symbols used in its decoration, as indicative of
current beliefs and practices when it was made. The ancient
inhabitants of Sikyatki have left no written records, for, unlike the
more cultured people of Central America, they had no codices; but they
have left on their old mortuary pottery a large body of picture
writings or paleography which reveals many instructive phases of their
former culture. The decipherment of these symbols is in part made
possible by the aid of a knowledge of modern survivals, and when
interpreted rightly they open a view of ancient Tusayan myths, and in
some cases of prehistoric practices.[116]

Students of Pueblo mythology and ritual are accumulating a
considerable body of literature bearing on modern beliefs and
practices. This is believed to be the right method of determining
their aboriginal status, and is therefore necessary as a basis of our
knowledge of their customs and beliefs. It is reasonable to suppose
that what is now practiced in Pueblo ritual contains more or less of
what has survived from prehistoric times, but from Taos to Tusayan
there is no pueblo which does not show modifications in mythology and
ritual due to European contact. Modern Pueblo life resembles the
ancient, but is not a facsimile of it, and until we have rightly
measured the effects of incorporated elements, we are more or less
inexact in our estimation of the character of prehistoric culture. The
vein of similarity in the old and the new can be used in an
interpretation of ancient paleography, but we overstep natural
limitations if by so doing we ascribe to prehistoric culture every
concept which we find current among the modern survivors. To show how
much the paleography of Tusayan has changed since Sikyatki was
destroyed, I need only say that most of the characteristic figures of
deities which are used today in the decoration of pottery are not
found on the Sikyatki ware. Perhaps the most common figures on modern
food bowls is the head of a mythologic being, the Corn-maid,
_Calako-mana_, but this picture, or any which resembles it, is not
found on the bowls from Sikyatki. A knowledge of the cult of the
Corn-maid possibly came into Tusayan, through foreign influences,
after the fall of Sikyatki, and there is no doubt that the picture
decoration of modern Tusayan pottery, made within a league of
Sikyatki, is so different from the ancient that it indicates a
modification of the culture of the Hopi in historic t