Echoes of the Ancients

I love many things about New Mexico. The mountains, mesas and fiery sunsets. The electricity in the air during a thunderstorm. Arroyos that go from bone dry to swollen torrent in minutes. Valles Caldera, the ancient volcano above Los Alamos. The fascinating, disturbing Bradbury Museum, teller of the Manhattan Project tale. The Literary Festival. Prickly pear margaritas at Coyote Café’s rooftop cantina. The table-side guacamole maestros at Gabriel’s in Pojoaque. Sunrises over the Sangres. The black night skies. The vistas of Galisteo Basin. An evening at Harry’s Roadhouse.

Another thing calls to me here: the voices of people who have walked these lands for 13,000 years.

Valles Caldera

In the past year, we have trekked to the Pecos ruins, Taos Pueblo, Chaco Canyon, the River Walk at Nambe, Bandelier and Puye Cliffs. In all these places, sophisticated civilizations arose, and evidence of their art, architecture, tools, technology, and spirituality is everywhere.

Ancestral Puebloans (the term now preferred over “Anasazi,” a Navajo word that means “enemies of my ancestors”) had a profound understanding of the land. Where the rock was soft enough—places like Puye, Bandelier, and Mesa Verde to the north---they carved dwellings out of the cliffs. Around 1000 CE (“Common Era”— replacement for the overtly Christian “Anno Domini,” or AD), they started farming, using cliff-top mesas to raise corn, beans and squash. Around 1200, they started building large above-ground cities like Chaco Canyon. These flourished for hundreds of years. And then, not too long before the Spanish arrived in the 1500s, they vanished.

If you tour one of these places, you may hear a story of mystery. How could these people just disappear? In truth, what probably happened was more pragmatic. A four-hundred year region-wide drought exhausted the soil and pushed these people off the mesas and mountains into the verdant Rio Grande river valley. These wanderers eventually were absorbed into the 19 Pueblos that march up and down New Mexico, from Taos to Zuni.

Pueblo Bonito

Chaco Canyon is harshly beautiful, deeply affecting and completely improbable. It’s hard to get to---located in a remote corner of the state, at the end of long miles of washboard roads. So it takes a determined visitor to make the trip. Chaco lasted about four hundred years, from the 800s to the 1100s, and at its height housed up to 6000 people. Archeologists can’t agree whether there was much of a year-round population, or if it was a destination mostly for ceremonies and trade. There’s not much evidence of large-scale farming, so how could they feed that many? It was clearly a hub of the pre-Columbian world, knitting together 150 communities throughout the Southwest with a network of good roads and stone curbs. Remains of copper bells and tropical birds suggest far-flung trade, from places as distant as Mexico.

Even in ruins, the buildings are spectacular. Chaco’s largest great house, Pueblo Bonito, had four stories, 650 rooms, intricate stonework and sophisticated architectural patterns laid out along the four cardinal directions. Chaco was also some kind of large-scale astronomical observatory, with walls and keyholes that line up with celestial events that play out over millions of miles across the galaxy.

Fajada Butte

How did they do that, with no modern astrometric tools? Just centuries of observing the heavens? How did they get the wood needed for huge, weight-bearing buildings like Pueblo Bonito? The nearest forest is in the Chusko Mountains, more than 50 miles away; and archeologists assure us the Ancient Puebloans had no pack animals.

Everything about this place challenges your assumptions. From the solstice marker atop Fajada Butte to the impeccable engineering of Pueblo del Arroyo to the tower kivas of Chetro Ketl, it’s a lesson: ancient does not equal primitive.

Closer to Santa Fe are Puye Cliffs and Bandelier. Bandelier is the more famous of the two, and it is beautiful, rising above Frijoles Canyon with its pretty little forest and river. But when people ask, I suggest a visit to Puye instead. Bandelier is administered by the National Park Service, and its story is told exclusively through Anglo eyes. Thousands of tourists stream through here, self-guided. They scramble over paved walkways, use handrails

Pit house at Puye Cliffs

screwed into the rock, read the kind of signs you see in every other national park. Every artifact the ancients might have left behind has been stripped clean by these unaccompanied visitors. Vandalism is a problem.

Puye, by contrast, is largely untouched. We hear its story from Samantha, a 20-year-old member of the Santa Clara Pueblo, which administers this site. Samantha is a descendent of these cliff dwellers, and she is deeply knowledgeable about the land’s geological formations and ecology, and the customs, art, and spiritual practices of her ancestors. Crops were chosen, she says, for their symbiosis. “The corn provided the stalks for the beans to run up. The broad squash leaves sheltered the beans and corn from the sun. This cut down on the water that had to be hauled from the creek below.” She stops us alongside a large boulder littered with artifacts—hundreds of different types of rock, pottery shards, arrowheads, stone tools—all from the surrounding area. She explains them in detail: the different glazes artists used for pottery; how rocks of varying hardness were deployed for different things; how animal carcasses leftover from meals were thrown over the cliff into a pit, keeping wild animals from coming into the center of the settlement. She paints a vivid, personal picture of 1500 lives lived up to 13 centuries ago.

Samantha straddles two worlds. She went to the Catholic high school “because my parents thought it would be a

better education.” Was it? I ask. She shrugs. The teachers were not terribly supportive of her Native culture. “A lot of tribal people my age are going back to the old ways,” she says. The elders, she explains, are more likely to practice Catholicism and other remnants of the Spanish occupation.

Puye Cliffs is about 20 miles from Los Alamos—shorter as the crow flies. An Ancestral Puebloan could have walked it in a day. And probably did, given that the Jemez Mountains and Parajito Plateau were sacred sites to them.

Both places could be called triumphs of human ingenuity. In one, a thriving, sophisticated culture arose through wisdom and understanding of the land. In the other, a campaign of terrible brilliance about the physical properties of creation unleashed the most destructive power humanity has ever known.

Is this co-location just a really weird, ironic accident?

I have stood on mesas at Chaco, Puye, and Bandolier. I have looked at the ruins below; listened for the echoes. Wind blowing in my face, I have felt a thin silver ribbon of time, stretching from me---a 21st-century white woman—back to people who possessed a preternatural connection to the earth. I have thought-, more than once, and with regret: How little we understand.