Page 269 - TheHopiIndians

MESA FOLK OF HOPILAND 261

The prevalence of ruins around the Hopi mesas is
in keeping with the movements of the tribes in the
Pueblo region. Of the seven Hopi towns, Oraibi is
the only one now on the site it occupied when the
Spaniards came to Tusayan.
Not long ago, according to Hopi traditionists, some
clans withdrew from Tusayan and rebuilt cliff-houses
in the Canyon de Chelly, where before some of the
clans that finally settled in Tusayan lived for a time.
Without doubt the connection between the early
Hopi clans and the people who lived in the cliff-dwell
ings was close at a former period, and there is reason
to believe that the older clans who are said to have
come in from the North possessed the black-and-white
pottery and the arts of the cliff-dwellers. Other clans
coming from the South must have worked considera
ble changes in Hopi arts. While the southern clans
brought yellow pottery, it remained for the great in
flux of peoples from the Rio Grande to introduce the
artistic ware with complicated symbolic decoration
that rendered the Tusayan ceramics superior to all
others in northern America.