truly profound impres

sions. If these impressions are now more
blurre d than they were, I can only assure you that, in sharing my
distant memories,

aided by the immediacy of the photographs, what I have to say will offer an impression both of a world whose culture is dying out and of a problem of decisive importance in the general writing of cultural history: In what ways can we perceive essential character tr

aits of primitive pagan humanity? The Pueblo Indians derive their name from their sedentary lives in villages (Spanish: pueblos) as opposed to the nomadic lives of the tribes who until several decades ago warred and hunted in the same areas of New Mexico and Arizona where the Pueblos now live. What interested me as a cultural historian was that in the midst of a country that had made technological culture into an admirable precision weapon in the hands of intellectual man, an enclave of primitive pagan humanity was able to maintain

itself and-an entirely sober struggle for existence notwithstanding-to e

• ngage in hunting and agriculture with an unshakable adherence to magi
  cal practices that we are accustomed to condemning as a mere symptom of a completely backward humanity. Here, however, what we would call superstition goes hand in hand
• with livelihood. It consists of a religious devotion to
  natural phenomena, to animals and plants, to which the Indians attribute active souls, which they believe they can influen
• ce primarily through their masked dances. To us, this syn
  chrony of fantastic magic and sober purposiveness appears as a symptom of a cleavage; for the Indian this is not schizoid but, rather, a liberating experience of the boundless communicability between man and environment. At the same time, one aspect of the Pueblo Indians' religious psychology re
• quires that our analysis proceed with th
  e greatest caution. The material is contaminated: it has been layered over twice. From the end of the sixteenth century, the Native American foundation was overlaid by a stratum of Spanish Catholic Church education which suffered a violent setback at the end of the seventeenth cen
• tury, to return thereaf
  ter but never officially to reinstate itself in the Moki villages. And then came the third stratum: North American education. Yet closer study of Pueblo pagan religious formation and practice reveals an objective geographic constant, and that is the scarcity of water. For so long as the railways remained unable to reach the settlements, drought and desire for w
• ater led to the same magical practices toward the binding of hostile natural for
  ces as they did in primitive, pretechnological cultures all over the world. Drought teaches magic and prayer. The specific issue of religious symbolism is revealed in the ornamentation of pottery. A drawing I obtained personally from an Indian will show how apparently purely decorative ornaments must in fact be interpreted symbolically and cosmologically and how alongside one basic element in cosmologic imagery-the universe con
• ceived in the form of a house
  -an irrational animal figure appears as a mysterious and fearsome demon: the serpent. But the most drastic form of the animistic (i.e., nature-inspiring) Indian cult is the masked dance, which I shall show first in the form of a pure animal dance, second in the form of a tr
• ee-worshipping dance, and finally
  as a dance with live serpents. A glance at similar phenomena in pagan Europe will bring us, finally, to the following question: To what extent does this pagan world view, as it persists among the Indians,
• give us a yardstick for the development from primitive paganism, through the paganism of classical antiquity, to modern man? All in all it is a piece of earth only barely equipped by nature, which the prehi

storic and historic inhabi

• tants of the region have chosen to call their home. Apart from the narrow,
• JEOL 6100 with EDS and Cambridge scanning electron microscope (SEM)
• furrowing valley in the northeast,
• through which the
• Rio Grande del No
• rte flows to the Gulf of Mexico, the landsca
• pe here consists essentially of plateaus: extensive, horizontally situated masses of limestone and tertia

ry rock, which soon form higher plateaus with steep edges and smooth surfaces. (The term mesa compares them , with tables.) These are often pierced by flowing waters, ... by ravines and canyons sometimes a thousand feet deep and more, with walls that from their highest points plummet almost vertically, as if they had been sliced with a saw .... For the greater part of the year the plateau landscape remains entirely without precipitation and the va

st majority of the canyons are completely dried up; only at the time that snow melts and during the brief rainy periods do powerful water masses roar through the bald ravines. In this region of the Colorado plateau of the Rocky Mountains, wh