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CASA GRANDE RUIN

By Cosmos Mindeleff

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INTRODUCTION.

LOCATION AND CHARACTER.

The Casa Grande ruin, situated near Gila river, in southern Arizona, is
perhaps the best known specimen of aboriginal architecture in the United
States, and no treatise on American antiquities is complete without a
more or less extended description of it. Its literature, which extends
over two centuries, is voluminous, but of little value to the practical
scientific worker, since hardly two descriptions can be found which
agree. The variations in size of the ruin given by various authors is
astonishing, ranging from 1,500 square feet to nearly 5 acres or about
200,000 square feet in area. These extreme variations are doubtless due
to difference of judgment as to what portion of the area covered by
remains of walls should be assigned to the Casa Grande proper, for this
structure is but a portion of a large group of ruins.

So far as known to the writer no accurate plan of the Casa Grande ruin
proper has hitherto been made, although plans have been published; and
very few data concerning the group of which it forms a part are
available. It would seem, therefore, that a brief report presenting
accurate plans and careful descriptions may be of value, even though
no pretention to exhaustive treatment is made.

HISTORY AND LITERATURE.

The earlier writers on the Casa Grande generally state that it was in
ruins at the time of the first Spanish invasion of the country, in 1540,
and quote in support of this assertion Castaneda's description of a ruin
encountered on the march.[1] Castaneda remarks that, "The structure
was in ruins and without a roof." Elsewhere he says that the name
"Chichilticale" was given to the place where they stopped because the
monks found in the vicinity a house which had been inhabited by a people
who came from Cibola. He surmises that the ruin was formerly a fortress,
destroyed long before by the barbarous tribes which they found in the
country. His description of these tribes seems to apply to the Apache.

[Footnote 1: Castaneda in Ternaux-Compans. Voyage de Cibola. French
text, p. 1, pp. 41, 161-162. (The original text--Spanish--is in the
Lenox Library; no English translation has yet been published.)]

The geographic data furnished by Castaneda and the other chroniclers of
C