On Visiting the Ancient Puebloans with some Remarkable Folks part 2

Part 1 can be found here.

Our first hike was to great house ruin Penasco Blanco in the west of the canyon.  It’s only 7 miles round trip on a good trail with slight elevation gain.  But it was midday, the scudding clouds quickly burned off and it felt as if we were hiking in 90 degree heat.  2 ½ miles in, Lynn quite suddenly began to present symptoms of heat stroke (headache, nausea, dizziness and the rest.)  Steve recommended we turn around immediately and we did, accompanied by Jordy King, one of the Crow Canyon staff.  We used the ice and ice water in our thermos water bottles to cool her head and then made easy stages from shade to shade back to the trail head.

We then spent the remainder of the afternoon in the shade in the Chaco campground with a few others who had decided to forgo the hike or had turned around early.  A cold beer in the shade and good conversation can be remarkably restorative.  Nevertheless, I was disappointed to miss hearing Philip and Steve’s comments about Penasco Blanco.  Its geographic placement along with its design has always suggested it may have played a complex and possibly dramatic role in the canyon’s prehistory.  The great house at Pueblo Alto is directly viewable from there and I doubt that was by chance.

El Camino Catering catered our meals for the two days we camped at Chaco and they were excellent.  Their tacos on the second evening were particularly scrumptious.  However, pride of place would have to go to the first evening when Bill Strauss, one of the members of our group, cooked organic lamb chops that he’d brought which were quite simply the best I’d ever had (and I’ve had my fair share of Welsh lamb which can be amazing.)  They were appropriately accompanied by garlic mashed potatoes and salad provided by El Camino followed by perfect chocolate brownies.  Dinner at the Strater was good fun but this was at entirely different level.    After dinner, Chris Purcell and I did some amateur star gazing which evolved into recalling the history of 20^th century astronomy and how astronomers deduced methods to measure stellar distances.  I’m reasonably comfortable with my memory of basic astronomy but I found that Chris has a finer command of the details of Cepheid variable stars, the irregular galaxies called the Magellanic Clouds and the methods Edwin Hubble used to deduce distances to them which subsequently led to Hubble’s law and then the theory of the Big Bang.

Midmorning the next day we hiked to Pueblo Alto which is stands just north of the cliffs above Pueblo Bonito.  We took the short and direct route (3 ¼ miles) instead of the canyon edge trail and I was glad we did as it was another hot and cloudless day.  It’s one of my most favorite hikes:  a slight scramble and a short but dramatic walk up a narrow slot takes you to the cliff tops and views of the great houses from above.  Pueblo Alto itself is on a further rise, slightly north and the trail leads you past several places where the evidence of the Chacoan Great North Road is clearly apparent.

During the hike I found myself walking with Bill Strauss who brought up the topic of Canyon de Chelly which we’d both visited.  We discovered a mutual enthusiasm for an old cowboy movie filmed there which we both saw as teenagers and which I hadn’t thought of in years.  I find that hiking in Chaco, desolate and challenging as it is, can evoke surprising memories and initiate some memorable discussions.  Exercise for the interested reader:  figure out which movie it is.

Dating Pueblo Alto is tricky.  According to Lekson (who directed an excavation there in 1977) construction may have begun as early as 1004.  Although there is also significant evidence of major work in 1044-1045. Substantial portions of the ruins are clearly visible but others are not.  Though I’ve visited the site multiple times, this was the first time I perceived the entire plan of the great house in detail and appreciated that it really is of the same scale as those in the canyon proper.  Both Steve and Philip agreed that its placement was due, at least in part, to the views it commanded to the north, west and east.  I infer that it may have played multiple roles:  as an elite residence, a strategic lookout, and as the southernmost station for the Great North Road, which lies a little to the east.  Among the other topics we discussed at Pueblo Alto were the debate over the purpose of kivas and great kivas and the extent of the great North Road.  More about that later.

In the afternoon we strolled around Pueblo Bonito.  Steve focused on two areas particularly:  the history of the archaeology and the evidence in the building showing how its architecture evolved during its construction over three centuries.   It was first discovered by Anglo Americans (it was never forgotten by native Americans) when James Simpson, a lieutenant in the US army and his guide Carravahal were granted leave from Colonel John Washington’s expedition to survey Navajo lands to stay back and study, map and name the sites in Chaco Canyon.  Indeed Simpson gave the sites the popular but curious names we use today.  The rancher and amateur archaeologist Richard Wetherill, who famously discovered Mesa Verde when he was forced to take shelter in a cliff dwelling during a snow storm, conducted the first major excavation along with George H. Pepper of the American Museum of Natural History from 1896 to 1900.  Subsequently, Edgar Lee Hewett redirected attention to neighboring Chetro Ketl. But attention to Pueblo Bonito returned with the excavations and research of Warren K. Moorehead, Nels Nelson, Earl Morris, and the nearly comprehensive work of Neil M. Judd.  Nevertheless, Partricia Crown and Wirt Wills were able to re-excavate Judd’s trenches as late as 2005 and subsequently made the astounding discovery of traces of cacao and Yaupon Holly (which contains high levels of caffeine) on ceramic pieces from the site, which is quite simply wicked cool.  One of Stephen Lekson’s great skills is story telling which is evident to anyone who’s ever read one of his books or even one of his manifold academic papers.  And on that rather warm afternoon, he brought to life the personalities, passions and work of the extraordinary men and woman who explored and excavated Pueblo Bonito.

Even so, the most interesting part for me was learning to see the clues to Pueblo Bonito’s architectural design and construction in the building itself.  For example, Pueblo Bonito apparently began as a single unit Pueblo in one corner which then evolved over almost 300 years, (a strategy that would be repeated at much greater speed at Aztec and at many other great houses.)  The great arc of Pueblo Bonito’s north wall has its origin in the gently arcing wall observable in many unit pueblos, a feature that I suspect may simply have been adopted to improve structural integrity.  Then you can see the strategies the Puebloans adapted and experimented with to enable them to build higher walls that would last multiple generations:  core and veneer construction, an arcing tapered wall used to buttress an older, less resilient wall of constant width.  I felt I was glimpsing for the first time the deep balance of an architectural method which combined empirical discovery and adaptation with careful design and planning.  Both were essential for the Chacoans unique monumental architecture.

Then there were the alignments.  Pueblo Bonito shows a shift from solstitial to cardinal alignment during its construction.  The most notable example, of course, is the wall running north-south which bisects the great house.  It even crosses straight through a great kiva, a difficult architectural and construction challenge,  so its exact placement was obviously of critical importance to its builders.  Why didn’t they build the wall a few feet further to the east?  I wouldn’t dare guess at the number of archaeology papers and long late night discussions that change in orientation has fueled (always polite and gentile I’m sure).   I’ll only observe that I was reminded of the division in Balcony House at Mesa Verde and that I find such evidence as well as the evidence of cultural pluralism in other southwestern sites particularly interesting.  How do you know when an alignment is real and intended?  More late night discussions?  I have a recommendation which I’ll come to later.

The next morning we packed up and left the Canyon for our exploration of the Great North Road.  We’d seen its beginning at Pueblo Alto, now we drove then hiked to Twin Angels Pueblo at the edge of Kutz Canyon.  Indeed the Chacoan’s Great North Road runs almost precisely north (with a 2 degree angle change at Pierre’s Complex.  Along the way are several other ruins.  Lynn speculated that these may have served a purpose analogous to that served by caravanserai in the middle east along trade and pilgrim routes.  Such places can serve both practical and spiritual purposes and I thought that was a rather perceptive observation.  The road may or may not end at the edge of the canyon.  Philip Tuwaletstiwa believes that it does and that road was used primarily for ritual purposes.  Stephen Lekson believes it continued north to Salmon Ruins on the east bank of the San Juan and was the primary migration corridor.

Lynn observed that both purposes are possible, not necessarily mutually exclusive and I consider that most likely.  Given the severity of the climate, a clear route with way stops providing water and supplies was essential.  But a change of capital, from Chaco to Salmon, must also have been an important ritual event.  However, except for the remains of a staircase descending into the canyon, there is no further evidence of the road beyond, a fact explainable by the rapidly eroding geology of the canyon.  It’s one of the most desolate parts of New Mexico I’ve ever seen.  Indeed, it looks like it could be in the South Dakota Badlands.

I happened to be standing next to Jordy King while we were standing on the rugged point where Twin Angels Pueblo stands.  He is also trained in archaeology and helped me pick out and identify the building’s layout which, like Pueblo Alto, is more complex than it first appears and which, to my mind, supports Lynn’s thesis.

I can imagine the Twin Angels Great House as it might have appeared to Chacoan travelers in Kuntz Canyon on a moonlit night: a welcome sight, possibly a place for respite as well as a reminder of the established Chacoan order.

We pressed on to Salmon Ruins,  (and yes I committed the faux pas of mispronouncing it like the name of the aquatic animal though I know better).  Great house construction by emigrants from Chaco began around 1090, (just as Pueblo Bonito was reaching completion) apparently following the same method as at Chaco: a first unit pueblo was built at the southeast end and then, after several years of planning, material gathering and preparation or astronomical observation or all three, construction of the great house proper commenced.  In 150 years it was substantially complete but was only occupied until 1280 when the capital was moved again 14 miles north to Aztec.  Salmon had a dark and sad ending:  at the end of its occupation, much of the western side of the great house was burned.  20 children and 2 adults were cremated on the roof of the tower kiva and other adult remains were found in some of the adjacent rooms.

Part 3 can be found here.