by Craig Childs
I walked into a narrow passage, slipped through doorways, and emerged into an open arena where kivas surrounded me. The sky turned from morning pink to an expansive blue over my head. Light was just entering a bank of rooms along the northern arc of Pueblo Bonito. I crouched and peered down an aisle of T-shaped doorways leading to one of the tombs. I was just starting to put its skeletons away when I heard a car door slam in the distance. Then came voices. I stepped into the light, taking in a last breath of solitude. The tourists were coming. The day had begun.
Gradually, the sun canted over Pueblo Bonito’s eroded walls. The breeze inside turned hot. By noon the place was as busy as an anthill. Children ran through doorways, and older men shuffled from one signpost to the next, reading out loud from park brochures. Adam and I crouched in what shade remained. Along with the regular wash of Americans, contingents from Korea and Switzerland arrived, as well as a family from India, the women loosely shawled in colorful fabrics.
It was baffling to watch this parade of visitors, people from everywhere coming to this hole in the desert. Native Americans passed through, Seminoles and Choctaws coming to see what earlier Native Americans had once done. A young guide led a tour, explaining, “These are what we call our clan kivas.” The tour group listened as attentively as if they were viewing the Sistine Chapel. Whose clan kivas? I wondered. Even as I carefully put all the artifacts back into this great house, checking through the pages of my notes as I went, layers were being added faster than I could count. Nothing was still. The hot September wind kicked up dust devils, hissing and sputtering through open rooms, suddenly blinding the tourists, who covered their eyes, their faces pelted with sand.
I was told by archaeologists to be careful at Pueblo Bonito, maybe even to avoid the place entirely. They said that too much data has been collected at the site, too many points of fascination uncovered. A fair and succinct conclusion can never be drawn. The place makes Chaco look too heroic; the Anasazi appear more complex and majestic than they may have been. But Pueblo Bonito is here nonetheless, surrounded by its blushing sisters: the impressive great houses of Pueblo del Arroyo, Chetro Ketl, Kin Kletso, Pueblo Alto, and the circle of Casa Rinconada in plain sight across the wash.
I did not take the archaeologists’ advice. I do not know how many days altogether, from sunrise to sunset, I have spent at Pueblo Bonito looking at the same rooms, the same beaten ground. I have wandered through this great house as if it were a book I could not stop reading, its every line filled with connotation.
The T-shaped doorways, for instance, stand out like bulky crucifixes. Anasazi doorways, and everyone else’s for that matter, tend to be rectangular. That is the easiest way to build them. Occasionally, around the world, there are other forms, each with certain cultural significance: the peaked arches of Islamic mosques, circular moon gates in China, and trapezoidal doorways in the Incan ruins of South America. At Pueblo Bonito and its surrounding great houses, there are T-shaped doorways mixed in with all the rectangles.
The first T shapes in the Southwest were at Pueblo Bonito, and later they spread to the remainder of the Colorado Plateau. Someone brought the shape here or invented it here. (It also appeared later at the Mayan site of Palenque in southern Mexico and in a number of Incan sites in Peru.) Perhaps it began as a functional piece of architecture, allowing people to enter with loads on their backs or facilitating the movement of air into the deeper recesses of the great house. It may then have become a symbol identifying the purpose of a room, perhaps as a privileged space, a ceremonial chamber, or a passage leading back in time to the older burials. Whatever the T shape once meant, it was a signal to me, something that I could follow.
Classic T-shaped doorway inside Pueblo Bonito. REGAN CHOI
There are other definitive signs at Pueblo Bonito, markers that once extended clear across the Colorado Plateau. I have identified seven such markers: corn as a primary food source, the importation of birds for ceremonial use, black-on-white pottery embellished with strict geometric forms, elaborate masonry construction, subterranean kivas, alignments with astronomical and geographic features, and, of course, T-shaped portals. In this business of reassembling an ancient world, I had these primary keys to work with.
Another, less tangible sign is mobility. The Anasazi were travelers, driven by the Southwest’s undulating topography, pushed and pulled by the coming and going of rain. Some researchers believe that the Anasazi drove themselves out by overfarming and by depleting wood supplies that were used for cooking fires and construction, but this is too simple an explanation. If one follows trails of archaeological markers, a pattern becomes visible of people constantly coming and going, arriving and disappearing at almost regular intervals. Although there is evidence of failing resources, the majority of Anasazi populations appear to have dealt with their problems by moving rather than by perishing.
As the shadows lengthened at the end of the day, Adam and I walked casually into the plaza-like opening in the center of Pueblo Bonito, where we skirted around kivas set deep into the ground. A circular theater of ruins surrounded us, doorways and windows bright in the last light. Behind the burials that once graced Pueblo Bonito’s northern perimeter rose the brassy cliffs of Chaco Canyon.
The sun fell until its last orange bead clipped out of sight. “There it goes,” Adam said, marking off another day.
We were the last people here, listening to car doors slam and seeing the red flicker of taillights in the distance as tourists returned home. In the gathering twilight a ranger arrived on her rounds. She was from Alabama, wearing a gun and a radio, her hat brim stiff. Politely, she told us it was time to go. And politely, we went.
As we drove away from Pueblo Bonito and out the gated entrance, followed by the ranger, I noticed an official work truck parked there and a uniformed Navajo woman inside. I looked back and saw the woman swing the gate closed behind us and secure it with a padlock. Then, she, too, drove away, and Chaco again belonged to no one, the moon tumbling unhindered through crumbling buildings.
PART TWO
THE ROAD NORTH
LOOKING NORTH
PUEBLO ALTO
Ionce saw a pair of Anasazi sandals so beautifully made that I right away thought of striding across the land in them, each step proud. They were loom-woven out of white dogbane, their thread count so fine I could hardly detect any weave at all. The curator who lifted them from a drawer in a museum did not offer them to me. They were too precious, the prize of the museum’s holdings. She turned them slowly in her cotton gloves, close to her chest, as if she, too, wished to put them on and begin a journey. They had never been worn, not a nick of use showing on their edges, not even the trouble of sand or dirt. They were at least a thousand years old.
Walking people, travelers, those who lived on the Colorado Plateau in the early centuries A.D. are well known for their sandals. You find pieces of discarded sandals chewed and gathered in wood rat nests. Many rock art panels have images of sandal prints walking straight up the cliffs. There are sandals made of disks that cover just the balls of the feet for running, and more traditional sandals with which to walk cross-country.
The curator turned this fine pair so that their soles faced me. There I saw a delicate, woven pattern. It was a geometric image raised slightly along both soles in order to leave a message on the ground wherever the wearer walked, like stamping a seal into hot wax. I moved closer, peering at these raised designs of zigzags and square-edged spirals, imagining all the other sandals of the era with their own woven patterns, individual insignias stamped in the sand and dust of the Colorado Plateau. People left tracks, and in these tracks they placed their identities. I pictured a person a thousand years ago dropping down to one knee and reading a print on the ground to determine who exactly had passed through.
These people were travelers from the start. Well before Chaco they had a history of burning their pit-houses in rituals of departure, then moving en masse to some other place. They were road builders, i
tinerants in a home landscape, and when I saw the stamp of these sandals, I immediately knew they had been leaving premeditated communiqués all across the desert, messages trailing out wherever they went.
I thought of these perfect white sandals as I began a foot journey north from Chaco Canyon into the open desert beyond. I had set water caches along a due north-south line known as the Great North Road that begins at Pueblo Alto. I had driven out on wandering dirt roads and buried gallon jugs in the sand, marking them with broken sticks so that I could find them again. These caches followed a series of great houses extending from Chaco toward the San Juan River well beyond the horizon, as well as a prehistoric road aiming straight north.
I started walking at Pueblo Bonito, carrying a week or two of supplies on my back. Late on that hot September day, I climbed out of Chaco Canyon to the highest point around, a handmade hill. I walked to the top of this rise and found myself surrounded by the weathered remains of the first great house built on this ancient road. It was the twelfth-century enclave of Pueblo Alto, most of it buried by wind and dust. Its last walls stood no more than half an inch above the surface, just enough so that I could see the compact insignia of a floor plan. With its vestiges of kivas and room blocks, the place looked like the impression made by a Japanese kanji carved onto a wooden chop and pressed firmly onto the dry parchment of northwest New Mexico.
Pueblo Alto’s floor plan contains basic formalities that one would expect around Chaco: an ideogram of rectangular rooms and circular kivas bound by an arcing exterior wall on a point of land with the best possible vantage. It is unmistakably Anasazi. The sky around it is huge, every horizon brought to bear, making the ruin even more remarkable. I stood motionless at the tip of this great house, the low, angling sun still hot with summer.
I have long had a love for setting out on journeys, balanced at the starting line, every decision waiting to cast me into the future. I grew up in motion. I have never lived outside the Southwest, yet in my childhood I rarely had the same home or lived in the same state for more than a year or two at a time. Well before adulthood I believed that all was right with the world only when I was standing at the brink of every possibility, a voyage not yet taken unraveling before me.
As I stood at Pueblo Alto, I could see, about a mile in the foreground, a dry wash winding in and out of itself like a snake gliding across the sand. Beyond it was nothing, a country of arid, rolling steppes. Oblivion. If I had come nine hundred years earlier, I would have been presented with deeply cut lines radiating out from Pueblo Alto, roads built to the far corners of the world. The Great North Road was only one avenue leading to and from this place, part of a network of thoroughfares that required more labor to build than even the great houses. Workers transported unknown tons of earth, cutting and filling to keep roads straight regardless of the topography they passed through. Where it would have been far more efficient to jog around some butte or lone cliff, the roads aimed straight ahead, incorporating costly ramps or carved stairs directly up to the top.
The word roads is probably a misnomer. Although many are wide enough to handle multiple lanes of car traffic and they are outlined into the distance by curbs of rock and broken pottery, they seem too large for mere transportation. Instead they were likely formal processions, long public spaces akin to the National Mall in Washington, D.C. There is still healthy debate over how many ancient roads existed around Chaco. More than one hundred miles of roads have been soundly documented, and nearly three hundred miles of partial roads can still be seen. Some researchers believe that the roads continue for a thousand miles, going this way and that.
Most roads around Chaco dwindle into nothing the farther one walks from a great house, and then they reappear along the same straight line, becoming visible again as they reach the next great house. Then they dwindle again, all the while keeping their flawless bearings. One segment points straight to another from twenty, thirty, forty miles away, as if the two were linked by surveyors. In the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries, these roads were lengthened and formal monuments were built along them all the way into what is now Colorado, Utah, and Arizona. A cultural unity was spreading from Chaco outward as great houses cropped up like missions. There was a smell of empire in the air.
I was standing at the start of the Great North Road. This was one of the longest, most complete roads in the Anasazi world, stretching more than fifty miles from Pueblo Alto toward the distant San Juan River. Silent now, save for the snap of the hot late-summer wind, the Great North Road was practically invisible beneath the enormous sky. I felt like a straggler arriving nine centuries too late. I was ready, nonetheless, standing on the brink of a voyage, the walls of an upstart empire fallen around my feet.
But it was not yet time to leave. I had to wait until the right hour. Only when the stars came out would I be certain of the path ahead. I paced along Pueblo Alto’s crumbled northern face, stepping over fields of rubble and walls, waiting as the sun left the sky, its spangles and streaks of light catching in high cirrus clouds. A young crescent moon lay low in the southwest, grazing the distant black rumple of the Chuska Mountains. In the drifting coolness, darkness lifted out of the east, and suddenly I saw it there, a pinprick of a star. It was the one star I was looking for, Polaris, dependable and due north in the sky.
The doubtless finger of this star pointed through windows and hallways all across this region, where buildings were aligned with the sky’s axis. It emerged, as it did every night, in the center of a prominent T-shaped portal at Casa Rinconada. The star’s light pointed out a line that led to my water caches, the course of the Great North Road. I gathered my gear and followed the star into the night.
VISIBILITY
THE GREAT NORTH ROAD
Iwalked under the sun, middle of the day, early September. The Great North Road was nowhere to be seen, just colorful rows of brittle clay badlands stretching around me. I traveled across filigree cracks as a bluish dust rose and fell behind me.
The only way I knew the road was here was by the arrow on my compass. While my senses drifted out among dry arroyos and rambling horizons, I kept the red arrow pointing straight ahead, trying to stay with it.
The compass led to a weathered coyote den that looked like a sad, toothless mouth in the ground. I got down on my hands and knees and nosed into its wilted entrance, the soil cracked and hot under my hands. In the den’s entrance, spiderwebs hung heavy with tiny pendants of fallen clay. It was the only shade I had seen in hours, not big enough even to get my head into. Nobody was home.
I got up and walked on, past pillars of purple and green clay. I finally found a hole eroded from the ground, something large enough for me to fit into. It was a sinkhole, and I crawled straight down into it, reaching a cave where I shrugged off my gear. I pulled off my hat and relaxed in the shade. A spear of daylight entered above me, deflected by the walls of this pit so that it never touched me. I set out my carefully rationed bottles of water. Every move I made smelled of dust. I took out my notes—a handful of papers—and some satellite images and aerial photographs.
I spread these images across my lap and looked for the road I was supposed to be following. At times four, even six, roads paralleled one another through here, corridors built nearly two hundred feet wide when added all together. This processional was visible from the sky, from space, but from the ground everything just blended together, stripped by a thousand years of erosion. I knew I was in the right place, though. Along the way I had found sherds from ceramic vessels, objects left in the same years that European Crusaders were first sacking Jerusalem on the other side of the world. The age of the pottery and its path from south to north told me what I needed to know: I was following an ancient line.
I once traveled one of these pre-Columbian roads with an archaeologist. In the cool of the evening, while we were sitting at our meager camp, he told me that he thought the roads were actually monuments. Camped not far from a ruined, half-buried great house, I listened to th
e relaxed tempo of his voice as he talked about the meaning of the word monument, its root being monere, to remind. These roads, he believed, were built ceremonially, features to be remembered down through the years, connecting old settlements to new ones. He said the word monument made him think of a mountain, mon, and the mind, ment.
“Mountains of the mind,” he said. “I think that is what these roads were.”
The terrain of northwest New Mexico is mostly flat and unbroken. People may have built roads to give the place some definition, rendering it on a human scale. They inscribed their minds onto the land.
The most abundant resource in this desert is visibility. To set a corridor from one horizon to the next would have been an act of cultural magnificence. Perhaps the Great North Road had been used for moving goods from one place to another, but it did not need to be thirty or forty feet wide to accomplish a purely economic goal, and certainly it did not need to run four or six roads abreast as it does in places. Something else was going on, something beyond simple function.
Gwinn Vivian, a longtime scholar of Chaco, sees these roads as more symbolic than utilitarian. Vivian once told me, “The straightness, or at least their directness, was because they needed to be seen from great distances. That’s opposed to a more winding road that might have been more efficient, but you would only be able to see it here and there. When you’ve got one straight damn road you can see for miles and miles, that’s a psychological effect.”