On Visiting the Ancient Puebloans with some Remarkable Folks part 3

Part 1 can be found here.

In the evening we decamped to a hotel in Farmington, New Mexico.  A shower after three days of hiking and camping was more than good fun.  We then gathered on a patio for drinks and to listen to Philip Tuwaletstiwa speak and read his paper, “Chaco Pathways.”  I enjoyed the paper a lot, not least because he began with his visit to Maes Howe in the Orkney Islands, a Neolithic site Lynn and I recall fondly.

I would call it a personal essay, a venerable literary form of which I’m particularly fond, not least because of the way in which truly good ones deeply engage readers or listeners, which his certainly did that evening.

Though he began with the common properties of certain fundamental structures in very diverse cultures (such as Maes Howe), his primary concern was identifying the set of shared characteristics of human consciousness across cultures.  He listed ten probable ones and it occurred to me that such a set might not only explain the human will to spiritual observance but also the human will to scientific definition and exploration as well, which is wicked cool, when you think about it for a bit.

As if in recognition of that point, he then turned to the particular concern of Chaco roads and argued persuasively with statistical analysis and cultural context that they are most probably spiritual pathways.  I particularly liked the way he illustrated how spiritual pathways can hide in plain sight and his observation of people’s behavior at the entrance of an evangelical church.

One of the “shared characteristics of human consciousness” he mentioned was “an ongoing struggle to bring order out of chaos.”  In that context he quoted a Diné song,

With beauty may I walk.
With beauty before me may I walk.
With beauty behind me may I walk.
With beauty above me may I walk.
With beauty all around me may I walk.

It was both precisely pertinent but also quietly brave.  And it led perfectly to the next shared characteristic, art.  My synopsis of his paper doesn’t do adequate service to its subject and I’ll refrain from quoting the insight of his conclusion which deserves to be read in the context of the paper as a whole.

I will say that I will be severely grumpy with him if he doesn’t publish it.  Soon.

The next day we set off for Aztec and then Chimney Rock.  One of the startling things about Aztec is its contemporary geographic context:  a great and amazing Chacoan site resides in the middle of the north suburb sprawl of Farmington, New Mexico.   You pass through the Park Service entrance in the shade of cottonwood trees and in a few steps you’re immersed in the Chacoan world and one of its most exquisitely beautiful sites.  Lekson argues this was Chacoan culture at its peak and optimally efficient and capable.  The western great house was the largest edifice they ever constructed and it was done so quickly, probably in about a decade (versus 300 years for Pueblo Bonito), though still following the same empirical-architectural paradigm.

Two things engaged me particularly this visit, the Hubbard Tri-wall structure, a stone footprint consisting of concentric circles linked with radial segments, and the great kiva.  The rooms of the Hubbard Tri-wall structure would have been much too small for practical storage or habitation; I couldn’t help but wonder if the Chacoans were buttressing to facilitate height for tower construction, just as European medieval architects had used flying buttresses in cathedral construction.  Then there was the great kiva, excavated and restored by Earl Morris.  I’ve always felt that Aztec Ruins is probably the best place for someone to begin learning about Chacoan culture.  The restored kiva is a catalyst for the imagination and experiencing it is one of the best ways to school your ability to visualize what a Chacoan ruin looked like when they were first complete and occupied.  Lekson once again brought the practice of archaeology to life, recounting Earl Morris’ excavation in the 1920s and his return to it in 1934 when he carefully restored it as part of a WPA project for the National Park Service:  there is nothing in the reconstruction, including the unique pattern of the roof structure, that wasn’t suggested by what he found during the original excavation.  So Earl Morris is now one of my new heroes.

We finished at Chimney Rock that afternoon.  Much of the discussion concerned astronomical alignments and Philp gave a nice recap of the work of Anna Sofaer and the Solstice Project before we walked up to the great house, which is adjacent to the two great stone pillars.  The views from there are excellent, of course,  and it is nothing if not a statement of imperial Chaco culture given the labor required to build and maintain such a structure on a peak.  (I’m sure I was one of the water carriers in a former short life.) The remains of the formal fire pit at the north end of the point and the view of Huerfano Peak which served as the intermediate signal station between Chaco and the Chimney Rock community is one of the most dramatic examples of the Chacoan communication system.  It was first identified by Tom Windes, who argued it may have had more importance than the road system to the function of the extended culture as a whole.

I’ve always felt that astronomical alignments are difficult because they constitute a spectrum:  from those of clear practical use, such as soltitial markers which are useful, even essential, for agriculture to those with ritual importance to those which may have occurred by chance.  So interpreting them is difficult and obviously many are ambiguous.   An impartial, multi-cultural classification system would be a very useful thing.  Each class should have a set of clear, objective defining criteria, such as practicality for agriculture and/or ethnographic references etc..  Devising such a system would be non-trivial to be sure and devising it or collecting the right set of people to do so would require intellectual depth in multiple sciences and cultures.  The great benefit would be the collective data analysis and discoveries it might facilitate, not to mention moving many conversations about them to a more productive place.  With all do deference, I’d suggest Phillip Tuwaletstiwa is uniquely qualified to lead such an undertaking.

Our little expedition concluded appropriately with dinner and farewells at a good restaurant in Durango.  Though I haven’t mentioned them in the preceding I must thank David Boyle and Peggy Zemach, the other members of the Crow Canyon team for their diligence as well.  They managed sometimes complicated logistics and inevitable surprises with remarkable efficiency and aplomb.  Most importantly, I owe thanks to the group as a whole for so many engaging and inspiring conversations, from an improbably cheerful before coffee conversation with Charlie Leffingwell about mummy sleeping bag techniques to avoid boa constrictor dreams, to a conversation with Phillip and Steve about the literality of Hopi and Navajo ethnography and oral tradition.  Then there was the afternoon when Susan Markley shared her amazing photos of Eric Clapton in concert.  All were great fun.

A few closing comments on the trip.  I ‘ve lived in the Southwest U.S. much of my life.  It has a much more remarkable history and prehistory than most people know and both are particularly pertinent to the challenges our society and multiple cultures now face.  I feel have a right to know my home’s history and prehistory and an obligation as well.

If, by chance, you’re just beginning a journey in Southwest prehistory and archaeology, I highly recommend the new revision of The Chaco Meridian as an entrance.  It’s way too much fun for the amount of hard and clear scholarship it delivers.  Stephen Lekson’s writing is effortlessly engaging but his observations and assertions were forged by years of field work and excavations,  careful critical analysis and peer review.   Perhaps most importantly, without apparent effort and editorializing it conveys the great significance of the subject and work.

And when you’ve finished that you can move on to A History of the Ancient Southwest, his bicameral comprehensive history of the ancient southwest and the history of the people, international politics, academic fashions and cultural changes and conflicts which shaped the archaeology from which he assembled and deduced his history of the pre-history.  At the “Big MACC” Conference this spring I observed that his fundamental premises, that “everyone knew everything,” that “there were no coincidences,” that “distances can be dealt with” now informs and shapes much new work and I expect it to continue to do so for a long time to come.

(The concluding Pueblo Bonito sunset photos are from a previous trip.  Now back to Malory and other concerns.)

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.

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 10^th and 11^th 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