Recent Hopi Pigements II

Weather: Very cold Thursday morning, then rain yesterday in the night and early this morning; later the temperature dropped and snow fell.

What’s blooming: Tansy, purple asters; globe willows turning yellow; next year’s buds visible on peach.

Animal sightings: Mice trying to get into house; chickadees.

Weekly update: Alexander Stephen was told the yellow ochre the Hopi used for prayer sticks and their bodies in the 1890s came from the base of a pool under a spring in Grand Canyon near the salt deposits. A trip to the salt lands was part of male initiation activities. The initiated also made other trips west when necessary.

Men sometimes mixed the yellow pigment with water that had boiled squash.

Women used rabbit bush flowers for yellow for their baskets. Stephen saw Ericameria nauseosa used by men associated with one kiva. They boiled the flowers with fibrous alunogen or sandy gypsum. Both minerals were found on mesa cliffs in the region; the first is found near coal deposits.

Black could come from several sources, but Stephen observed, coal, charcoal, soot and corn smut were not interchangeable. They were "used separately for different occasions." To get black for weaving, men mixed seeds from sunflower plants they cultivated with roasted piñon gum and boiled sumac twigs.

For baskets, Whiting says women used Helianthus petiolaris seeds and purple corn for deep purples, and darkened them with piñon gum. Stephen saw men use purple corn with the greasy, salty clay used to cook potatoes. They strained the dyed water through sumac berries. Black and purple could both be used to represent Above.

Red was the most variable, as it had been in the earlier murals at Awátovi. As mentioned in the post for 28 June 2009 on Maltese Cross, red fades without the right alloy or mordant. It took centuries for European glass makers to produce a decent red.

Whiting said there was no satisfactory, natural source for basketry. At best, a pink could be produced from a winged pigweed, Cycloloma atriplicifolium. Men sometimes used white corn meal with an aniline dye on the body of a Kachina dancer.

Hematite still was used, usually mixed with white corn meal or bean meal. Stephen reported some came from Shushtuban Tukwi, a mountain some 15 to 20 miles southwest of Walpi. They also took some pigment from the ruins of Kautaktipu in the foothills of the western valley. He observed there was "a great deal of iron ochre and selenite" gypsum mixed in the shale near the coal deposits.

Stephen was told red was the color of warriors. Its ritual import no doubt dated back before the drought of the late 1200s, when ceramics were black, white and red. In addition to the usual red ochres, the Hopi had two special reds.

One was a glistening, red, sky stone applied to prayer sticks at the winter solstice in 1892. Stephen thought the shiny hematite might have had a meteoric origin, but was told it came from a mining town north of San Carlos, which, by road today, lies 244 miles away in Apache territory to the south. The Captain Jack claim contains specularite and magnetite in limestone with evidence of past mining activity.

The other was vermillion, which both women and young men used to adorn themselves. It had attracted the interest of the Spanish, who thought it was cinnabar. The mercuric sulphide was critical to processing silver ore. They asked so many questions, Stephen was told the pigment came to be called Spanish red, Kas’til shü’ta. Natives no longer gave details about it.

When Americans penetrated the west after the discovery of silver in Colorado, in 1864, they too searched for mercury. Jacob Vernon Hamblin was a Mormon who settled in Kanab, Utah, in 1869. From there, he and his son, Lyman, explored the Colorado River and proselytized the Navajo.

Lyman was given a sample of the red pigment by the Pai Utes, who had received it from the Shivwits Utes who lived north of the Canyon. He told an aide to John Wesley Powell, who was exploring the area in the 1870s. It looked so much like cinnabar, Frederick Dellenbaugh tracked the source to a cave in Grand Canyon "in a side gulch about three thousand feet down the side of the Canyon, and two thousand feet above the river."

The Hopi reservation was created in 1882, that of the Havasupai in Grand Canyon in 1880. The new boundaries and the privatization of land between, no doubt, altered the ways the Hopi could travel outside their prescribed area. That change, in turn, probably was altering relationships between the two groups in the 1890s.

At the time Stephen was in Arizona, the Hopi were trading with the Havasupai. They traveled west to Cataract in the fall for buckskins. Stephen Hirst says, the Havasupai came east in February to exchange "baskets, buckskins, red paint, mescal, corn, salt, and shells" for "jewelry, blankets, pottery and horses." Their red was believed to have magical properties and was traded far to the east.

The vermillion-colored pigment probably came from a cave in Diamond Creek Canyon. George Billingsley noted, when that red claystone was mixed with deer tallow, it had protective properties against sunburn. An assay ordered by Dellenbaugh showed it was an "iron ochre," but the "greasiest, most penetrating stuff I ever saw."

White was taken for granted. Kaolin or white clay mixed with sand or gypsum was used on men’s bodies and as an undercoating on wood, as it has been centuries before on polychrome pottery. It wasn’t mentioned for weaving or basketry. Even if bleaching were possible, light colors weren’t practical.

The Hopi use of color does recognize the difference between the sacred and the profane, as it recognizes the differences between ceremonial blue and the colors found in nature.

Notes:
Billingsley, George H. "Mining Activity in the Grand Canyon Area, Arizona," in D. P. Elston, G. H. Billingsley, and R. A. Young, Geology of Grand Canyon, Northern Arizona (With Colorado River Guides): Lee Ferry to Pierce Ferry, Arizona, 1989.

Dellenbaugh, Frederick Samuel. "Indian Red Paint," Masterkey 7:85-87:May 1933; quoted with additional comments in Watson Smith, Kiva Mural Decorations at Awatovi and Kawaika-a, 1952.

Hirst, Stephen. I Am the Grand Canyon: The Story of the Havasupai People, 2006.

Peterson, Jocelyn A. and Mark H. Hibpshman. Status of Mineral Resource Information for the San Carlos Indian Reservation, Arizona, 1981.

Stephen, Alexander. Notebooks, 1882-1894, edited as Hopi Journal, 1936, by Elsie Clews Parsons.

Whiting, Alfred F. Ethnobotany of the Hopi (1939).

Photographs: Local uses of pigments on Española shop signs painted directly on stucco; buildings with other surfaces have applied signs.

1. Boomerang thrift shop, Riverside Drive, Anna Dillane, owner; wisteria vine climbs the corner of the building and spreads along the roof; sign with store name is attached to the wall.

2. Same as #1; at the base of the wall, flamingos wander in the grass.

3. Hollywood Theater, Riverside Drive; mural dramatizing the business covers the front and entrance side of a converted house.

4. Los Compadres car wash, Chama-Los Alamos Highway. Paintings of a car being washed were on the west (street) and north sides; the name was painted on the south. After the business closed this summer, the walls were painted white.

5. Jessica’s Fashions, Riverside Drive, Andres Gallegos, contact. Someone added details to this sign and painted another on the front; the store was open a week ago Friday. Everything had been painted over last Sunday morning when I went to take a more recent picture.

6. Another Man’s Treasure thrift shop, Cook’s Bridge Road, Amanda Sena, owner. If a building is not actively being used, the paintings of a closed business may remain. This had been a day care center. When the current thrift shop opened, the owner painted her sign over the previous name and left the rest of the day care pictures. Most are from Winnie the Pooh; one is of Goofy.

7. The Water Store, Riverside Drive, Dyna Padilla, owner; small sign signifying the nature of the products sold.

8. Baila Conmigo dance studio, Chama-Los Alamos Highway, Juana Maria Duarte Ontiveros, instructor; detail with name exploits hopes.

9. Saints and Sinners bar and package liquor store, Riverside Drive, Dennis Salazar, owner; detail with name amplifies customer’s self image.

10. The Original Chimayo Trading Post, Riverside Drive, Leo Trujillo, owner; detail with name is Native sun symbol.

11. Pegasus Auto Sales, Riverside Drive. The simplest painted sign is a name with no adornments.

12. Lovin’ Oven doughnut shop, Riverside Drive, Alexandra Stone, contact. Where I grew up in Michigan in the 1950s, merchants did not paint the bricks of their stores. Instead they painted their windows using water-based paints. This one shows a pueblo bake-oven and a pueblo-style house frosted with snow.

Recent Hopi Pigments I

Weather: Rain last Sunday, followed by frost on the car windows in the mornings.

What’s blooming: Tansy, purple asters; Siberian elm and beauty bush leaves turning yellow.

Animal sightings: Grasshoppers, large and small black ants.

Weekly update: Hopi ceramic craftsmanship declined after the Spanish introduced iron pots and, later, cheap china. They stopped burning the coal that had produced the hard pottery, and returned to wood. Some speculate the introduction of steel axes facilitated that change.

Alexander Stephen, a Scots trained in metallurgy at Edinburgh, was living near Walpi on First Mesa in the 1880s. Jesse Walter Fewkes, who led the southwestern archeological expedition sponsored by Mary Tileson Hemenway from 1889 to 1894, apparently suggested he keep notes. Stephen’s interest naturally included the use of minerals.

While he was in Arizona, archaeologists were reconstructing fourteenth-century pottery. Collectors, and later tourists, wanted pieces. This stimulated Hopi craftsmen to recreate the older designs, and in some cases, to replicate older processes. Stephen mentioned visiting the "old pottery fire pits" in 1893 with a potter and her husband. They asked him to identify useful lodes of coal.

The previous year he had watched pottery fired with sheep dung and corn cobs. They added bones of sheep, cattle or deer, which turned white when burned, to add "this quality of whiteness to the pottery" that high heat once had provided. "Bones of horse or burro are not used. These would darken the pottery."

He noted the paste was covered with a clay slip and decorated with red, brown, and yellow ochres. The brown turned maroon, the yellow a pale red when fired two to four hours.

He noted elsewhere, black came from black iron ore or tansy mustard. Barbara Freire-Marreco saw women at Hano, the Tewa-speaking pueblo on First Mesa, steam bundles of Descurainia pinnata in a pit oven in 1912, then press and dry the liquid for later use. She said, women used it as a trade good among themselves. Walter Hough said it was turned into an oily mixture that served as a binder with an iron pigment for pottery.

The primary uses for paint by men were for their bodies, prayer sticks, kachina masks, and other ceremonial objects. Most of the pigments were the same as those used in the kiva murals in the fifteenth century, but their sources may have changed.

With improved, though still rudimentary roads, they could obtain more from Grand Canyon. Their legends identified the plateau fissure as the place from whence they emerged onto the surface of the planet.

Ralph Cameron and Pete Berry claimed copper deposits along Horseshoe Canyon that were mined between 1890 and 1907. They exploited existing trails of the Havasupai, also known as the Ko’honino or Coconino, who lived on Cataract Creek. The company’s detritus may not have been commercial grade, but it still was rich in copper compounds.

Both blue and green were used by the Hopi. Stephen found men clearly recognized differences in hues, but their language combined them, leading to confusion. It may be because they still used forms of copper, which could vary from sample to sample. Azurite is unstable when exposed to air; water replaces some of its carbon dioxide, turning it into malachite. If the water or saliva used in Hopi pigments contained salt, it would have had the same effect on azurite.

In 1893, Stephen was told they gathered the blue and green malachite used on prayer sticks from the Ko’honino plateau.

They made a light blue for masks from copper carbonate, boiled piñon gum, and squash seeds. They did not use boiled binders for prayer sticks, only clear spring water or white bean meal and saliva. Both men and women used an easily ground, blue-green, copper-stained sandstone, mixed with water, on their bodies. He noted some were experimenting with adding a little aniline blue or green dye.

For weaving, which was the responsibility of men, they mixed indigo with warm, aged urine. For baskets, women used blue beans or Mexican indigo, according to Alfred Whiting.

Indigofera suffruticosa is native to the Mexican lowlands of Guerrero, and was being used as a colorant before Columbus. The Spanish developed an export industry in the 1500s, and it still was a major agricultural product in Chiapas, Colima, Guerrero, Jalisco, Michoacán, and Oaxaca in the 1890s.

Notes: Some information from Wikipedia.

Freire-Marreco, Barbara, William Wilfred Robbins, and John Peabody Harrington. Ethnobotany of the Tewa Indians, 1916.

Hough, Walter. "The Hopi in Relation to the Plant Environment," The American Anthropologist 10:33-44:1897.

Stephen, Alexander. Notebooks, 1882-1894, edited as Hopi Journal, 1936, by Elsie Clews Parsons.

Whiting, Alfred F. Ethnobotany of the Hopi (1939).

Photographs: The Hopi collected their pigments from great distances. Grand Canyon is at least 150 miles away. If one wanted to make pigments where I live, one would have to do the same. Sedimentary rocks were more likely to yield pigments, conglomerates the crystals and other gem stones used in rituals.

1. La Bajada Hill southwest of Santa Fé, 35 miles from my house; Chinle Formation red-brown sedimentary mudstone.

2. Red granite in driveway gravel taken from quarry west of Río Grande, maybe 8 miles away; stones originally came from Picuris area, 40 miles to the northeast. Granite often includes pink feldspar, white quartz, and black mica.

3. Rio Puerco west of Albuquerque, 136 miles away; redeposited grains of yellow sandstone from Navajo Draw Member, Arroyo Ojito Formation.

4. Yellow-stained stone, driveway gravel.

 

5. Los Barrancos west of Rte 285 and south of Española, 5 miles way; one of the white ash beds.

6. White quartz and a red/white/black piece of granite, driveway gravel.

7. Rio Oso northwest of Española, 14 miles away; first rains after Las Conchas Fire sent black water that covered the river bottom; photograph taken 28 August 2011.

8. No pure black or blue stones in driveway gravel, but many shades and types of gray; also see background stones in other drive pictures.

9. Deformed fault east of Dixon, less than 35 miles away; black shale hardened into slate.

10. White, yellow, and pink quartz, driveway gravel.

Hopi Pigments

Weather: Below 30 on Wednesday; catalpa leaves turned brown, cottonwoods leaves started dropping; last rain 10/20.

What’s blooming in the area: Chrysanthemums.

Beyond the walls and fences: Áñil del muerto, purple asters.

In my yard: Winecup mallow, black-eyed Susan, chocolate flower, blanket flower.

Animal sightings: Cabbage butterflies, hornets, large and small black ants.

Weekly update: Hopi experiments with burning rocks and attempts to change the color of yellow clay to something lighter may have led to a better understanding of mineral-based pigments. The pottery continued to have a black decoration made from iron manganese, but colors began to be used in wall murals in the Awátovi kiva on Antelope Mesa sometime before the late 1300s.

When Watson Smith helped excavate the kiva in the early 1950s, he sent samples of the mural paints and paint pots found in the area to chemists. Unfortunately, he didn’t publish the same details about locations as he did for the murals themselves, so it’s difficult to know when which pigments were introduced.

The colors included many shades of yellow, red, blue, black and white, the primary colors of the Hopi palette. Other colors were used, but in small quantities. The few green samples came from malachite, a copper carbonate.

The black and white probably represented transfers of ceramic knowledge. Much of the white was derived from "the white sandy clay that occurs in the Cretaceous beds underlying Antelope Mesa." The blacks varied, but all involved some kind of carbon. A few had obvious remains of charcoal.

Yellow came from limonite or goethite, red from hematite. All are iron ores better known as ochres. They are responsible for the colors in clay. Their usefulness as pigments has been discovered by people living on all parts of the globe since paleolithic times.

The three Hopi mesas settled today sit on Mesaverde sandstone. Antelope Mesa to the southeast lies on exposed Mancos shale that has "thin beds of bentonic clay," meaning clay formed from weathering volcanic ash. It probably derived from eruptions on Hopi Buttes farther to the southeast.

When John Hack excavated the ash heaps on Antelope Mesa where pottery had been fired, he found the upper seam of coal left red ash and the lower one left white ash. The red came from the shale, which in turn got its color from hematite. Brown shale gets it colors from goethite and limonite. Shale, itself, is a sedimentary, compacted mud.

It’s possible artists weren’t satisfied with hematite. Smith noted more sources for red than other colors, including some vermillion. He also noted a number of examples of pinks, oranges, maroons and browns that might have been intended to be reds. The pinks appeared to be reds painted over white bases that might have faded. The others were forms of iron oxide, some burned, some containing carbon particles. Some of the browns and purples contained manganese. Compounds of the last often are pink. All indicate experimentation.

Blue is the innovation. The polychrome ceramics that preceded Jeddito ware used black, white and red pigments. While weather oxidizes the darker Mancos shale to a blue hue, few stones or plants are pure blues.

Sapphires, aquamarines, and lapis lazuli may be found in small quantities in this country, but they are mined in the parts of Asia near the collision of tectonic plates that lifted the Himalayas and Hindu Kush. Cobalt, which releases arsenic gases when it’s smelted, is mined today in the Congo, China and Cuba.

Copper compounds often are blue or green. A few pigments found in the Awátovi kiva were made from copper carbonate or azurite, another form of copper carbonate. Turquoise is a hydrated phosphate of copper and aluminum, but would have been considered too valuable to grind.

Smith did find some blue pigments were made from crushed pebbles. Most were mixes of white clay and charcoal. When he compared the kiva paints with those used in the Franciscan church erected over the kiva in 1629, he found only copper carbonate used for blue or green. Mixtures no longer were used.

The mixtures witness a desire that prompted a search for a new pigment and may hint that the need for blue was recent in the 1400s. They even may suggest when the modern Hopi palette began coalescing.

Notes:
Hack, John T. Prehistoric Coal Mining in the Jeddito Valley, Arizona, 1942.

López, Alejandro. "A Tribute in Paint to the Earth and Local Agriculture," Green Fire Times, October 2014. Robert Montoya and Marlo Martinez also provided information on murals.

O’Sullivan, R. B., C. A. Repenning, E. C. Beaumont, and H. G. Page. Stratigraphy of the Cretaceous Rocks and the Tertiary Ojo Alamo Sandstone, Navajo and Hopi Indian Reservations, Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah, 1972.

Smith, Watson. Kiva Mural Decorations at Awatovi and Kawaika-a, 1952; has quotation about source of white.

Photographs: Murals on local Española buildings. The ones on the city-owned Hunter Ford buildings across from Cook’s Hardware, Paseo de Oñate, are sponsored by Cultura Cura/Culture Cures Collaborative. The group was formed by Lily Yeh and the New Mexico Community Foundation’s Collaborative Leadership Program. Northern Rio Grande National Heritage Area, Inc. matched the NMCF funding. All imagery was based on collage of photographs by Alejandro López. My pictures were taken 29 October 2014.

1. "Mother Corn," design by Rose B. Simpson of Santa Clara, with collaborative support from Warren Montoya of Santa Ana Pueblo; Santa Clara pueblo, with Black Mesa on left and Jémez on right. Floating corn in center was added by Mike Ipiotis of Albuquerque. Hunter Ford building.

2. Detail of #1, counterclockwise, corn is yellow, blue, white, and red mixed; woman in center has peppers with squash nearby; corn field is being continued to the right by Thomas Vigil of Española.

3. Detail of #1; sparkle in water is created with pieces of colored or mirrored glass; paints are acrylic; more than sixty community members have painted and applied recycled glass elements to the murals.

4. "Primavera" by Alejandro López, Roger Montoya of Velarde, and Arlene Jackson from Trinidad. Spring planting looking east towards Truches Peaks; water in the ditches; Hunter Ford building.

5. Detail of #4, man plowing with peach orchard in back; girls’ heads by Arlene Jackson.

6. Running the irrigation, early in season, peaches in back; by Alejandro López; Marlo Martinez commercial building across road and little south from Valley National Bank, Riverside Drive. López is from Santa Cruz, his family from Las Truches.

7. "El Sembrador" by Arlene Jackson, Alejandro López, and Robert Montoya; water running in the ditches. Young man at left with ear phones is Victor Villalpando, who was killed by local police in June, 2014. Hunter Ford building.

8. Detail of #7; corn is ripening in back with peppers in front; blue-flowered morning glory in corn; Victor is carrying yellow corn. Students at Robert Montoya’s La Tierra Montessori School in Alcalde and Moving Arts Española added the animals and some plants; students included Konstantin Aragonez, Sasha Backhas, Isaac López, Kylie Martinez, and Amelia Ortega.

9. "La Española" by Alejandro López; imagines the women who ran the restaurant used for the name of the local rail stop; Santa Cruz church in back, yellow and red apples above; Marlo Martinez building.

Red Amaranth Seeds

Weather: Rain Monday night; last rain 9/22.

What’s blooming in the area: Silver lace vine, datura, morning glories, bouncing Bess, sweet pea, Russian sage, red amaranth, zinnias from new seeds and reseeds, African marigolds from seed, Maximilian sunflowers, pampas grass.

Beyond the walls and fences: Pink and white bindweed, goat’s head, stickleaf, leatherleaf globemallow, Queen Anne’s lace, pigweed, ragweed, chamisa, Hopi tea, snakeweed broom, broom senecio, native sunflowers, goldenrod, áñil del muerto, golden hairy, heath and purple asters.

In my yard, looking east: Large-flowered soapwort, hollyhocks, winecup mallow.

Looking south: Betty Prior and floribunda roses.

Looking west: Catmint, calamintha, David phlox.

Looking north: Yellow potentilla, hosta, Mexican hat, black-eyed Susan, chocolate flower, blanket flower, anthemis, coreopsis, chrysanthemum.

In the open, along the drive: Buddleia, white yarrow.

Bedding plants: Blue salvia, French marigold.

Seeds: Larkspur, reseeded Sensation cosmos from last year’s plants, yellow cosmos.

Animal sightings: Geckos, small birds, bees, grasshoppers, hornets, large and small black ants.

Weekly update: Whenever I hear people argue there’s no such thing as species alteration, I think how isolated we’ve grown from our agrarian past when peoples’ lives depended on observing plants.

For years anthropologists believed farming had been invented one time in the middle east about ten thousand year ago. They assumed the activity was too complex to have been created more than once. They, of course, were thinking of farming as they knew it, not as it had been.

In 1961, Richard MacNeish reported evidence for separate invention in the Tehuacán valley southeast of Puebla, México. In the Coxcatlán rock shelter his team found seeds for moschata squash and amaranth in strata dating between 4700 and 4300 bc. The National Research Council has identified the last as a form of Amaranthus cruentus.

The red-leaved plant was not native to the area. The dark-seeded annuals descended from Amaranthus hybrida in what is now Guatemala and southern México. The seeds found ready for threshing in Coxcatlán had been selected for their light color.

Given an opportunity, the wind-pollinated cruentus interbreeds with its neighbors. In Guatemala, it mates with its parent hybrida. In México, the plants cross with the local grain amaranth, Amaranth hypochondriacus.

Two thousand years later, a Franciscan friar, Bernardino de Sahagún, recorded the plants important to the Aztecs. He himself probably knew little about farming - he was from a family wealthy enough to send him to the royal university at Salamanca. He transcribed what his informants said without obvious editorial revision.

In the 1570s, natives of the Mexican valley distinguished the types of amaranth in their area by their seeds. Bird amaranth had a white seed. Another had seeds that were red or black. The mirror stone amaranth had glistening black seeds, while those of the one now identified as hypochondriacus were described as becoming like "coarse sand."

The last was the one used to make the blood and dough figures that were distributed during festivals honoring Huitzilopochtli. The Spanish were so horrified by what they saw as a mockery of the Eucharist that they suppressed both the festival and the grain. Soldiers aren’t trained to discriminate between types. They destroyed all cultivated amaranths.

Cruentus survived as a crop in Oaxaca and Guatemala. In 1947, Jonathan Sauer found both dark- and light-seeded varieties. The later were preferred for tortillas, and used "in various other ways, much like maize." The dark seeds were used only for tortillas.

In the late nineteenth century, Jesse Walter Fewkes reported a red-topped amaranth was being used by the Hopi to dye the red flat bread used in kachina rituals. Alfred Whiting said they still were growing red-leaved amaranths in irrigated, raised beds in the 1930s.

Matilda Coxe Stevenson saw Zuñi women tending the annuals in small gardens around their villages in the 1890s. Like the neighboring Hopi, they used it to dye the thin wafer bread used in ceremonies.

The anthropologists didn’t note the seed color. Sauer says morphological features indicate the southwestern red amaranth is a dark-seeded strain of cruentus created by selection.

Selecting seed is time consuming. After World War II, mass marketing made it easy to buy packaged seeds. Then, economies of scale made it less expensive to buy finished products that seeds.

When Sauer returned to Guatemala in 1967, red amaranth no longer was treated as a crop. He still saw plants growing on the edges of milpas and in dooryard gardens. But, they were naturalized plants with dark seeds. No one had kept light-colored ones.

In the 1960s, he says the Hopi were substituting commercial food coloring for ko’mo. The Zuñi no longer were bothering to select the best l’shilowa yäl’tok a seeds. They used reseeded plants that had interbred with a local green amaranth species, Powellii.

As the plants growing in the Española valley this summer show, when plants are neglected, species that have been selected can degenerate. It takes human effort to keep some strains pure. Thousands of years aren’t enough time to stabilize them.

Notes:
Fewkes, J. Walter. "A Contribution to Ethnobotany," American Anthropologist 9:14-21:1896.

MacNeish, Richard Stockton. Tehuacán Archaeological-Botanical Project, Annual Report, 1961. More on his work appears in the post for 21 February 2010.

_____. The Prehistory of the Tehuacán Valley, volume 5, 1972.

National Research Council. Amaranth: Modern Prospects for an Ancient Crop, 1984, edited by F. R. Ruskin.

Sahagún, Bernardino de. Historia Universal de las Cosas de Nueva España, c.1577, translated as Florentine Codex: General History of the Things of New Spain, Book XI - Earthly Things by Charles E. Dibble and Arthur J. O. Anderson, 1963.

Sauer, Jonathan D. "Amaranths as Dye Plants among the Pueblo Indians," Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 6:412-415:1950.

_____. "The Grain Amaranths and Their Relatives: A Revised Taxonomic and Geographic Survey," Missouri Botanical Garden, Annals 54:103-137:1967.

Stevenson, Matilda Coxe. Ethnobotany of the Zuñi Indians (1915).

Whiting, Alfred F. Ethnobotany of the Hopi (1939).

Photographs:
1. Red amaranth growing near village, 17 August 2012.

2. This year’s offspring of #1, same location, 4 September 2014.

3. Red amaranth seed, purchased from Native Seeds/Search. It appears black when it comes from the package.

4. Unidentified amaranth in Florentine Codex, illustration 963, after Francisco del Paso y Troncoso. His version of the codex was published in three volumes in 1906 and 1907.

5. Red amaranth seed, purchased from Horizon Seeds. One seed is redder than the others. All Sauer and others say is light and dark, but not how light or dark.

6. Red amaranth seed, purchased from All Good Things Organic. The lighter colored seed looks like an unviable one that won’t sprout if its planted.

7. Local green amaranth in my yard, 13 August 2012. The earliest leaves and the stems are reddish.

8. Reseeds from #1, growing behind the 2012 plants; 4 September 2014.

9. Reseeds from #1, growing across drive from 2012 plants; 4 September 2014. Differences in height probably are due to differences in runoff from the road.

10. Red amaranth seeds, purchased from Seeds of Change. Similarities between seeds from different vendors may be inherent in the species, or may be because many seed companies purchase their stock from the same wholesale source.

Red Amaranth

Weather: Hurricane Norbert off the southwest of Baja brought rain Friday.

What’s blooming in the area: Hybrid roses, silver lace vine, trumpet creeper, rose of Sharon, datura, morning glories, bouncing Bess, purple garden phlox, sweet pea, Russian sage, zinnias from new seeds and reseeds, cultivated sunflowers.

Beyond the walls and fences: Yellow evening primrose, purple mat flower, pink and white bindweed, goat’s head, stickleaf, leatherleaf globemallow, pigweed, ragweed, horseweed, Hopi tea, snakeweed broom, broom senecio, native sunflowers, goldenrod, plains paper flowers, áñil del muerto, tahoka daisy, golden hairy asters, black and side oats grama grasses.

In my yard, looking east: Large-flowered soapwort, garlic chives, Jupiter’s beard, hollyhocks, winecup mallow, cut leaf coneflower, Maximilian sunflower heads beginning to bend from weight of seeds.

Looking south: Betty Prior, Fairy, rugosa and miniature roses.

Looking west: Caryopteris, catmint, calamintha, David phlox, ladybells, Mönch aster, purple coneflower.

Looking north: Yellow potentilla, hosta, golden spur columbine, Mexican hat, black-eyed Susan, chocolate flower, blanket flower, anthemis, coreopsis.

In the open, along the drive: Buddleia, white yarrow.

Bedding plants: Snapdragon, sweet alyssum, blue salvia, moss rose, gazania.

Seeds: Larkspur, reseeded Sensation cosmos from last year’s plants, yellow cosmos.

Animal sightings: Rabbit, geckos, small birds, bees, grasshoppers, large and small black ants.

Weekly update: Some mysteries are never solved.

A few years ago a woman down the road planted some bulbs that erupted after the monsoons came in July of 2010. They reached four feet by the first of August with maroon, begonia-like leaves. I thought she’d ordered something from some mass market catalog that featured South African novelties.

The next year, someone two miles away planted something with similar red leaves between rows of African marigolds in a cutting garden. By the end of September I decided the red heads must be some type of giant celosia instead.

The celosia I know, the plumed variety of Amaranthus argentea sold as a bedding plant, might get a foot high. These were six-feet tall, with spikes like Amaranthus caudatus. However, they didn’t have the hanging habit of love-lies-bleeding.

This year I decided the burgundy-leaved, maroon-flowered giants were a form of the red amaranth grown by the Hopi and Zuñi. They extract a beet-like pigment from the plumes to dye the thin wafer bread distributed by kachina dancers.

The real mystery isn’t the identity of the plant, but how Amaranthus cruentus got into Española area gardens in 2011.

When I was in Santa Fé this week I saw them growing in two yards. I’m told one of the gardeners had purchased it as bedding plant from Agua Fria Nursery in 2012. It naturalized and since has come back from its own seeds.

The seeds themselves are not offered by Lake Valley, the company whose seed is most available here and in Santa Fé. One has to order packets from some small company that specializes in native or heritage plants.

One such company, Seeds of Change, has offered Amaranthus cruentus x Amaranthus powelli as the Hopi Dye Plant. The company was founded in 1989 in Gila, New Mexico, by Gabriel Howearth. The research farm was moved to El Guique, northwest of Española on the road to Ojo Caliente in 1996.

The following year, the company was bought by Mars, Inc. The corporate owner closed local operations in 2010 amid chaos that could have scattered inventories. Employees were abruptly dismissed. Seed crops were abandoned. Headquarters originally were in Santa Fé. They’re now located in Rancho Dominguez, California.

The people with the cutting garden might buy plants from Agua Fria. They maintain their yard and put bedding plants in a whiskey half barrel laid on its side. However, they usually grow petunias that are available everywhere.

It’s more likely they planted seeds. The companion African marigolds usually are grown that way. I wondered for a while if they were cropping the amaranth, perhaps drying the heads and selling them in the Santa Fé farmers’ market as everlastings. They could also have been harvesting the grain or leaves for sale to gourmet cooks.

However, they seem to leave the plants to be killed by the frost. It takes three to five months for the seeds to mature after plants die.

I saw red-topped plants in three other places last year. All were in yards of single-wides in settled locations, not mobile home parks. The one also has a few rose bushes, perhaps selected from the ones imported in mass by the local hardware. Another has morning glories grown from seeds and iris that may have been passed along. While all three trailer dwellers appreciate flowers, none look like they would frequent stores that sold unusual annuals or seeds.

It’s possible one person’s plants came from a neighbor who bought bedding plants or whose ATV, snowmobile or hauling trailer tires picked up seeds around El Guique. Those plants could have gone to seed over the fence. Individuals then might have traded seedlings among themselves last year. Friendship and kinship ties spread over miles in the valley.

No one seems to have planted the amaranth this year. Instead the plants look like they reseeded in dense patches. One even came up on the shoulder opposite one of the trailers.

The cutting garden still has its plants in rows, but it looks like someone may have dug the furrows after the plants emerged. Everywhere, this year, the plants are variable heights and colors.

As for the first plant that had red leaves and plumes, the woman continued to plant it for several years, then stopped. I still have no idea what it was.

[I have since been told this is the castor bean plant, Ricinus communis. It’s in the spurge family.]

Photographs:
1. Red amaranth head, trailer on south side of village, 17 August 2012.

2. Red amaranth plants growing outside fence by road to post office, 5 September 2014. The plant grew here last year, and apparently reseeded. I would guess the sprouts inside the fence were weeded out, but the ones outside left to fend for themselves. With irregular watering, they became deep red and short.

3. Unknown red-leaved plant growing on the main road, 11 September 2010.

4. Red amaranth growing in rows with African marigolds, double-wide on north side of village, 12 October 2013.

5. Plants in the cutting garden shown in #4 killed by frost, 26 November 2011.

6. Morning glories blooming with plants in #1, 17 August 2012.

7. Plant growing on shoulder across the road from south trailer, 4 September 2014.

8. Cutting garden plants from #4 growing this year, 4 September 2014.

9. The red-leaved plants that first piqued my interest, 11 September 2010; same as #3. The fence is about three-feet high.