by Craig Childs
I felt a sharp prick on the back of my neck. I put the images down in my lap and reached behind my collar to pluck off a bloodsucking insect, a kissing bug—Triatoma protracta, the western conenose. It was an opportunist down in this shaded hole, waiting for animals like myself to crawl in seeking shelter. It was no larger than a shirt button. Its wiry legs struggled for purchase, and I flicked it into the dark, where it righted itself and started back for me.
I waited for its return, tipping my head back and resting in the shade. Misshapen stalactites of clay hung from the ceiling. When the bug reached me again and began climbing along my shin, I picked it up and tossed it. This went on for a long time, until I fell asleep and the bug finally got the blood that it wanted.
I walked back and forth for days across badlands and expanses stubbled with sage. Every now and then I spotted a gentle crest where the road had been dug, but I was never entirely certain of what I was seeing. It could have been the work of the wind or coincidences of soil and erosion. I knew field archaeologists who had eyes for these ancient roads and could see them clearly. I was just learning this art. With my eyes charged, anticipation at full throttle, I saw roads everywhere: channels formed by the way sage had grown along invisible water lines, clearings made by the passage of generations of jackrabbits. Abandoned fence posts lined up in rows leading beyond the horizons, marking townships and ranges. Anthills stood like miniature great houses, where ants streamed along their own processionals, carrying treasures to their queen. Meanwhile, the sky was laced with white lines of passenger jets defining routes between the larger cities of my own civilization, a daytime ceremony that at night became points of light flashing through a bed of stars. I felt as if I were walking among layers of roads, the Great North Road being one of the least apparent of them all.
Near sunset one day I headed for a cone-shaped butte and climbed its steep flank, looking for a view. It was the first place in many miles I could get high enough to see the surrounding land—a butte standing in a council of buttes, each looking as if it were on stilts, each wearing a flat cap of rock on its head. As my boots carried me up the soft clay slope, a vista spread out before me. In most of the Southwest, a rise of a couple of hundred feet is nothing, but in this sheer, open country I felt as if I were being thrown straight into the sky. At the top I found a smooth, narrow block of caprock, where I dropped my pack and turned slowly to take in the full circle of the earth. I would camp on this high point for the night.
The butte’s sunset shadow extended at least a mile into the east, a cone of shade running over meager washes and a few stranded junipers. To the south I faced a half-moon balanced on its own axis, a manila pirouette low on the southern horizon. The moon was due south, I noticed. This meant that the line equally dividing the moon’s dark and light sides pointed straight at Pueblo Alto, now a couple of days behind me and barely in view from here.
Some researchers believe that the Anasazi planned their settlements and monuments to line up exactly with trends in the landscape. Dennis Doxtater, an architecture professor at the University of Arizona who has studied how various cultures align themselves on the land, took a close look at the Chaco region and discovered startling configurations. He plotted on a map every prominent archaeological site in this part of northwest New Mexico, along with the summits of the highest nearby mountains, mesas, and buttes. When Doxtater drew lines between these points—even if they were over the horizon, a hundred miles out of view from each other—a pattern emerged. Lines radiating from Casa Rinconada in Chaco Canyon passed directly through a number of great houses and straight through the centers of their largest kivas to meet significant landmarks in the distance. On his map he saw flawlessly symmetrical angles and intersections that when added together made a nearly irrefutable argument: the Anasazi, Doxtater believed, had intentionally nested themselves into a georitual landscape with impressiveaccuracy, possibly utilizing surveyor/priests and astronomers to deter-mine where sites should be built.
Doxtater ran a line from the great kiva of Casa Rinconada on the floor of Chaco Canyon, out the center of its northern T-shaped portal, directly over the rim through a conspicuous gateway at Pueblo Alto, and straight to this cluster of buttes almost twenty miles away. Here the line continues through a throng of ruins and a collapsed great house, setting up an impressive long-distance alignment. He concluded that these buttes must have been a crucial axis in a landscape of “spirit lines.”
Pinning this idea onto a more utilitarian model, Doxtater wondered if such a precise and far-reaching knowledge of landscape might have allowed groups of people to move along preexisting lanes of travel during times of drought without causing territorial disputes. The supposedly ceremonial sites scattered along these many pre--Columbian roads may have simply been a map to follow in both times of need and times of pilgrimage. Setting out toward a different ecological niche—as would have been demanded frequently by this environment—various groups may have been free to travel along lines connecting ceremonial sites and landmarks, perhaps the same general tracks used for the previous ten thousand years.
Inventing the Anasazi world from what we now see on the ground is a flight of imagination. But at least there is no doubt that the Anasazi constructed places to peer across the earth at one another, with causeways set into the ground at incredible cost linking these sites either continuously or by directing the eye. As a novice, unable to claim the long cultural heritage of the Anasazi, even I could stand upon a butte and see this, the moon half-opened and half-closed like a clamshell above the skyline. If a georitual landscape like the one so many Southwest scholars envision is possible anywhere, that place is here.
The sun went through its final throes, polishing the sky with a bright amber light, chasing the shadow of this butte and me for miles into the east. As I turned toward my gear and unbuckled a water bottle, I noticed that cut into this caprock were the remains of a massive hearth. As I sat down at the edge of this hearth, I noticed an ashen darkness to the soil within it, the remains of ancient firespreserved by the aridity. Pieces of broken pottery lay about, signs that long ago this place was well used.
I knew that archaeological surveyors had discovered hearths on these buttes while mapping the Great North Road. It has been suggested, rather obviously, that people lit signal fires here. What other reason could there be to come to a narrow slab of caprock high on the landscape where there is not room for even the smallest habitation and light huge fires? A bonfire on this point would have been clearly visible from Pueblo Alto, as well as from a number of other high points in the area also marked with the dark soil of ancient fires. I picked up one of the potsherds at my feet. Not from a prosaic piece of gray cooking ware, it was instead from a decorated piece of black-on-white pottery, which told me that this had been a prominent place in the minds of these people—so prominent that they had brought their finer wares here.
In the past I had slept on some of the other high points visible on the horizon. I could barely glimpse a cap of rock far to the northeast, where I had once spent a night with my wife and child. A furious thunderstorm had pummeled us that night as bolts of lightning struck the ground and a stiff rain swept by. In the morning, when the storm had cleared, I had stood on that high point, where remnants of a pre-Columbian shrine were located. The storm had left the atmosphere remarkably clear, and using binoculars I had been able to see the crest of Mesa Verde in Colorado and a notch in the north-ernmost horizon, more than seventy miles away, where a mountainous great house had been constructed at a place called Chimney Rock. I had turned in the other direction and seen, some twenty miles in the distance, a nip on the southeastern horizon where this very butte I was currently camping on lifts along the Great North Road. Chaco is clearly visible from here, its farthest landmarks standing on tiptoes, peeking over the horizon. Fires lit on these high points could have swiftly relayed messages north, deep into the Rocky Mountains, or west over the Chuska Mountains and down the other side, where Anasazi rui
ns now rest in northern Arizona. Communications could have been sent across the Four Corners into the erotic sandstones of Utah or south to the headwaters of the Little Colorado River.
Positioned on a great hearth atop this butte at sunset, I imagined spectacular sky-lighting fires, with flames curling upward as the sweating fire tender stepped back and shielded his face. Such high signals may have been torches of warfare or of ceremony. Perhaps fires were lit at the winter solstice to put a call out in the searing cold of this high desert, letting communities know that they were not alone, that they were members of a nation of great houses and villages extending beyond the horizons. I envision dry brush going up like straw, flashing brightly into branches of juniper wood. Then the surrounding nightscape would have unfolded, settlements flickering to life as if fireflies had been let out into the dark.
As I sat at the edge of this lofty hearth, I brushed my fingertips through dry frills of ricegrass and a single sprig of dropseed grass. Pieces of burned pottery lay all around, stuck in rock cracks or prostrate on the hearth’s floor. A fire had not been lit here for centuries.
The sky drifted into night as a stiff wind split around the head of the butte. I hunched my back against the wind, feeling the hot breath of day fading on my neck. I ate my meal—a few squares of dried ginger, a bead of honey on my tongue, fists of nuts, and an entire quart of water guzzled down into the dry recesses of my body. As the half-moon slowly capsized into the southwest, I pulled my wool serape over me to break the wind and curled my body underneath, gaps tucked closed. I kept a peephole open, the wool pulled back from my eyes so that I could see the dark stretch of earth below. I saw no sprinkles of town lights, not even a ranch’s blue-star vapor light. You could see a match struck fifteen miles away out here.
I once spoke with an archaeologist named Tom Windes who had worked for more than thirty years researching Chaco. He was one of the surveyors who had first studied these roads in the 1970s. Windes told me he had spent many nights in the desert contemplating the sky, feeling the ground beneath his back.
“I’m just a city kid—what the hell do I know about the outdoors?” Windes had said. “Where I grew up, you couldn’t even see the skies at night. It’s a wondrous thing to me to be around Chaco at night and look at that universe and have that feeling of how you fit in. You never get that back east, never. You can’t see the kind of universe that’s visible here. You grow up in trees and lights, and you can’t see anything. You come out here, and it’s clear for a hundred miles in every direction. That’s a different mind-set. Each landscape allows or inhibits perspective, and that creates the culture. Views like you get out here, these make their own people.”
The day I met Windes, I walked into his office with a satchel full of papers, stopping when I saw he was busy. At the far end of a room that stretched like a narrow closet, Windes sat in his chair swiveling across the floor, the phone cord following him as he moved from desk to desk, flipping open files and maps, rolling back, tapping his pen on paper. He spoke into the phone with a quick voice, explaining exactly what was needed: a compiled analysis of tree-ring dates. He wanted it quickly, a last-minute request.
Windes glanced up and saw me at his door. His hand waved me in and gestured at a vacant chair as he continued his conversation. Just behind him was a map tacked to the wall, and I recognized the topographic lines as those of the Chaco region. Across the map’s printed intervals, Windes had drawn rays of straight lines, a network of rules crossing back and forth.
Thirty years earlier, when Windes was first working as an archaeologist surveying around Chaco, he and his crew kept finding slight mounds out in the desert. These mounds were all over the place, but they hardly deserved note compared to the great houses being documented at the time. There was little architecture attached to these scattered mounds, just some low, crumbled walls that looked like foundations for structures never completed. Very few artifacts were visible on them, and the surveyors debated about what to call them in their reports, even thinking that perhaps they should not be listed at all.
Then, digging into one of these humps, Windes came upon a bowl delicately carved out of stone, its lip inset, where a lid was seated. When he uncovered the bowl, he found a handful of turquoise inside. He looked up from this nameless site, peered across the land, and suddenly realized that he was in a very important place.
These mounds that they had nearly skipped over were each situated at a specific point—not just a high point, but one in view of no fewer than two other high points. There was a pattern. Windes started exploring lines of sight and contours in the topography, sending people to stand atop sites in the dark of night and light flares so that the old relays could be seen. He found that these sites, located twenty or thirty miles apart, had been created to communicate with each other. They were signal stations.
Sitting in his office, I could barely hear a woman’s voice on the other end of the phone. She was trying to write down what he said but was unable to keep up. Windes smiled and said, his voice slowing, “Okay. Relax. Don’t stress about it. I’m sure you’ll find everything, and I’ll look for it on my desk next week.”
He hung up the phone and, without even taking a breath, leaned toward me and extended his hand to shake mine. He reclined in his chair and said, “You wanted to ask me about this signal system.”
Windes is a trafficker of data. He gathers sizes and numbers. Ratios. Categories. He has rain gauges set up all over the desert, checking on precipitation patterns. Potsherds he finds are carefully labeled: Gallup Black-on-White, Mesa Verde White ware, White Mountain Red ware. He records each one, keeping track of how many have been found in each place. For decades he has been drilling plugs of wood out of ceiling beams and wall posts at archaeological sites, sending his cores to a tree-ring lab to determine the years or even the seasons when the wood was cut. This gives him a fairly accurate idea of when each site was constructed.
“Yes, the signal system,” I said.
“Communication system,” Windes said, planting his words like a solid explanation. “That’s what it is, a network for relaying information.”
“Is that the map?” I asked, pointing at the wall behind his head.
He did not have to look.
“Yes, that’s the map,” he said, his voice jaunty with the inflections of a comedian. “The system they had is engineered, no question about it. It links everything out there. People don’t talk about it much. It’s always roads, roads, roads. But what about these signals? How come we don’t talk about them more? We’ve demonstrated that they are not random, that they are clearly planned. You’ve got to pause to think about it. These Anasazi guys really had it together. I mean, this is phenomenal. You could flash messages in minutes across the whole Chaco world. It even looks like a dual-route system in some places, so if one went down, you would have another line to back it up. Whatever the hell they were talking about over these distances, it must have been pretty damned important to build such an elaborate system.”
As I listened to Windes, I thought that his mind must never rest. As he spoke, his hands bounced from place to place, touching a piece of paper, tapping on his knees, returning to the same piece of paper. His movements were not neurotically quick. They were merely busy, ceaseless.
He did not think that fire was necessarily a key component of this system. He had found signs of large fires at a number of sites—such as Pueblo Alto and a butte along the Great North Road—but for the most part smaller sites, which he called shrines, revealed no charcoal or ash. He thought these were mirror relay stations, perhaps using plates of knapped obsidian flashing in the sun, or even pyrite mirrors like those used in Mesoamerican signaling systems of the same era.
I asked him about the exact placement of these sites, if they were on every high point around Chaco.
“No, not at all,” he said. “They’re very select. I cheated and figured out the pattern by looking at USGS maps from the sixties and fifties. When they made those m
aps, they did the same thing people a thousand years ago did. They went out on the topography, and they looked around to find which points were going to visually connect to as many other points as possible. They climbed up, and they stuck in steel stakes and took bearings so they could make their nice maps. They were right on top of these shrines, and they never knew it. I’d find these sites right under those old USGS datum points, so I thought, Hell, I’ll just look at the USGS maps and find out where their points are. I had a high degree of success, because they were looking for the same kind of thing. They were looking for range. They were interested in visual linkages.”
Windes did not bother coming up with a concrete reason that such a network would have been created. Military intelligence, religious rites, tribal gossip—who can say what the system was used for? He liked the military concept best, though. It made the most sense to him—a warning system to relay the movements of enemies, scouts checking back in. Regardless of purpose, it existed. Whether it was ever used to signal information from place to place or not, this array of linkages is evidence that these people were well connected.
“We just stumbled on it,” Windes said, still amazed at his good fortune thirty years later. “We almost missed it. We almost thought it was nothing. It was that narrow of a margin, and we might have never known. Funny how that kind of dumb luck just keeps happening out there.”
At midmorning I came across a dirt road cutting east to west across the Great North Road. As I stepped onto its graded surface, the stiffness felt peculiar beneath my feet. A translucent skim of the Rocky Mountains was beginning to show a long way off in Colorado. I crossed the road and walked several feet beyond its shoulder, where I stopped at a dead branch of sage stuck in the ground. I had left it here days ago. I sank to my knees and started digging straight down with my bare hands, shooting sand out behind me and uncovering the round shoulder of a plastic jug. With one hand shoveled underneath and the other one up around the jug, I lifted out one gallon of water, then another. Both jugs were cool to the touch. I placed one against my forehead, enjoying the sensation. I unscrewed the caps and filled bladders that I kept in my pack. A few drops of water escaped, diamonds hitting the ground, then disappearing immediately. I was aware of their loss—minor but obvious. An unintended offering, I thought.