Not Navajo. Often a stone circle is the foundation of a traditional hogan, but this is in the wrong place–over a lava field, no grazing near–and the “doorway” break faces west, not east.
Puebloan? There are tumbled Ancestral Puebloan structures in the neighborhood, but they’re all square-cornered. Nor can it be a kiva, because it was built right on the sandstone slabs.
The fallen ponderosa that divides it neatly in half is old, but thick lichen says the circle is much, much older.
What was it?
Stone in the outwash of the Morrison Formation…
…and, near the stone circle that is all that remains of an early Navajo hogan, a juniper stump, axe-cut a couple of centuries ago and scoured to the ground by wildfire:
On a ridge above the crumbled, pink-and-black Morrison Formation was a decaying axe-cut juniper stump, signal to watch for the circular stone base of a hogan.
Sure enough:
It was probably nineteenth-century, because the juniper cribbing had decayed or been taken for firewood. Into it had been dumped the rusted remains of a McCormick wind pump dating to, say, the ranching thirties:
Outside the circle, laid carefully on a rock–“curated” by some previous visitor–was a 3″ chert hand axe. The Navajo had metal trade axes, so presumably this one was Archaic. Thousands of years older than both hogan and pump.
From the mesa edge we saw, on a south-facing bench, two Navajo hogan rings and a stone corral, and climbed down to them.
They were old. No historical pottery scatter at all. One of the rings still carried the juniper cribbing of the roof, though it had fallen. In the desert juniper can endure for hundreds of years.
The hogan’s door did not face east as is traditional, because the ring had been built against a sandstone slab; however, the north wall did appear to have been knocked out, customary ritual to release the spirit of a dead person.
The corral had been formed ingeniously by piling cedar to wall up the ends of a cleft formed when a fallen slab split in two.
*
WORLD-BUILDING and WILDERNESS: 