Wednesday, October 7, 2015

On Visiting the Ancient Puebloans with some Remarkable Folks - Part 1


Gaspar Pérez de Villagrá, a captain in the 1596 expedition of Juan de Oñate to colonize New Mexico, recounts a native story told to him on their march north in his 11,891 line, surprisingly accurate epic poem about the expedition, Historia de la Nueva México:  two valiant brothers, “of high and noble Kings descended” led two large columns of people south until they encountered an old hag with an immense iron boulder on her head.  The old woman instructed one brother to pass south and found the great Mexican altetpetl of Tenochtitlan, capital of the Aztecs.  The other brother was told to turn about and found another city which the editors of the text identify as Paquimé, as Casas Grandes is also known.

In 1872,  William Pierson, the US Vice Consul at El Paso del Norte in Mexico, sent an account to the Department of State in Washington, describing a discovery made by a party of Mexican mountaineers.  They had begun excavating prehistoric ruins at Casas Grandes in Chihuahua.  One of them, Teodoro Alverado, wandered into a large room where he encountered a brick tomb.  Inside, he discovered a “curious mass of meteoric iron” carefully and curiously wrapped in coarse linen like a mummy.  Pierson, along with some friends, arranged for the purchase of the 1 ½  ton meteorite and today it resides in the Smithsonian where it still can be seen.

The  Nahuatl word “Aztec” means people from “Aztlan.”  In 1789, the Jesuit priest, Francisco Clavijero, deduced that Aztlan lay north of the Colorado River.  Could the two legendary brothers have been leading a migration from the Chacoan altepetl at what is now known as Aztec, New Mexico?  Was Chacoan culture that spread across the Colorado Plateau in the 10th and 11th centuries Aztlan?  Was an historical event the root of the mythical tale told to Pérez de Villagrá?  Such speculations are intriguing to say the least, and there are many more historical and ethnographic allusions which I haven’t mentioned, (such as the Navajo tale of the Great Gambler and the Hopi origin story).  There are also suggestive facts, for example the language of the contemporary Hopi people is Uto-Aztecan, as Nahuatl is.  There are many theories and many vested interests in many countries.  Nevertheless, as curious and provocative as all of this is, it remains legend, myth  and possibility.


On Sunday evening, September 27 of this year, Lynn and I joined an eclectic group gathered in a back room of the venerable Strater Hotel in Durango, Colorado.  We were there for dinner, to reprise our agenda for the coming week and to listen to Professor Stephen Lekson, the preeminent, sometimes controversial and always erudite southwest archaeologist give a short précis of his most recent view of the origin and rise of Chacoan culture.  To my mind, the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center, which organized the trip, had done an amazing thing by enabling some of us outside of the profession to travel and learn from one of southwest archaeology’s most important scholars.  I’d wanted to hear Lekson speak since I’d first read the first edition of his book, The Chaco Meridian, in 2003.

That evening he began by retelling the events I’ve reprised above.  He then went on to discuss some of what the archaeology of the Colorado Plateau has to tell about the origins of Chaco.  During the Basketmaker III period of the Pecos chronology system (500-750) nearly all settlements were very small, consisting of a few pit houses, sometimes with a stockade.  To paraphrase Lekson, if you find a site with ten you write a book and retire.  In Chaco Canyon, there is not one but two sites with ten times that number:  Shaik’eschee.  Lekson speculates there may possibly be a third: beneath Pueblo Bonito itself given the tantalizing Basketmaker III evidence found there.  Nevertheless, during the subsequent Pueblo I period (750-900) Chaco became a bit of a backwater.  Instead, directly north of one of the Shabik sites, two new major sites evolved rapidly:  Blue Mesa and Sacred Ridge.  In the recently published revised version of The Chaco Meridian, Lekson quotes a private correspondence with Jason Chuipka, the excavator of Sacred Ridge:

What stands out about Sacred Ridge are all the things that were “not supposed to be there” according to our understanding of the early A. D. 800s in the northern Southwest.  The site was too early for towers (there was one at Sacred Ridge); pit structures in the area averaged 5 meters in diameter (most were 50% larger than that at Sacred Ridge); no sites were known to contain more than two or three contemporary habitations (there were 20 at Sacred Ridge), and in a time of plenty without ecological stress and population pressure there should be peace (instead, there was ample evidence of violence)…

There were more eighth century houses in the 7 miles betwixt Sacred Ridge and Blue Mesa than at any other Pueblo I period site.  Altogether, it suggests the nascence of a precocious, inventive and assertive culture.  Chaco had never been abandoned, but it begins its meteoric rise just as Sacred Ridge and Blue Mesa are abandoned.  Could there have been a migration?  The timing and distances alone are suggestive.  Then there are the “royal” burials at Pueblo Bonito, the construction of which began around 850.  Two men were buried with grave goods suggesting Mesoamerican level of wealth including, in one case, a cape of 2,000 pieces of turquoise as well as macaws.  And the burials are very early.  Could they have been two valiant brothers of high and noble kings descended, possibly from Sacred Ridge or Blue Mesa?  Chaco Canyon though beautiful is severe, with little water and significantly greater temperature swings both in summer and winter than nearby areas.  Then there are the winds.  I remember hiking in a sustained 40 mph “breeze” on our second visit some years ago.  It is not a likely place for a people to settle unless they had an historical or cultural reason to do so.

And that’s where we concluded our evening.  The next morning we were to set out for Chaco Canyon itself.

At breakfast, Lynn and I were joined by the other archaeological scholar in the group, Phillip Tuwaletstiwa, an engineer and a geodetic scientist. I later learned that he had served as an officer in the National Oceanographic and Atmosphere Administration and had developed the Hopi Tribe’s first comprehensive land information system to assist in management of their cultural and natural resources.  He is also a specialist in archaeoastronomy, particularly astronomical alignments.  Mr. Tuwaletstiwa was the first member of the Hopi tribe we’d ever met.  He is exceedingly gracious, affable and unassuming.  Nevertheless, by the end of our week together I realized he also possesses a keen and perspicacious intelligence with the very rare advantage of being able to view history as well as the archaeological record from multiple cultural viewpoints.

Then there were the other members of the group.  We had an active professor of Anthropology, a marine biologist, physicians, engineers, a successful  rancher who raised organic sheep and lambs and more as I wasn’t able to discuss everyone’s life experience with them.  Several were or had been instrument rated pilots.  I quickly deduced it was not a group with whom to play the game of who has worked or done research in the most interesting or dangerous place.


Traffic on the freeway into Chaco was light.  Not.  Actually, I have always suspected that special graders were researched and built for that dirt road, (possibly funded by a secret society of dentists).  It’s only 20 miles or so but 15 mph can feel like 5 mph over a prudent speed.  The group we were riding with made experienced comments about how good the road was this year whilst I worried about my dental work and listened to the vehicle’s sheet metal flexing with every solid bump.  But soon Fajada Butte (443 feet high)  stood ominously beautiful before us in the gap leading into the canyon.  In 1977 Anna Sofaer discovered that the sun’s dagger shaped shadow on a petroglyph of two spirals high on the butte, accurately signaled the equinoxes and possibly much more.  The Chacoans also erected a 95 meter high, 230 meter long ramp on the southwestern face, an immensely ambitious civil engineering project.  You can’t look at it without wondering if they saw the butte as something like a Mesoamerican pyramid and used it for analogous ritual purposes.  There are ruins on the upper levels of the butte as well.

Part 2 can be found here

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