In the high desert of northern Arizona, near Willow Springs, a boulder carries a small figure cut into its face: a bear’s paw. Four claws and a pad scratched into red sandstone, the lines darkened by centuries of sun until they almost match the rock around them. For most who passed, the mark meant nothing. Travelers, herders, and later the men who mapped the region went by without a word for it.
But a Hopi man standing at that same boulder would read it as a name, the sign of the Bear Clan, cut there by a young man on the hardest journey of his life. The boulder and the ones around it hold more than 5,000 such marks, each one a clan, each one a family. The marks were never a mystery, only unreadable to the people holding the maps. The Hopi call the place Tutuveni, which translates closest to newspaper rock.
Not a newspaper of headlines and mysteries, but a running record, a page after page of who was here. The site is a scatter of sandstone boulders covering an area a little larger than a city block, with the marks concentrated on a cluster of about eight of them. One boulder, the largest, carries close to sixty percent of the carvings. The oldest marks go back roughly eight hundred years to around 1200, with newer ones added on top and beside them into living memory.
More than 5,000 Hopi clan symbols, the largest gathering of them anywhere, eight centuries of a people signing their names in the same place, generation after generation. The marks began disappearing quickly once roads came through. Most of the damage happened between 1980 and 2005, when people scratched their own initials over clan symbols, harming up to a tenth of the marks. In 2010, a power company paid for a fence, and a team of specialists worked with the Hopi Cultural Preservation Office to record the boulders in three dimensions, digitally, so that even the marks that get chipped away are not completely lost.
The site is now recognized as a traditional cultural property and has been put forward for recognition among the great monuments of the world. A Hopi clan symbol is not a picture of a thing. It is closer to a name. The Hopi are organized into clans, and each clan carries a sign: the bear, the snake, the reed, the sand, the badger, the tobacco, the water people sometimes called the cloud or rain clan.
When a man from the Bear Clan cut his mark into the boulder, he was not drawing a bear because he liked bears. He was writing the equivalent of his family name. He was saying that the bear people were here, that he was one of them, and that he made the journey. When an elder looks at the crowded face of that boulder, he is reading a roll call of clans, a census in stone, every household still legible to the people who kept the list.
The reading of the marks comes from Hopi tradition, carried by Hopi people, not from the measure of the stone. The archaeologists could count and photograph the cuts, but the meaning of the marks came from the Hopi through the men who wrote it down. The same sign appearing again and again in cuts of clearly different ages was not repetition or a practiced doodle. To a Hopi reader, it was a line of different men of the same clan spread across generations, each recording that he too had made the journey.
The sign does not change because the clan does not change. The journey those young men made was one of the hardest and most sacred the Hopi undertook. The Hopi call the Grand Canyon Ongtupqa, the salt canyon. The men gathered salt from deposits near where the Little Colorado meets the Colorado, and gathering it was a sacred act.
The trail ran from the Hopi mesas, past the country around Tuba City, down through a side canyon to the Little Colorado and along the gorge to the confluence. Along the way stood a chain of shrines where prayers were made, and Willow Springs was one of the camps. The salt journey was tied to becoming a man. A boy initiated into the men’s societies through a ceremony called Wuwuchim would set out toward the salt canyon as part of his passage into adulthood.
At Tutuveni, he would stop, camp, pray, and cut his clan’s mark into the rock. Over four or five centuries, one initiation at a time, the result was 5,000 names on eight boulders. There were two sides to the record. On one side, the rock and its marks were measurable, and archaeologists studied how weathered each cut was to work out a rough order.
On the other side, the meaning of each mark came from Hopi tradition. That meaning was never stored in the rock. It lived in the initiation, inside a clan and a society over years of a man’s life. A trained scholar could stand at that boulder and leave knowing less about it than a Hopi child already did.
In the 1890s and around 1900, an archaeologist from the Smithsonian named Jesse Walter Fewkes was working for the Bureau of American Ethnology. He spent years around the Hopi mesas, excavated the old Hopi village of Sikyatki, and made some of the earliest sound recordings of Hopi songs. In 1900, he published a long report with a dry title, Tusayan Migration Traditions. Fewkes did not make things up.
He wrote down what Hopi men told him and named them. Three men named Wiki, Wikatiwa, and Kopeli gave him the legends of the Snake clans. A man named Anawita gave him the story of the Rain clan. Another gave him the Tobacco legends, others the Horn and Flute story and the Eagle.
Fewkes was the stenographer. They were the record. The traditions were not vague poetry. They named places and directions and an order of events, and when checked against the ground, they held up.
The clans did not all come from the same place. According to the traditions Fewkes collected, the clans arrived in Hopi country from three main directions, settling at the village of Walpi on its high mesa. Some came from the north, from a place called Tokonabi. Some came from the east, from Pueblo country toward New Mexico, a region called Muyovi.
Some came from the south, up along the Little Colorado, from a region called Palatkwapi. The Snake Clan came from the north, and its ceremony, the Snake Dance, became the best known Hopi ritual to the outside world. Fewkes noticed that the ceremony carried signs of the puma, the horn, and the snake, matching the legend that those groups had lived together before reaching the mesas. The spoken legend and the living ritual pointed back to the same shared past.
The southern clans told Fewkes they had been driven out of their ancient home by great floods caused by Palulukon, the great water serpent. The water people carry the sign of clouds and rain, and their oldest memory is of having far too much of it. Anawita, chief of the Patki, the Water Clan, described the route north village by village, from the oldest southern homes to one ruined village after another, up through the country. One of those stops was a place near present-day Winslow, Arizona, spelled Homolovi.
After laying out the migration route, Fewkes wrote that the last four of those ruins had been identified and that extensive archaeological investigations had been conducted at them. The Hopi told a story about floods and a serpent and a long walk north through a chain of villages, and the villages were there, real ruins in the places the tradition said they would be. Anawita is the living center of this story. Fewkes describes him in plain words as a very reliable man.
Some of the oldest villages on the migration route had not yet been found by archaeologists when Fewkes was writing, but Anawita could point them out. The knowledge that could have guided an entire excavation sat in a Hopi chief, carried in clan tradition as precise as directions. One of those villages, Homolovi, sits today in a wide floodplain of the Little Colorado a few miles northeast of Winslow. It was not one village but a cluster strung out for miles along the river, with hundreds of rooms, lived in roughly between 1260 and 1400.
People farmed the floodplain, grew corn and cotton, and fired pottery that still turns up by the thousands. Then, over a couple of generations, they left and moved on toward the mesas where the Hopi live today. The state of Arizona made the villages into a park. For years it was called Homolovi Ruins State Park, and the Hopi asked the state to change it.
From inside Hopi tradition, those villages are not ruins. The ancestors are still present there. In the spring of 2011, the Arizona State Parks Board voted to drop the word ruins, adding a line describing the site as ancestral Hopi villages. The marks at Tutuveni were made by Hopi hands, every single one of them.
They are the clan signatures of Hopi men who walked the salt trail toward the Grand Canyon as part of becoming adults. There is no mystery of the kind outsiders sometimes imagine, no star map left by someone who was not human. To look at a Hopi man’s record of his own sacred journey and imagine it was left by a stranger is to hand a real people’s real achievement to someone who was never there. The truth is that human beings on foot in a hard and dry country kept a written record in stone for eight centuries, in a script of clan symbols they never once stopped being able to read.
The knowledge was never lost. It sat with the Hopi the whole time, in the clans, in the chiefs, in men like Anawita who could have drawn the map any afternoon if anyone had thought to ask. Fewkes asked and wrote the answers down. Henry Voth, a missionary who spoke Hopi, wrote down more than a hundred traditions from the village of Oraibi and published them for a museum in Chicago in 1905.
Between the two men, a whole library of this material sits in old bound volumes, most of it unread for a lifetime. The mission was not a clean rescue. Voth recorded a great deal the Hopi considered private, and to this day some Hopi feel too much left the mesas and was printed for strangers. That tension is real.
But the migration traditions and the clan symbols Fewkes got the way a record is supposed to be gotten. He sat with the people whose knowledge it was. He named them. He wrote down what they chose to tell him.
Go out to Willow Springs and the marks are still on the stone, a little worn, a little damaged by people who came later and did not care. Open Fewkes’s old report and the route is there, village by village, north from the flooded south to the mesas. Stand in Homolovi and the ancestral villages are there in the floodplain, alive. Three pieces of the same record: the mark, the memory, and the ground.
The only reason it ever looked like a mystery is that for a long time, the people holding the maps were not the people holding the story. Remember the bear’s paw on the boulder, and remember that somebody always could.