Kinishba Ruins - Description

Description

Kinishba is located at about 5,000 feet above sea level, south of the Mogollon Rim and north of the Salt River. It is at the eastern foot of Tsé Sizin (“Rock Standing Up” or Sawtooth Mountain), on White Mountain Apache trust lands associated with the Fort Apache Indian Reservation. The reservation is located in the valley that slopes to the White River. The site is the most publicly accessible of the 20 or so large (150 or more rooms), Ancestral Pueblo village ruins in the area.

These were built and occupied as part of the ancient American Indian colonization of the Mogollon Rim region in the AD 1100s to 1300s. They were considered part of the western Pueblo complex. The largest 13th- and 14th-century ruins along the Mogollon Rim all share architectural elements, ceramic assemblages, and similar locational characteristics. They are proximate to expanses of land suitable for dry maize farming, and the have ready access to domestic water, tabular sandstone or limestone, and ponderosa pine.

All of these large villages were built up from apartment-style room blocks, laid out to define communal courtyards or plazas. The Kinishba pueblo is composed of nine major building mounds, the remains of masonry room blocks, with some originally three stories tall. There were two large apartment blocks, and several smaller buildings, with two communal courtyards. At its peak, Kinishba may have housed up to 1000-1500 people. The masonry walls are unique for their double-walled construction: one side is faced and the other made of rubble. The rooms averaged 14' by 12', with a firepit in the center. Scholars believe that most families occupied two rooms, one for living quarters and one for storage.

In the smaller courtyard was a kiva, a room built underground for ceremonies. The larger courtyard revealed evidence of three ceremonial stages. It is 63 by 51 feet. In the first stage, of the late 1100s or early 1200s, five underground rooms, each the size of the kiva, were built; they had earthen rather than masonry walls. About the middle of the 1200s, these rooms were filled in and juniper posts were set into the ground to support beams and a roof, making a large, above-ground room of the courtyard. Later the roof burned, and researchers found no evidence that it was replaced. Ceremonies were moved to other rooms of the pueblo.

The people cultivated corn, beans and gourds nearby, which were raised together to conserve moisture. They may have raised cotton as well, and gathered fruits, berries, nuts and other foods locally. The men hunted game for food, and the women processed the skin, sinew and bones for clothing, tools, and other needs.

Scholars believe that Kinishba may have been the pueblo Chiciticale referred to in narratives of the 1540-41 Spanish expedition led by Francisco Vasquez de Coronado. Kinishba and its sister villages were abandoned in the late 14th or early 15th century for unknown reasons. It may have been related to a water source drying up. The area was virtually unoccupied until the 16th or 17th-century migration of nomadic Apache from the western Great Plains. They did not live at the ruins but had territory in the area.