Ken Zoll, executive director emeritus of the Verde Valley Archaeology Center and Museum, recently gave a presentation to a capacity crowd at the Sedona Public Library titled “Ancient Verde Valley Family Life: The Sinagua at the Dyck Cliff Dwelling.”
The presentation was based on a book that he co-authored.
The Dyck Cliff Dwelling, which provided a home for up to 20 of the Sinagua people, is located about 15 feet up from the banks of Wet Beaver Creek near Rimrock and was occupied from approximately 1050 to 1325 CE. Artifacts from the dwelling make up the 60,000 items of the Paul Dyck Collection, which comprise the majority of the VVAC’s collection.
While “Sinagua” is an accepted anthropological term for some of the peoples who formerly occupied the Southwest during its up to 30,000-year history of human occupation, the Hopi people prefer the word Hisat’sinom because Sinagua is derived from the Spanish phrase “sin agua,” translating as “without water,” a name they were given after they had disappeared from the region.
The Hopi, Yavapai and Apache believe some of the Sinagua may have integrated into their populations after they departed the Verde Valley around 1450 CE.
The cliff dwelling is located just upstream from Montezuma Castle and was occupied during the same period as the early settlement of Montezuma Castle, and the inhabitants of the two locations likely interacted with one another.
Dyck ended up in Rimrock in the 1930s after being born in Chicago and later studying at the Munich Academy at theage of 15.
“While in Dresden, Germany, he met One Elk, a Sioux Indian who was performing with a circus at the time,” the Eddie Basha Collection’s website states. “He would later live with One Elk in South Dakota prior to his service in the U.S. Navy during World War II. It is there while living with the Sioux that Dyck was given the Indian name Rainbow Hand.”
“When he was 17, one of the ‘Wild Bill’ Cody Indian shows came through Germany, and he went to it and he became totally enamored by the Indians,” Zoll said. “When he turned 18 and came back to the states, he immediately shot over to the [Rosebud] Indian reservation. He was planning to spend the rest of his life there studying and painting or whatever. And he ended up marrying the daughter of the Sioux chief that was there. Unfortunately, about a year and a half later, she passed away during childbirth, so he got on his motorcycle and just went west.”
In 1935, Dyck purchased a 320-acre ranch along Wet Beaver Creek that doubled as his art studio. The ranch was located about 10 miles north of where the VVAC is now sited in Camp Verde.
“He returned to painting in 1953 and he had a whole bunch of one-man shows throughout the country, everywhere from New York … to Los Angeles,” Zoll said. “But it was all one-man shows. We actually have a Paul Dyck painting retrospective in the museum now if you haven’t been there; we have about over 20 paintings of his.”
When he first explored the cliff dwelling on his property, Dyck noted that there were no recent footprints in the residence and that it was in pristine condition. Observing the recreational use of Beaver Creek, Dyck proceeded to fence off the site and didn’t mention it to anyone until he was doing a one-man art show in Los Angeles in 1960.
“Dyck met Dr. Charles Rozaire at the Southwest Museum during the preparation of one of Dyck’s exhibitions of paintings,” the VVAC website states. “Rozaire was working at the museum as the assistant curator and had a Ph.D. in anthropology from UCLA. Dyck asked Rozaire if he would be interested in doing a professional excavation of the cliff dwelling on his property. Rozaire agreed, intrigued at the prospect of digging a very well-preserved dwelling and creating a complete record of every artifact. The first dig was a 10-day operation that started on April 13, 1962.”
The collection of artifacts was initially stored at the Southwest Museum before being transferred back to Dyck, who kept it in a shed near his studio. In 2014, the artifacts were donated to VVAC by Dyck’s son John Dyck. This prompted the start of a comprehensive report on the collection, and after four years of work, the two-volume report was published in 2020, coauthored by Dr. Todd W. Bostwick, Zoll and VVAC volunteers.
The finds at the site included 3,500 kernels of corn from three different color varieties along with over 10,000 cobs, 176 beans from four species, 3,000 squash seeds from three species and the remains of roasted agave and yucca, giving evidence of the Sinagua’s varied diet.
“In, addition, the faunal assemblage contains 25 identifiable [vertebrate] species, including at least 16 species of mammals, seven species of birds two species of fish and three species of reptiles, all of which could have been a part of their subsistence strategy,” Zoll wrote in his presentation.
Zoll also discussed how 10 coprolites, or fossilized feces samples from the dwelling’s residents, allowed for “dietary reconstruction based on microscopic and macroscopic remains in coprolites. This evidence revealed a broad nutritional diet of agricultural produce augmented by wild food resources. Consumption and horticultural practices are indicated through these pieces of information,” as expressed in a 2022 study from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
The samples showed that the Sinagua consumed everything: Rodents such as woodrats as a supplemental game source, maize, prickly pear pollen, sunflower seeds, milled amaranth seeds and several other foods.
“The broad diversity of diet at Dyck indicates a pattern that would support good health at this site,” the Nebraska study stated. “The macrobotanical remains, in conjunction with microscopy analysis techniques … recovered a wealth of information regarding the Sinagua in the Verde Valley diet and supplementation. As a site previously unexplored on a microscopic level, the information uncovered in this Verde Valley site gives us a first look into the dietary habits of the Sinagua people off the Colorado Plateau.”
Coprolites contain an abundance of information about the food practices and daily consumption patterns of those who came before, with samples weighting only half a gram able to provide valuable insights. “It’s the Cadillac of ethnobotany,” said Tim Riley, the curator of archaeology at Utah State University.
“The Smithsonian and the University of New Mexico are coming out next month, and they’re going to do DNA [research] on some of the quids,” Zoll subsequently said, explaining how research on the collection is ongoing. “That’s the chewed-up part of agave. When they would roast the agave, they would chew the leaves … [it’s] sometimes called prehistoric chewing gum, and then they would spit out that residue, all the fibrous material. They’re going to do DNA analysis of the fibrous material to determine the species of agave that they were eating. And this is part of an entire American Southwest study that the Smithsonian is doing on prehistoric agave sources.”
Over the summer, VVAC will also be burying a number of pottery sherds that visitors have dropped off at the museum without historical context.
“People keep dropping off pottery sherds that they pick up on the trails over the last 50 years, and they suddenly feel guilty, and they’ve picked up these pottery sherds,” Zoll subsequently said. “So they drop them off. And we have hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of these. And we don’t know where they came from. And so they basically have zero archeological value. It’s been decided after consulting with the Hopi we will just bury them.”
Zoll is slated to return to the Sedona Public Library for another presentation in August with the date and time to be announced.
