Agincourt, Information Architecture and the Apache

Today is the 600^th anniversary of the battle of Agincourt and, somewhat to my surprise, I find my feelings and thoughts surprisingly complex.  It’s not the facts of the event themselves, or the facts of the literary and cultural consquences,

 “…Then shall our names,

Familiar in his mouth as household words-

Harry the King, Bedford and Exeter,

Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester-

Be in their flowing cups freshly rememb’red

This story shall the good man teach his son;

And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by,

From this day to the ending of the world,

But we in it shall be remembered-…”

Nor is it a desire to pass some kind of superfluous judgment.  Rather, it’s a desire to see all of it, and correctly understand the connections.  At its root is the basic human will to reason out how the world, how the universe, works.

Some days ago I found myself standing on a small remote promontory in the Southwest overlooking a quiet pastoral valley, almost a glen that was subtly, autumnally beautiful.  It was also, not so long ago, the site of a massacre, in which two dozen men and women and fifty children were ruthlessly killed early one evening.  It’s an event I know very little about.  Yet, I found myself deeply emotionally affected.  It was as if there was something now in the place itself.

I still don’t know what to make of my reaction.  I’d had such experiences a very few times before, at Omaha Beach and at the Dachau Concentration Camp for example, but on each of those occasions I was more than conversant with the history.

Near the end of a fireside conversation in Chaco Canyon a week or so before, Philip Tuwaletstiwa recommended I search out a book by the cultural and linguistic anthropologist, Keith H. Basso, Wisdom Sits In Places.  Steve Lekson, who was sitting with us, strongly concurred.  Though my “to read” list is particularly full at the moment, (mostly with Arthuriana), I made a note to do so.  Their combined and strong recommendation was something I couldn’t resist.

Basso’s book begins as a narrative of an innocuous project to develop a map of Apache place-names in the area around Cibecue, Arizona during late summer months when he traveled with three occasionally recalcitrant and ironic but always witty Apache guides.  It soon becomes apparent that both they and he are after much more elusive and dangerous game than a sheet of paper with a large scatter of phonetically accurate aboriginal labels.  He is studying and they are trying to teach him how different kinds of narrative, including history are developed, recorded and used in Apache culture.  Not surprisingly, it is very different from the traditional western post-Enlightenment traditions.  What is surprising, to me, is how pragmatic, efficient and rational it is.

As I read Basso, I couldn’t help but think about his ideas in an entirely different context:  computer science.  Here is a trivial, inaccurate but sufficient model of a modern computer for my sequel:  a computer is large sequentially numbered set of mailboxes (memory locations) and a robot (the CPU) who can retrieve information from those mailboxes and do a limited set of things with the contents, such as move it to another mailbox or perform an arithmetic operation on it.  Of course, almost none of the information we use in life fits that structure, therefore so much of the work of any computer program (the recipe which the robot follows to continue the metaphor) is mapping, structuring and manipulating data.  These days, after decades of research and experimentation, people generally follow a set of reasonably good practices, however, there was a time when the world was a bit wilder, when deep, philosophical questions, such as the difference between a thing and the symbol which stands for it found concrete expression in the way a computer program worked.  Sometimes the most pragmatic of computer programs could also be seen, quite reasonably, as a philosophical experiment.  More often than not, the core issue was “referencing:”  when should one block of information point to another.  At one extreme, one might try to avoid referencing all together: imagine putting everything there is to know about a place or a subject into its name.  At the opposite end the information could be so fragmented that the information becomes apparently invisible:  all you see are pointers, or pointers to other pointers even pointers to other recipes to construct the information you need.

One narrow, but useful way to look at Apache narrative, history and place-naming is through the formalism of information architecture.  Almost immediately, it’s apparent how well-designed it is, how naturally it suits the culture’s needs.

Most interesting is how the information is structured to make culturally productive use of the imaginations of its individual members.  Obviously, I find myself wondering how the western historical tradition can and should be informed by its model.

Which brings me back to that sodden Friday in 1415 and its manifold references and pointers.  We know so much.  We remember so much.  We have the words of the greatest dramatist in the language to help us see his vision of it.  But I’m not sure our rich, unruly set of pointers, and the implicit values therein make best use of our understanding and imaginations.

“…We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;

For he to-day that sheds his blood with me

Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,

This day shall gentle his condition;

And gentlemen in England now-a-bed

Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here,

And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks

That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.”

A Fine and Terrible Mystery - Episode 27: A Queen in Wild Seas

Back from Chaco Canyon, I find myself musing about dramatic cultural change.  At Chaco, it may be expressed in the architecture itself, for example in the existence of cardinal and solstitial alignments in Pueblo Bonito.

Returning to Sir Thomas Malory (half a world away and 400 years later) I wonder if the political changes of the summer of 1460 didn’t presage a cultural change which would reach its culmination on January 30, 1649.  This is episode 27 in my exploration of Malory’s life; episode 1 can be found here.

At the Battle of Northampton, King Henry VI was taken prisoner by the Yorkist lords.  They discovered him in his tent, abandoned by his Lancaster army.

Nevertheless their first action was to kneel to him:  he was the anointed king.

Henry was then conveyed back to London and isolation and house arrest in the Palace of Westminster.  Two months later, on October 10, 1460, when Richard, the Duke of York, entered the Great Hall, ostensibly to claim the throne, he was met with silence from the attending lords and peers.  Yet, what happened next is even more interesting, (and particularly English.)

For two weeks the lords and commons negotiated and debated.  Some of the issues, were fundamental, such as who even had a right to decide who should be rightful king.  Yet, at the end of those two weeks, a solution emerged, a compromise:  “the Great Accord:”  Henry should rule in peace for the remainder of his life but the crown would then pass to York and his heirs.  I expect many argued that it was the best solution possible, that it was even the most just:  if, for example, one believed in the illegitimacy of King Henry’s son and/or that York’s genealogical claim was superior to Lancaster.

In a previous post, I wondered generally to what extent Malory was witness to these events since he was free and almost certainly in London at the time.  I’ve personally found no specific evidence in Le Morte d’Arthur, nor in the academic literature.  However, Malory’s most famous personal editorial addition to his book is pertinent:

Lo, ye all Englysshemen, se ye nat what a mychyff here was?  For he that was the moste kinge and nobelyst knight of the worlde, and moste loved the felyshyp of noble knyghtes; and by hym they all were upholdyn, and yet myght nat thes Englysemen holde them contente with hym.  Lo thus was the olde custom and usayges of thys londe, and men say that we of thys londe have nat yet loste that custom.  Alas! Thys ys a greate defaughte of us Englysshemen, for there may no thynge us please no terme.

The passion of this despairing and notably timeless declamation about the end of Arthur’s reign and Mordred’s campaign against him suggests it was inspired by personal experience.   Malory is also commenting on the history he lived through, possibly including events he personally witnessed that summer.   However, so much was yet to come that it’s unreasonable to deduce he was speaking of 1460 alone.  And what we can deduce of his role in those events argues that this was written later.  Did Malory have a contemporary counterpart for Arthur in mind?  That’s a question best addressed in a later post.

“The Great Accord” failed.  The Queen and her son, Edward of Winchester, who had been disinherited by the compromise, were encamped at Harlech Castle on the west coast of Wales with her brother-in-law Jasper Twdyr.  In her son’s name she wrote an open letter to the city of London denouncing the Duke of York as a “horrible and falsely forsworn traitor… with an “untrue pretensed claim.”  She demanded the citizens aid to free the king.  But she knew her situation was desperate, so much so that in November she and her son took their chances against the winter gales of the Irish Sea and took ship for Scotland.  There, with the aid of Mary of Guelders, the widow of the recently deceased King James II, she organized and collected the opposition, most notably the earls of Somerset and Northumberland.  They were summoned to gather at Hull on the Humber Estuary in the northeast of England.  Her accomplishment of gathering an army of almost 20.000 in the middle of winter when roads were muddy and impassible argues not just formidable will but tremendous organizational skill as well.

In London, York was caught off guard  by the Queen’s uprising.  However, he soon organized, divided and dispatched his forces to face the threat.  His eldest son, Edward Earl of March, marched northwest toward the Welsh Marches to face Jasper Twdyr whilst York and the Earl of Salisbury marched north.  Warwick and Norfolk remained to hold London.  I concur with Christina Hardyment that Malory probably remained in London as well, though there is no direct evidence.

On December 30^th the Queen’s army of northerners and Scottish mercenaries famously confronted York at Sandal Castle at the Battle of Wakefield.  It is the subject of some of Shakespeare’s finest imagined drama in the “Henry VI” trilogy of plays and controversial as well.  York’s motive and strategy in accepting battle with a force 2 ½ times the size of his own is still debated.  The outcome is not.  York, his 17 year-old 2^nd son, Edmund, Earl of Rutland and Salisbury were killed and their heads were placed on spikes above the gates of York.  It was a catastrophe for the Yorkist cause.

When Edward, Earl of March, learned of his father’s death and defeat he turned his army of 11,000 around to march for London.  But he soon learned he was being pursued by Jasper Twdyr and a force of 8,000.  He turned again and on February 2^nd defeated Jasper at Ludford Bridge before continuing to London.

So very much had happened in seven months.  You can appreciate what I mean when say one has the sense that history was accelerating.  But what about Malory?  What did he think and do when he heard the news?  Again, we have no direct evidence.  But the Paston letters, particularly one from Clement, a 19 year old student in London, gives us a good sense of the mood and situation in the capital.  And we can draw some reasonable conclusions about Malory’s probable feelings and decisions, which are supported by another small, but important emendation in Le Mort d’Arthur all of which I will discuss in my next post in the series.

The photo is Lynn on the walls of Harlech Castle. 

Episode 28 can be found here.

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.