I am haunted by the ghosts of the Anasazi, the ancient ones of the Mesa
Verde cliff dwellings, the Chaco Canyon pueblos, and thousands of other
sites scattered across the Four Corners. I am haunted by the spirits
of those who peopled the Cliff Palace, Pueblo Bonito, the primitive pithouses
on Chapin Mesa, and the Great Kiva of Casa Rinconada. Once I gazed
at a stark, sheer wall of Cliff Canyon only to discover the shattered ruins
of an Anasazi house secreted in a niche under a massive overhang--saw it
emerging in my vision like a spirit photograph; now I browse coffeetable
books of western landscape photography half-expecting to discovery in the
scenery a telltale set of handholds in rock overhangs, props beneath great
boulders, the remnants of a wall, or the outline of a buried kiva.
Like buildings taking sudden shape upon a bare canyon wall or a city of
clay and stone rising from a desolate desert, the Anasazi seem to be just
beyond my vision, perhaps drawn back down the Great Sipapu from which in
the beginning mankind first emerged, and I am haunted by a sense of their
imminent presence.
That August Sue and I had crammed clothing, camping gear, and all kinds
of guidebooks into a Chevette and left Missouri for the Southwest, first
sweltering through the prairie heat of Kansas and then steaming through
the mountain rain of southern Colorado. Yet when we turned off U.S.
160 between Mancos and Cortez onto the road to Mesa Verde National Park,
we were not too weary to be startled by the flat cyclinder of rock rising
from the pine forest. We drove cautiously up the steep, winding entrance
road carved out of the side of the mesa, two flatland midwesterners both
awed and unnerved by the tortuous twists and turns, the magnificent view
unfolding ever further below us, the sheer drop seeming always to be only
inches away.
Morfield Campground, located in a basin surrounded by further heights of
the mesa, had over 500 campsites, but each campsite was isolated from the
others by pinyon pine and juniper and tall grass. When we began setting
up the tent, the only ones who watched us were a mule deer doe and her
twins, kibitizing at the border of the trees. Near sunset, dozens
of deer slipped out to browse in the high grass; campers strolling around
the campground in the fading light stopped in the road to watch them, and
the deer stared back warily while they ate.
The night turned cool and the campground quieted and the sky was clear
and dazzlingly brilliant with stars. We found our way to the campground
amphitheater to listen to a talk on astronomy. One of the park rangers
had set up a telescope and helped us locate Mars, Jupiter, four of Jupiter's
moons, and some constellations. On our return the lights of lanterns
and woodfires were absorbed by the surrounding vegetation and the campground
seemed sparsely populated, even though we knew it was nearly full.
We were only aware of that dazzling overcrowded sky, for the first time
in our lives appearing before us unobstructed, in its full glory.
We fell asleep looking up at that dense canopy of stars, feeling absolutely
alone except for the company of the universe.
In the morning we drove off toward the ruins. Mesa Verde, the "green
table" aptly named by early Spanish-speaking visitors to the region, spreads
out to the south in long peninsulas separated by deep, narrow canyons.
The Anasazi ruins most visitors see are on Chapin Mesa, some sixteen miles
south of the campground. There, at Mesa Top Ruins, the neatly laid
out archaeolgical evidence follows the path of development that culminated
in the magnificent cliff dwellings built in the 12th century AD and abandoned
mysteriously soon after. The peoples who wandered onto Mesa Verde
from unknown origins around 600 AD were Modified Basket Makers. They
found in the climate of the mesa a place to develop their agriculture of
corn and squash and supplemented it by hunting the plentiful game with
spears, using an atal or spearthrower for greater force. Mesa Verde
rises 7000-8000 feet above sea level; its rains are more plentiful
than in the surrounding area, and the Anasazi soon learned how to capitalize
on the rainfall by building abundant dams and irrigation channels--the
remains of Mummy Lake, one of their reservoirs, is still visible at Far
View Ruins.
In time their population grew. At first they built pithouses by excavating
earthen circles, strengthening the walls, and covering it all with a raised
roof of sticks and wattle. The entrance was through the smokehole
on the roof. Originally pithouses were single family dwellings and
single rooms; eventually anterooms were added for storage. Then,
as the population grew, the pithouses were replaced by pueblos, multi-room
dwellings built above ground of single course masonry, a row of stones
mortared with mud. The pithouse, which had been not only a dwelling
place but a place of ceremonial events, survived in the communal kiva,
a large circular pit whose common elements included a firepit in the center,
supporting pilasters or pillars, a banquette or bench encircling the room,
niches in the wall for ceremonial objects, and a ladder leading to the
roof by which clan members entered or exited. Ventilation shafts
were added to bring in fresh air by another source than the smokehole/entrance
and a stone slab added to deflect the airflow and circulate it around the
room. Each kiva also had a small circular hole in the floor, the
sipapu, a symbolic reminder of the Great Sipapu, the hole in the earth
leading to the underworld from which, according to myth, mankind had first
appeared in this world.
The development from pithouse to pueblo was a matter of centuries, a time
of growing population, stable and increasing food supply, and expanding
trade with other Indian cultures. From the world outside Mesa Verde
came beans, a more reliable crop; the improved hunting technology of the
bow and arrow; pottery, which the Anasazi adopted and enhanced with their
own unique black and white designs; and better techniques of construction,
apparently developed in the pueblos of the Chaco culture to the south.
The Chaco culture had developed in ways similar to Mesa Verde throughout
the same period. Chaco Canyon, in west central New Mexico, is a broad
desert rimmed with low mesas. There the Anasazi developed an extensive
culture of interrelated towns and outposts. Roads were developed,
trade routes established, lookout towers constructed with some system of
communication between outposts and central pueblos. At the center
was Pueblo Bonito, an enormous planned city of over 600 rooms and 33 kivas,
terraced up to five stories high and supporting an estimated population
of 1000 people. The desert Anasazi had an influence on the Anasazi
of Mesa Verde, particularly in the method of stone construction of pueblos,
and the trade between them must have been vigorous.
But in the twelfth century, almost at the height of their prosperity, the
Chaco Anasazi abandoned Pueblo Bonito and vanished, their extensive culture
withered, and their buildings were left to the ravages of time. And
at Mesa Verde the Anasazi began to construct their dwellings in sandstone
overhangs on canyon walls, leaving the mesa tops for the cultivation of
crops but living their lives in cliff dwellings that sometimes reached
astonishing size. They came and went from the dwellings by means
of hand and toeholds scraped in the sheer cliff face, descending a hundred
feet from the rim to buildings often perched hundreds of feet above the
canyon floor. It was a precarious, if well protected, existence.
And then, in the end of the century, following twenty-three years of drought,
dated by tree ring dendrochronology as 1276-1299, the mountain Anasazi
too disappeared, abandoned their cliff dwellings, left no traces of where
they went. When nomadic tribes such as the Utes, the Navajos, and
the Apaches wandered into the region they avoided the deserted buildings.
Today the Ute reservation surrounds Mesa Verde on three sides, and the
Navajo reservation to the west of Chaco Canyon occupies an area larger
than New England stretching across New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah, much
of it dotted with Anasazi ruins.
There are mysteries here, about both the origins of the Anasazi and their
fate, and about the decisions they made concerning the culture they created
in the five centuries in which their culture is recorded. The pueblos
and cliff dwellings seem to be defensive measures, particularly the double
course masonry which replaced simpler construction in later centuries,
but there is no historical evidence of warfare or invaders--the known nomadic
tribes came much later. We understand little about the relationship
between such towns as Pueblo Bonito and Cliff Palace and their outlying
communities and outposts. What little we assume about the religious
and ceremonial activities in the kivas we interpolate from studying modern
Pueblo ceremonies--surely the Anasazi were the ancestors of the modern
Pueblo peoples, though shifts of population among ancient Indian peoples
are not so simply explained as that. One interpretation of their
demise sees it as an ecological warning, an example of how overpopulation
and counterproductive agricultural practices can leave a culture with no
means of survival; the counterargument is that twenty-five years of drought
surely would wreak more havoc on a primitive agriculture than the devastation
wrought on a more advanced agriculture in the few short years that created
the 20th century dustbowl. Moreover, Chaco was deserted before the
great drought at Mesa Verde began, while the rain was still falling.
These are issues we may never resolve. The Anasazi left only abstract
designs and some few petroglyphs--no written language, no hieroglyphics
or cuneiform tablets, no Rosetta stone. And yet we still can feel
their presence in the cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde.
The white man's first significant encounter with the cliff dwellings of
Mesa Verde occurred just over a hundred years ago, on December 18, 1888,
when two drovers hunting in the snow for lost cattle happened deep into
one of the canyons outlining the mesa and discovered, in a single day,
the ruins we now call Spruce Tree House, Square Tower House, and the Cliff
Palace. The modern traveler sometimes recaptures that experience
by standing on the rim of the mesa, taking in the stark beauty of one of
its canyons, measuring the plunge to the canyon floor, slowly surveying
the kaledoscopic changes in rugged grandeur along its walls, and then,
suddenly, realizing that among the sandstone shapes, tucked into a long,
narrow niche, shadowed in part by the massive stone overhang and perched
impossibly in the midst of a sheer rockface, are a series of stone walls,
perhaps the telltale shape of a window or doorway. He squints and
focuses on the sandstone-colored ruin, searching in vain for a discernible
path or road to the building, and turns to tell his wife. But when
he looks once more, the harsh sunlight disguises the building again; as
he scours the ledges and overhangs, the dark lines and shadowy openings,
he seems to find it suddenly but farther south than he remembered and somehow
missing a wall or two. His wife has meanwhile found a ruin herself,
this one north of where he began pointing, and as he follows her arm he
rediscovers the first ruin and almost simultaneously sights the third one,
the one she had found.
One of them is well-preserved, perhaps restored in part by the National
Parks Service, and well-protected by a large overhang; the ledge it sits
upon seems level and secure. Another is an eroding remnant of a building
of several rooms; over the centuries the ledge to which it clings obviously
has broken away as far back as the very center of the house itself, perhaps
carried down into the canyon by the fall of a portion of the cliff face
that had overhung the house originally--lines of fracture are still visible
on the rock above the building. The condition of the third is somewhere
in between the other two, still secure on the cliff face but crumbled and
hobbled by its own debris. And even as he marvels aloud that buildings
could be constructed on ledges seemingly inaccessible to mountain goats,
he discerns the regularly spaced indentations in the cliff face that mark
the handholds the Anasazi used to descend to those buildings and he feels
a thrill of acrophobia run through him.
In such a discovery the visitor replicates the surprise of those two cowboys
a century ago, an unnerving realization that these steep rocky canyons
harbor the ghosts of a culture long vanished. Often, having turned
away from the view of the canyon, the visitor has to search again to find
the cliff dwellings. Standing on the rim of the mesa, just off the
modern blacktop road that winds through Gambel oak and thick dry grasses,
he may feel a sense of isolation on his side of the canyon, until he discovers
that nearby the National Parks Service has installed a stairway down the
canyon wall and that a hundred feet directly below him, unheard and unseen,
dozens of campers and day visitors like him are scrambling among ruins
more extensive than those he searches for in the distance.
We descended to the Cliff Palace on such a stairway, twisting its way down
the cliff face and threading through fractures and around debris, now a
man-made series of steps, then a footpath along a ledge. The approach
allows a panoramic view of the Cliff Palace and the result is awesome.
Under a massive lowering brow of rock stand the remnants of a prehistoric
city of interconnected apartments, terraces, towers, and pits. At
its most extensive it had had over 217 rooms and 23 kivas and an estimated
population of 200-250 people. Deep within the overhang a ledge, now
inaccessible, shelters walls were food was stored; entrance would have
been gained by means of a ladder on the roof of a fourstory building, now
no longer so high. Much of the Cliff Palace is similarly gone, the
debris cleared for visitors, some walls restored or repaired in the Anasazi
manner, but the general sense of the place remains. Here was a city
of streets and plazas, private dwellings and communal buildings, all tightly
linked together and demanding a complicated sense of social order.
We moved along the terraces, gazing through T-shaped doorways at dark square
rooms, peering into the kivas where clans met to carry on the ceremonies
that were responsible for keeping the Anasazi in harmony with the universe.
Where walls had fallen and roofs collapsed we could see the quality of
construction, the overlapping of stone and mud mortar, the bracing up with
wooden beams.
From an upper terrace we could look down in one of the open kivas.
At Spruce Tree House, another ruin, we had been allowed to descend into
a kiva with its roof intact. We had felt the coolness of the semi-darkness,
the overarching weight of the roof and the mesa above--it had made us feel
for a moment closer to the Underworld. Sitting on a bench built into
the wall, gazing around the kiva, we had heard the bustle of people outside
and begun to imagine it was the bustle of Anasazi society. Then we
had emerged into sunlight and summer warmth and the 20th Century, into
the viewfinders of European and Asian and American photographers and a
babel of conversation. At Cliff Palace, gazing into the open kiva,
it wasn't hard to imagine these buildings restored and active.
The climb out of the canyon, by another way than the path in, was steep
and tiring but gradual and safe, nothing like the hand over hand scramble
up the rock face the Anasazi had faced daily to ascend to the agriculture
of the mesatop or descend to the springs at the base of the canyon.
Our climb gave us yet another panorama of the Cliff Palace, gleaming in
the sun, and yet when we turned to look back a few feet further up, it
was gone and behind us the canyon seemed silent and empty.
Throughout our stay we wandered the ruins of Chapin Mesa, often descending
arduously to investigate features of various dwellings. We strolled
the mesa rim searching for inaccessible sites nearly invisible in both
glaring sunlight and shadow and occasionally clambered across the walls
of mesa top ruins like the Sun Temple or Far View Pueblo. Once we
drove to Park Point, around 8600 feet above sea level, nearly two thousand
feet above the rest of the mesa, four thousand feet above the surrounding
Delores Plateau from which the mesa rises. The view extends for 360
degrees, to the easily identified figure of Sleeping Ute Mountain in the
West and the Delores Peaks and Mt. Wilson in the North, across the Mancos
Valley to the east, toward the singular volcanic shape of Shiprock in the
south. The unaided eye could barely discern the sparse sprinkling
of communities in the lowlands, and the distances were great enough that
it was easy to believe that the world beyond Mesa Verde was unpopulated,
that the tent and rv dwellers of the Morfield Campground were somehow the
last outpost of the Anasazi, taking refuge on the overgrown mesa while
the buildings of the ancient ones continued to crumble and those of the
less ancient ones we had fled had already begun to decay.
One evening, because I hadn't had enough of that magnificent view, I walked
alone from the campground out the Knife Edge Trail to watch the sunset
over the Montezuma Valley. A modern road had once extended along
the western cliff face of the mesa but the further you walked the more
evidence you found of how the mesa had rejected it, like an incompatible
transplanted organ. Massive boulders littered the road from above
and the eroded cliff face had torn away chunks of it from below until the
road itself disappeared into the earth. The sun sank behind Sleeping
Ute Mountain, its glow incarnadining the mesa wall and casting its craggy
face into red relief. I watched it as long as I could, then started
back before the absolute darkness of the mesa night could catch me on the
trail.
As usual the mule deer were moving in the thickets and rustling through
the undergrowth on the bluff above the trail. Rounding a boulder
I surprised a trio--a buck with the downy beginnings of antlers and two
young does--on the trail and tried to pass them casually, without putting
them to flight. All three watched me for a moment without moving,
then bolted for the bluff. I was startled by their sudden movement
but continued on my way until I heard a sound behind me. Turning
I saw the young buck following me cautiously. My movement sent him
toward the bluff again, but he clearly had no intention of dashing into
hiding. Instead he took a parallel route halfway up the rise, made
his way ahead of me, and then stopped, watching me all the while.
Behind me, visible but safe at the top of the bluff, the two does watched
us. Expecting skittishness, I was unsettled by the buck's belligerence.
I started walking again, keeping one eye on the buck and the other on the
uncertain footing of the trail. He moved parallel with me, his progress
on the loose shale noisy and often graceless, until a boulder in his path
made him pause. I continued along the trail around it and heard him
come down to the slope to level ground. Voices drifted up from ahead
of me on the trail. I stopped and looked back at the mule deer.
He stopped and kept his head low. In the faint gleam in his eyes
I thought I could see the spirit of a powerful stag with a full rack, but
he seemed satisfied that he had escorted me out of his neighborhood--when
I went off toward the campground he stayed behind. In the dimmer
light away from the western rim I could see other dark shapes moving in
the underbrush and hear their rustling all the way back to our tent.
That night I lay awake, thinking of the Anasazi, imagining them here, before
they abandoned the mesa to the mule deer, when they would have seen those
shapes in the darkness. I thought of the progression from single
families living in a hole in the ground to a complex society building a
culture, discovering irrigation, ventilation, and architecture virtually
on their own, occupying such monuments as the Cliff Palace and Pueblo Bonito
and making the complicated social structure to sustain them virtually out
of whole cloth. I thought of their disappearance, their moving out
and abandoning their culture for reasons as yet certain, their blending
and merging with the descendants of Hohokam and Mogollon cultures and the
nomadic peoples who entered the area long after the Anasazis disappeared.
I thought of the long centuries when the Anasazi were lost to time, their
buildings crumbling in the canyon crevices and worn away by the winds and
rains of the mesa, the brilliant sunlight of the days giving way to inevitable,
impenetrable night, the sky ablaze with innumerable stars, all unseen.
The night was without a moon, and the sky was densely packed with stars
of every magnitude and configuration. Lying in the tent, staring
through the tent flap, dazzled by the shining immensity of the universe,
I fell asleep pondering how such a universe would have seemed to a primitive
man on a planet blanketed in impenetrable darkness, a man seeing that spectacle
through a square window or T-shaped doorway or a kiva smokehole deep in
the recesses of an overhang on the side of a cliff, a man living like a
rock dove or a cliff swallow and believing that he and his kind are newcomers
to the light, having recently emerged through the Great Sipapu from the
underworld.
The ghosts of the Anasazi traveled with us when we left Mesa Verde the
next day. They haunted the whole of the Four Corners Area, the canyons
and mesas and deserts and mountains. We looked for them in Chaco
Canyon, lurching over washboard dirt roads past Navajo hogans to get there,
and found them in the sprawling ruins of Pueblo Bonito, and the neighboring
ruins of Casa Chiquita and Kin Kletso. They were in the straight
footpaths across the desert and up the canyon walls to carefully positioned
towers and to other ruined villages and family dwellings; they were in
the large pueblo of Chetro Ketl further down Chaco Wash and, across from
it, in the elaborate kiva at Casa Rinconada, looking in its restored but
still roofless state like a primitive gladitorial arena; they were in the
petroglyphs above Una Vida.
Even after we left Chaco, turning our attention away from archaeology,
we still found ourselves among the ghosts of the Southwest, ever among
the vanished. At Arches National park, vanished rivers had left the
eroded shapes that included Sipapu Arch; in the Guadalupe Mountains a vanished
sea had left the coral reefs of El Capitan, the fossil-littered floor of
McKittrick Canyon, the limestone recesses of Carlsbad Caverns; in Taos
and Santa Fe we walked among buildings indebted to Pueblo Indians and Spanish
missionaries--in Santa Fe's central marketplace, at a festival of Indian
artists, Sue bought a poster of corn kachinas and later, in Taos, I bought
one of La Noche de Zozobra, both celebrations of past rituals. On
our night in Santa Fe we took in a movie about the near past and clannish
young men who used a Baltimore diner for a kind of communal kiva.
In Bandelier National Monument, near Taos, we hiked through Frijole Canyon,
passing the basalt flows and rhyolite tuff tent rocks that gave evidence
to the vanished volcanoes nearby. It was our last day in the Southwest.
I left our campsite to take a trail across the desert that would bring
me out above Frijole Canyon. I watched my footing most of the way,
in part because the trail crossed rugged outcroppings of rock close to
the canyon rim, in part because I wanted to obey federal warning signs
and not "molest" any rattlesnakes, especially inadvertently. Suddenly
I was at the edge of the mesa and I could see the tent rocks in the distance.
But, unexpectedly, I could found myself looking down on Tyuoni Pueblo,
Anazi ruins laid out below me like a stone diagram on the floor of Frijoles
Canyon. Nothing was left of the pueblo but the base of its walls,
drying in the sun after a brief afternoon rain. In a thicket nearby
I could see mule deer moving cautiously, peering out across the empty canyon
floor.
In the ways we talk about cultural heritage, the Anasazi may matter very
little. They seem to be all but untraceable in the modern Pueblo
cultures, had no impact on the European heritage that dominates modern
American culture, can have no role in the changes a non-white, non-European
world will make in the cultures of the 21st Century. And yet they
matter still, perhaps because of the changes to come.
We are all Anasazi, always in transition, either in ascent or decline,
changing in our agriculture and architecture and art, adding intricacy
to our ceremonies and our society, making our inauspicious debut before
the footlights of history or mingling undetected among a new troupe of
players for a final crowd scene. Our cultures are only kinds of mudwattle,
varieties of adobe or stones and mortar, ever in need of repair, restoration,
replacement. Culture doesn't solidify like cooled magma; it is always
fluid, metamorphic, protean, and even the hardest rock eventually wears
away.
In America we like to see ourselves as forever young, a mere two hundred
years old and still growing up; we like to think that the destiny of the
planet is indistinguishable from our own national future. But the
"American Century" is ending and it will be the only one we get.
To our amazement and chagrin, all history was not simply a prologue to
the American moment, and the past was not only a European past. Here
on our own continent others came before us--Hohokam, Mogollon, Hopewell,
Anasazi, and countless others-- cliffdwellers and mound builders just like
us, if on a different scale. Like them we too are caught in the flow
of history--in our turn, we are becoming prologue.
Our history is one of deserted dwellings, places recording the different
ways we shut off our view of the universe in the recesses of caves and
cliffs, pueblos and tenements. The electric canopies that shroud
our cities in gray haze hide from us the brilliance and immensity of the
night sky, the oldest, most awesome memory of our kind, but we are all
Anasazi, newly emergent--once again--from the Great Sipapu, fresh from
the underworld of our past lives, fugitives from its ruins.