Medical Preparedness and Response for Bombing Incidents (MPRBI) Course Description

s of prehistori
Scope of Course
c communities s
urvive alongside the currently inhabited Indian vill
ages. In the northw

estern part of

the plateau, in the state of Colorado, are the now abandoned cliff dwellings: houses built into clefts of rock. The eastern group consists of approximately eighteen villages, all relatively accessible from Santa Fe and Albuquerque. The especially important _villages of the Zuni lie more to the southwest and can be reached in a day's journey from Fort Wingate. The hardest to reach-and therefore the most undisturbed in the preservation of ancient ways are the villages of the Moki (Hopi

• ), six in all, rising out o
• f three parallel ridges of rock. In the m
• idst, in the plains, lies the Mexican settlement of Santa Fe, now
• the capital of New Mexico, having come under the dominion of the
• United States after a hard struggle, which lasted
• into the last century. From here, and from the
• neighboring town of Albuquerque, one can reach
• the majority of the eastern Pueblo villages with
• out great difficulty. Near Albuquerque is the villag

e of Laguna, wh

ich, though it does not lie quite so high as the others, provides a very good example of a Pueblo settlement. The actual village lies on the far side of the Atchison-Topeka-Santa Fe railway line. The European settlement, below in the plain, abuts on the station. The indigenous village consists of two-storied houses. The entrance is from the top: one climbs up a ladder, as there is no door at the bottom. The original reason for this type of house was its superior defensibility against enemy attack. In this way the Pueblo Indians developed a cross between a house and a fortification which is characteristic of their civilization and probably reminiscent of prehistoric American times. It is a terraced structure of houses whose ground flo

ors sit on

second houses w

hich can sit on yet third ones and thus form a conglomeration of rectangular living quarters. In the interior of such a house, small dolls are suspended from the ceiling-not mere toy dolls but rather like the figures of saints that hang in Catholic farmhouses (Figure 2). They are the so-called kachina dolls: faithful representations of the masked dancers, the demoniac mediators between man and nature at the periodic festivals that accompany the annual harvest cycle and who constitute some of the most remarkable and unique expressions of this farmers' and hunters' religion. On the wall, in contradistinction

to these dolls, hangs the sy
mbol of intruding American cu

lture: the

broom. But the most essential product of the applied

Each jurisdiction scheduling a course must organize participants and supply other personnel and equipment support

arts, wi

• th both practical and religious purposes, is the earthenware pot, in which water is carried in all its urgency and scarcity. The characteristic style for t
• he drawings on these pots is a skeletal heraldic image. A bird, for example, may be dissected into its essential compo

nent parts to

form a heraldic abstraction. It becomes a hieroglyph, not simply to be looked at but, rather, to be read (Figure 3). We have here an intermediary stage between a

naturalistic image and

• a sign, between a realistic mirror image and writing. From the ornamental treatment of such animals, one can immediately see how this manner of seeing and thinking can lead to symbolic pictographic writing. The bird plays an important part
• A screen suitable for viewing at any angle by the entire class.
• in Indian mythical perception, as anyone
• familiar with the Leatherstocking Tales knows. Apart from the devotion it receives

, like every other animal, as a totem,

as an imaginary ancestor, the bird commands a spe

• cial devotion in the co
• ntext of the burial cult. It seems even t
• hat a thieving bird-spirit belonged to the fundamental
• representations of the The serpent (Ttzitz Chu'i) and the cosmological drawing with the weather fetish w

ere sketched for me on 10 January 1896 in my room, no. 59, in the Palace Hotel in Santa Fe, by Cleo Jurino, the guardian of the Estufa at Cochita. C. J. is also the painter of the wall-paintings in the Estufa. Th

e bird has a place in idolatrous cults for its feathers. The Indians have ma