains of two well built kivas. One kiva
used to have holes in the floor like those used to support
looms in modern Pueblo kivas. The other kiva shows evidence
of six layers of plaster. Modern Zuni Indians have a ceremony
every 4 years in which they re-plaster the smoke stained
kiva interior, and this tradition may give some idea of
how long this kiva was in use.
- A study of the annual growth rings
of its roof timbers indicates that most of the lower ruin
was built after A.D. 1070.
- On the face of the cliffs around White
House ruins and elsewhere in the park are pictographs
and petroglyphs.
Although archaeologists aren't sure what many of the figures
and designs mean, they may have been a combination of
ceremonial ritual, artistic expression, communication
of messages and even idle graffiti. Finely ground
minerals mixed with a binder of water, egg white, urine
or seed oil made up the paints, and fingers or bushes
made from the yucca plants were used to apply these pigments
to the cliffs to form what we call pictographs. Petroglyphs
are actually carved, or pecked into the face of the stone
cliffs using a smaller rock used as a hammer to chip away
the stone to form an image.
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- Occupation Period
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- Outstanding Features
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- Location
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- Discovery
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