Casa Malpais
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Casa Malpais is a Native American Indian ruin located near the town of Springerville, Arizona created by some type of ancient pueblo people. It is a nationally recognized archeological site.[1]
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[edit] Description
Casa Malpais was built around 1250 A.D. and was inhabited until about 1440 A.D.. It is one of the latest dated Mogollon Sites. The name Casa Malpais means House of the Badlands, which was given to the site by early Basque sheepherders who referred to the surrounding volcanic lava field as "badlands." The Springerville Volcanic Field contains over 400 volcanoes within a fifty mile radius of Springerville, making it the third largest volcanic field in the continental United States.[2]
Unique and unusual features characterize the site. The Great Kiva, painstakingly constructed of volcanic rock, is the centerpiece. A steep basalt staircase set into a crevice of the high red cliff wall leads to the top of the mesa.
Both the Hopi and Zuni Indian tribes still consider Casa Malpais a sacred ancestral place.
[edit] The Observatory
The site includes the ruins of an ancient atronomical observatory. The observatory is circular with five openings, and is approximately 26 meters in diameter. Four of the openings are connected with solstices, equinoxes, or both, while the fifth opening indicates true north by aligning with a pointed foundation stone at the center of the south wall.
The Summer Solstice sunset casts a shadow across a pit outside the west opening, through the west opening, and onto the inside of the east wall just north of the southeast opening.
The Winter Solstice sunrise is marked by sunlight coming over the southeast opening and hitting an alter on the inside of the west wall where the wall bends, now marked with a sandstone slab with the letter A.
The Winter Solstice sunset emanates from a notch just over the west edge of Pole Knoll, located about 24 kilometers southwest of Casa Malpais, and it passes over the south opening, over the east opening, through a boulder field above the calendar, and lands upon a bearclaw petroglyph on the cliff face.
The south opening is a little over a meter wide and the walls are offset to allow the Spring Equinox sunrise to pass through the offset in the walls across the southeast opening and through the south opening without hitting the inside of either south wall until well after sunrise. A white sandstone slab at the site marked with the letter S indicates which direction is south.
[edit] Discovery
The first visit to Casa Malpais by a professional anthropologist was in 1883, when Frank Cushing, an anthropologist living at Zuni , visited a site at "El Valle Redondo on the Colorado Chiquito", and was impressed by what he termed "the fissure type pueblo" he found there. In his journal he sketched dry masonry, bridging fissures, upon which the pueblo is constructed.[3]
