by Craig Childs
We moved around the circle of Casa Rinconada like pilgrims. The stonework was finely finished, as is to be expected in a kiva, smooth and curved like the ground glass of a telescope lens. Two ample T-shaped passages, grand keyholes forming a cardinal axis across the kiva from due north to due south, stood opposite each other. People paused and looked inside, as if peering into a cauldron.
The American Indians approaching Casa Rinconada this morning had faces the color of rose tea in the increasing light. Most were from a New Mexico pueblo, returning on this auspicious morning to a place where some of their ancestors may have stood a thousand years ago. Elder Anglos walked up the path, retired couples who had discovered a love for archaeoastronomy. Along with them arrived four Zen nuns, as well as a group of researchers from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, students of the sky who thought perhaps the Anasazi had asked similar questions of the cosmos.
Before the sun breached the horizon, a middle-aged Pueblo man began to sing. Wearing a notable amount of turquoise, he stood along the kiva’s east-west axis offering a traditional morning solo, intoning words of the Tewa language, studded with light consonants and sudden stops. The crowd listened to his song, not saying a word.
The man finished as the eastern horizon brightened intensely. The crowd began to collect along the kiva’s eastern arc, facing west. The first light would cast its geometric show against the far wall, which we watched like a blank movie screen.
Astronomical alignments were about to be struck all around Chaco, various niches and gaps in the great houses and their kivas. These alignments are often thought to have been instructional, marking the day on which one is to plant crops or the day of harvest. This explanation is painfully simplistic, though, as if planting or harvesting was on a fixed annual schedule and had nothing to do with the wild fluctuations of frost and drought that come every year. I imagine that instead of rudimentary to-do calendars, these astronomical features had been made by the Anasazi to observe the manifold patterns visible from here, confirming the peerless order of the world, cycles on which to hang annual ceremonies. Like the park ranger who stands for almost every sunrise, and like all of us who had come to Casa Rinconada to see this morning’s event, many great-house builders had probably positioned themselves in the right place at the right time so that signs from the sky would shower down on them.
The eleventh-century apex of Chaco happened during a striking convocation of omens both on earth and in the heavens. First came a dramatic supernova in A.D. 1054 at the same time the great houses reached their full height. According to detailed Chinese accounts from that period, the supernova was as bright as the full moon for almost a month, visible in the middle of the day. At night it bathed the earth in a ghostly ruby-colored light. It was positioned in a busy cluster of constellations, off Orion’s shoulder, a very prominent place in the sky. Over the next six years this light slowly faded, until it was replaced by another startling event—the eruption of a volcano in northern Arizona. A volcanic eruption was relatively unheard-of in the time frame of human generations in the Southwest, and it buried eight hundred square miles of land in glowing cinders. Numerous Anasazi villages were enveloped in lava, and ash blanketed Chaco 180 miles to the northwest. Two years after this event, Halley’s comet came trailing its white tail through the sky, and ten years after that the sun became visibly blemished with black spots as had never been seen before (or since).
Whatever preconceptions we have developed about the Anasazi, it would have been unlikely that they ignored the profundity of these various and remarkable occurrences. When the supernova first appeared, at an early July dawn, it was nearly touching the horn of the rising crescent moon. This iconic pairing was then painted and pecked into rock faces all over the Colorado Plateau, including a prominent pictograph in Chaco depicting a starburst, a crescent moon, and an upraised hand. Following the volcanic eruption, people took ears of corn and pressed them into the cooling lava, forever preserving impressions of plump kernels in black stone. Perhaps these incidents were the very events that spurred people to root themselves in orderliness, locking down their great-house walls and kivas to match the more dependable cycles of the heavens. Whether perceived as ill omens or hopeful signs, these dramatic episodes would have been strong markers in the lives of people a thousand years ago. Some must have thought it was a momentous time, one fitting for the bold rise of Chaco.
No one moved as we huddled at the eastern arc of Casa Rinco-nada this morning. All eyes peered to the west. Suddenly, the sky split open, and a meteorite slivered the blue horizon, its metallic green streak bright even in the morning glow. A full second of arcing, electric light marked the whole western sky. Voices of alarm rose from the crowd. Everyone had seen it, a coincidence of position. The meteorite fell beyond the horizon, striking the desert somewhere out past Standing Rock.
As this vein of light faded, many people gasped. Some laughed almost uncomfortably. I heard the word omen spoken under someone’s breath. The Tewa-speaking man who had sung the morning song said nothing. He had already turned to face the east. I turned also and saw a pinprick of orange light break the horizon.
John Stein once told me that he had spoken to Native Americans who possessed religious authority. From these conversations he had come to believe that Chaco’s architecture was more than a mere reflection of the heavenly cosmos. Instead, it was a continuation of it, a perspective from outside the cosmos looking in, a god’s-eye view. There would be no coincidences seen from Chaco, only omens.
The sun’s light was channeled through a portal of Casa Rinconada. A square of sunlight landed on the opposite wall in a niche just its size. I looked east, straight into the light, and saw great houses illuminated in the distance, miles of stonework ruins positioned to mirror and regard the turning sky. Across the canyon stood the behemoth of Pueblo Bonito, looking like a ship stranded in the desert, its five-story hull open, wooden ribs sticking out of the masonry. I lifted my hand to shade my face. The summer sun began scalding the bare landscape, shrinking every shadow back into itself, turning this place from an immortal calendar back into a searing desert.
IDENTITY
PUEBLO BONITO
The east side of Pueblo Bonito is the first to be touched by morning light. Long before the sun even rises, a gentle maroon washes one side of the great house. Then a faint breeze begins moving through the interior hallways and rooms, and the old great house seems to breathe.
The first time I noticed this breeze was on an early September morning. I was here with Adam again. He had already gone deep inside the great house while I milled around some of its outermost rooms. I stopped in the thin, aqueous light and lifted my hand in front of a doorway built in the shape of a T, much like the north-south axis entrances to Casa Rinconada. I felt air passing through the doorway and between my fingers, and I thought it odd, because the air outside was absolutely still. At this coolest time of the day, the masonry walls of Pueblo Bonito still held some of the previous day’s heat, enough to set up a temperature gradient and spur a subtle breeze. Back in the eleventh century, this would no doubt have been a welcome time of day, the doldrums within Pueblo Bonito stirred as cooler outside air pushed through apertures and ventilator shafts.
Pueblo Bonito is the largest of all great houses. It is built like a hive, with seven hundred rooms and about thirty kivas molded into a single, half-moon-shaped floor plan as large as the ground floor of the Sears Tower in Chicago. Most of its ceilings caved in long ago, filling the lower stories with rubble that was eventually sorted by excavators in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This site was cleared down to its bones, its every artifact carted away. The end result is a great house swept clean, empty as a cardboard box.
What business did seminomadic desert farmers have building a place like this? Chaco has all the markers of a sacred Neolithic site. Its great houses are similar to the Tarxien temples of Malta from 3000 B.C., and its stonework resembles that of five-tho
usand-year-old burial monuments in the Orkney Islands. The Neolithic is a formative stage that nearly every civilization has gone through, a tipping point when wild plant gathering mixed with domestic agriculture and domestic animals (such as turkeys and dogs avidly looked after by the Anasazi). Stone tools were refined to an art form, and signs of early metallurgy began to appear, usually starting with copper. During this period, hunting-and-gathering families joined into networks of farming villages and arenas of political power. As part of Neolithic development, enormous stone and wood architecture often showed up, as if people were experimenting with their newfound ability to pool labor and lift their imaginations off the ground.
The Neolithic era did not happen all at once around the world. It occurred at different times for different people, a sort of cultural protocol: China as far back as 12,000 B.C., the Greek fortifications of Sesklo around 6500 B.C., the rise of the Mound Builders in the Mississippi River Valley in 2500 B.C. Chaco in the eleventh century A.D. fits perfectly into this progression.
As I walked around Pueblo Bonito, stonework two or three stories high rose around me, clean as library shelves, hundreds of thousands of bookbinding stones all set perfectly flush against one another. I followed a faint breeze into one doorway and then the next, ducking my head and pulling in my shoulders as I went. Hallways stretched around me, long passages of repeated, symmetrical doorways. Although I prefer ruins left in a more relaxed, unexcavated state, it was a blessing to be able to walk through this compound and peer down avenues of rooms, their masonry escalating in the slowly turning light.
I entered one of the easternmost rooms and found Adam sitting on the tourist-beaten floor. He was the only other person in the great house this morning. His mug of Earl Grey rested in front of him. Adam and I had made a habit of coming to Chaco together, driving from western Colorado, where we both lived. There was no particular chore we had to accomplish here. We simply enjoyed each other’s company in this setting of crumbled Neolithic monuments.
Adam looked up at me. He had been waiting, knowing I would come to this room where the morning light show begins.
I sat near him on the packed dirt, opened a journal across one knee, and began to write. We saw different details each time we came—the air changing slightly from one month to the next, the light arriving differently.
After several minutes Adam said softly, “There.”
I looked up from my journal.
A pair of lights appeared on the east-facing wall across from us, the golden eyes of morning gradually opening through masonry windows behind us. Then another light below that. And another. The ancient grandfather clock of Pueblo Bonito was still work-ing. Its weights and pulleys spun into action as the wall before us became a field of bright nicks and rectangles cast two stories over our heads.
Almost every day Adam and I spent at Chaco began in this room. The sunrise kept repeating itself for us, but not in the same way. Midwinter sunrise comes with a different sequence of light creeping through empty beam sockets and windows skimmed with snow. High summer light arrives like bold white flags unfurling through the halls. September is methodical, one tidy patch of light after the next.
“They’re a little to the right,” Adam said.
I pointed my pen at the wall. “About half an inch,” I agreed, noticing how the patterns changed day by day. The sun was moving through the seasons, and we could actually see the daily evidence. Witnessing this shift from one day to the next produced a heartening sensation. The universe was still turning; this much we knew.
We had memorized the order of pear-colored lights, which one would appear first, which would come last. After the final light appeared above us, we got up off the dirt floor and passed through a nearby doorway, leaving our daypacks and Adam’s mug of tea on the floor. As we entered another room, the sunrise started again, and we stood back to watch. We went on like this from room to room, hustling through doorways as if passing through bulkheads deep inside a ship. We followed beams and daggers of light into farther chambers. In these roofless catacombs a single bead of light landed in a black stone box, and I touched it with my finger, a ritual of passing.
Every turn through these corridors led to an empty vault, where sunlight sliced across the vacant floor. What I was seeing was whatever early archaeologists and the National Park Service had decided to leave behind. Truth is, there is no one Pueblo Bonito, no one way to see the place. In the past, every century, every decade in fact, brought change, as this great house was extended, remodeled, partially torn down, built up, burned, cleaned, painted, and repainted. Chaco began to fade in the twelfth century as the last residents flooded into the shelter of great houses, where they subdivided big rooms into smaller domestic chambers, built hearths inside, and filled unused kivas with trash and feces. Even after that, after Chaco was supposedly abandoned, there was a revival in the thirteenth century, when people with belongings that originated in Colorado came in and fixed up the place, giving Pueblo Bonito’s central kiva a clean whitewash before moving on again. The next resurgence of activity was in the nineteenth century, when, at the behest of Anglo archaeologists, Zuni and Navajo workers cleaned out Pueblo Bonito for public display.
As I walked through the morning’s procession of light, my journal held open with a thumb, I recalled decades of excavation notes taken here, boxes of black-and-white photographs from early digs now stored in reliquaries around the country. Looking for the artifacts removed from Pueblo Bonito, I had wandered the long halls of the American Museum of Natural History in New York, its treasures sealed in seemingly never-ending rows of gray metal cabinets. In the Peabody Museum at Harvard, I found three stories of ceramics. In a small federal repository in Albuquerque, I went through thousands of beads in plastic cases, and painted seed jars crowded on metal shelves. In these modern storehouses I packed my journal with annotations, telling which of Pueblo Bonito’s rooms contained which artifacts. This morning I put the pieces back, restocking these rooms from my imagination. I filled spaces with thousands of nested bowls, their severe geometric designs flowing from one to the next. Exotic birds went back into their burials under the floors, along with a necklace made of two thousand flawlessly graduated turquoise disks, with jet-black finger rings and painted flutes. I fit ceiling beams back into position, first setting turquoise into their sockets, then hanging feathered sashes from their heights.
One room had been a dark aviary for scarlet macaws imported from southern Mexico, the floor covered with a gray slag of bird droppings. (The macaw bones were found deformed in a way that suggests the birds had been kept away from sunlight for most of their lives.) Another room housed golden eagles—great, darkly mantled birds that would have stared with molten eyes as I entered their chamber through a narrow doorway.
Some rooms I kept empty in my mind, exactly as they were found when excavators reached them more than a century ago. Crews discovered a surprising lack of refuse—frayed strings, potsherds, charcoal, or combed human hair—that one would expect on the floors of habitation sites. They unearthed only enough kitchen hearths from the eleventh-century component to account for seventy people living in these seven hundred rooms. Some researchers have concluded that Pueblo Bonito had only enough residents to sweep the floors (at the same time, respected Chaco scholars such as Gwinn Vivian and Chip Wills think Chaco great houses were more domestic). The rest of the rooms seem to have been left for the storage of ritual paraphernalia, for offerings, and for a small number of opulent burials. Rather than being domestic, many researchers believe, the great houses of Chaco functioned more like temples, to which people made pilgrimages.
Pueblo Bonito was built around cores of burials that even by the eleventh century would have seemed ancient. These burials have been one of the enigmas of Chaco Canyon. There are not enough dead to account for the numbers that must have passed through and lived here at one time or another. Only 650 skeletons have been found in the canyon.* At Pueblo Bonito, where 131 individuals were buried, t
wo primary tombs were excavated, revealing skeletons stacked like cordwood.
I took all the skeletons I could remember and buried them once again, draping jewelry over their rib cages, bracelets around their wrists. In a tomb consisting mostly of women and girls, I restored two young women exactly as excavators had found them: side by side, so that they were nearly holding hands, both buried at the same time on a single reed mat, their bodies draped with jewelry and covered with a turkey feather blanket.
As I walked, I added a haze of incense drifting through the rooms as if through the dinge of a high Tibetan monastery. I heard the blare of shell trumpets during festivals, ceremonies, and feast. During years of good rains and robust harvests, travelers would have come by the thousands, their baskets loaded with corn and with beautifully rendered trinkets, the finest of their wares brought from home to leave here. Feathered dancers would have made a sound like sea waves crashing against the shore, their feet pounding, their kilts and ankles loud with shell tinklers. I rehung painted wooden banners from the ceilings, their designs multicolored and involved like coats of arms. Colorful pageants may have been held in these great houses, much like those of the indigenous people of Bhutan, south of the Himalayas, where looming monasteries still function as the spiritual, political, and geographical centers for surrounding villages.
The skeletons found here reveal a cross section of the Anasazi world. The bones carry genetic signatures that identify the various people’s origins. The two innermost tombs of Pueblo Bonito may have contained two separate ethnic groups with genetic ties to different parts of the Colorado Plateau. This great house was designed like a map, with each region separated from the next by thick walls and inward-facing doorways leading to their associated burials. Some people who were physically taller than others were buried near others who were shorter and more heavyset; some with high, peaked foreheads were buried close to others with more rounded faces. Many different people—from deserts and highlands, from the San Juan River and the Rio Grande—came together here to build this unsurpassed nexus.