by Craig Childs
“You know the recent studies on corn, then?” I asked.
All three glanced at me, waiting.
I continued. “On the psychiatric effects of a corn-only diet?”
He nodded and went back to his sandwich. “I’ve heard some about it.”
This was the first time I had heard a Southwest archaeologist dare mention the study, which linked the eating of corn with chemical changes in the brain. The research was spearheaded by Michele Ernandes at the University of Palermo, in Italy. Ernandes, who had been looking at connections between neurobiology and sacrificial rites in cultures around the world, found that nutrition may play a considerable role in various religious and spiritual states. It has long been known that too much corn can alter brain chemistry and lead to a variety of malnutrition diseases, the likes of which have been revealed by many Anasazi skeletons. Corn lacks two key amino acids, lysine and tryptophan. Also, though it is high in many necessary proteins, minerals, and vitamins, corn’s niacin is chemically unavailable to the human body. When corn is made into a sole staple, these deficiencies alter the body’s makeup, dropping serotonin levels in the brain to a state similar to chronic sleep deprivation. At its extreme this is clinically linked to obsessive-compulsive disorder, aggression, and even mystical states of ecstasy.
Ernandes’s controversial research suggests that these symptoms might have played a role in mass human sacrifices and religious horrors that occurred among the Toltecs, the Mayans, and the Aztecs in late B.C. and early A.D. It was a time of unparalleled splendor in Mesoamerica, pyramids and ball courts spreading across two continents, when native corn reached its peak production. Meanwhile, tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of people were sacrificed every year on stone altars. High atop temples in cities that gleamed like pearl, fresh human hearts were cut out and placed in sacred vessels. This, the study suggested, might have been linked to an overindulgence in corn.
Ernandes did not leave the Southwest out of the study, mentioning a fervor that swept the Anasazi landscape. Terribly disfigured human skeletons have been found from that time, bones polished by cooking, heads severed. The authors of this study believe that corn could have been a factor, that dementia could have occurred on a cultural level.
The implications of this study are unpopular. For most Native Americans, corn is sacred and beneficial. As a food staple, it is a cultural foundation, a plant that gave birth to civilization. Calling it a drug, suggesting its effects are deleterious, is politically dangerous. People living in the Southwest actually figured out how to deal with corn’s nutritional deficiencies long ago by eating beans, amaranth, or meat with every traditional meal. This makes up for the missing amino acids. Fire ash, which consists mostly of calcium hydroxide, liberates corn’s niacin and is a key ingredient in Hopi piki bread. In this way corn was made safe, perhaps rendering the madness theory obsolete. Still, one can easily imagine priests who did not eat amaranth, beans, meat, or piki bread; prophets religiously indulging in nothing but corn, stewing in smoky, dark kivas, wild with visions. When a drought came and corn no longer arrived, Chaco may have turned sour, the addiction unmet.
The study on corn and madness became nothing more than a passing comment on a windy day, as we leaned against a buried kiva. No one asked the old archaeologist anything else about corn. We just waited for a pause in the wind so that we could pack up and keep moving.
It smelled like rain as I walked the last mile to the San Juan River. I left the refinery behind, its flames shooting upward as if from the mouth of a circus fire-eater. Now I felt drunk on the smell of water. A storm was pushing in from the west, rain not far away.
Dawn was coming on, its light crossing beneath bellies of clouds as I pushed through tamarisk trees and whips of young willows. Cottonwood trees lifted over my head, sturdy trunks holding up a green planetarium canopy. A damp wind clapped through thousands of heart-shaped leaves, making the sound of moving water, the sound of a river.
CROSSING TO THE OTHER SIDE
THE TOTAH
Asmooth pan of water, the San Juan River moved steadily in the dawn light. I pushed through vegetation until the water was right at my feet, its edges rippling around tree branches caught in the current.
After walking across the desert, I thought this river seemed impossible, as if it were a smuggling operation transporting a few million gallons of water past me every minute, its surface turning in gentle coils. The air was humid, both from the river and from a tropical storm blown inland and running aground on the Colorado Plateau. There was going to be a good rain. No wishing this time. I looked for a place to cross the river, my hands sliding through tamarisk branches, feeling salty drops of moisture.
The Navajo call this place Totah, a word describing the union of many rivers. The Piedra, Animas, and La Plata all flow down from the Rocky Mountains to the north and join the San Juan River within several miles of one another. These are wildly moody rivers, lifting to torrents as quickly as they fall back to persecuted little creeks. With a big storm coming, today would be their day to run wild.
I stripped to my boxer shorts and waded out through the delta of the wash formed below Kutz Canyon, slogging into thigh-deep mud. Cold water burped up from beneath my feet. I stopped out in the middle, the current sweeping gently around my thighs. Turning so that I could peer along the river’s softly spoken corridor, I looked downstream, reminded that my family had once lived about ten miles from here along the riverbank.
I was conceived beside this river. At least that is what I have been told. I first flashed to life in a town built on the bankside ruins of the Anasazi. I figured that somewhere in my body’s memory, back in the primeval strike of awareness when sperm and egg tapped each other’s shoulders, I carry this water inside me, the first water to prop up my budding cells. Remembering where I had come from, I looked downstream, watching the water go.
I kept moving. Lightning bolted into the sky, then the air thrummed with thunder. The arms of this storm were converging, violet walls caving in from all sides. Desert gullies would run yellow today, and the Animas River would look like chocolate milk. Kutz Canyon would flood behind me, the color of chalk and chicken broth. Colors would churn into the San Juan, creating a luminous brown. Not yet, though. I walked facing upstream as the river curled around my legs. My feet sorted through cobbles, choosing the path of the smaller ones, the lesser currents.
I climbed onto a braided island of tall grass and jogged through halls of cottonwood trees, my legs red in the coolness, salted by the scratch of brush. As thunder dove through the trees, small birds let go of their branches and flitted away. Mourning doves darted ahead of me, wings whistling, and I heard spotted towhees flipping through dry leaves in the underbrush, picking up their last morsels before the rain.
Through days of crossing the open desert, I had seen only ravens in the distance, a few sage sparrows darting about, and once a spiral of vultures rising elegantly on a thermal. Nothing even remotely like the abundance of birds on this island. The riverine forest was filled with the chatter of birds situating themselves for the storm. A bald eagle rose from its dead snag, dark wings opening as it flew, and I slowed my pace, turning to watch it go.
The evidence of captive birds and feathered artifacts in the Southwest has always been taken as a sign of colorful rituals where priests were robed in feathers, dancers looked almost like birds, and feathered artifacts hung from the rafters. It has also been widely believed that with the decline of Chaco, such ceremonies waned. After Chaco fell into decay, there was never a place on the Colorado Plateau with so much concentrated religious wealth. The traffic in exotic items and turquoise that had reached a busy pace around the rise of Chaco slowed substantially in the twelfth century, and it onlyfollows that the use of birds in ceremonies dropped off as well. As it turns out, however, this was not the case. A researcher named Kathy Roler Durand recently discovered that the use of birds and their feathers increased after Chaco lost its central power, an ind
ication that the Anasazi structure was not necessarily weakened by Chaco’s decline.
When I spoke with Durand, I was interrupting her work with bird bones excavated from various sites around New Mexico. In her office she had the entire collection of bird remains from SalmonRuins—my destination the morning of the coming rain. She was picking through these bones to determine each species—songbirds and raptors, entire complements of waterfowl—all identified from bones and skeletons that had been unearthed. She had found from Salmon Ruins a macaw and a turkey buried together, to her a very curious and auspicious arrangement. Turkeys are known to have been used in Mesoamerica as substitutes for human sacrifices, and macaws signify a connection with the tropical regions where such sacrifices were common. It seems that everywhere Durand found the remains of birds, she also found evidence of ritual life.
Among the birds Durand was cataloging, she began noticing a surprising majority from excavated levels postdating the fall of Chaco. In the period she thought would be absent of birds, she was actually finding a florescence of them.
“Supposedly after Chaco had completely declined, I’m finding that the use of birds just explodes,” Durand said. “There are so many different species of birds after Chaco’s heyday, just an amazing array, that you know they were not used simply for food. I think they were using the feathers for ceremonies, like the Zuni today who use—what is it—fifty-six different species? So it seems that the use of great houses as ceremonial centers is actually increasing dramatically in the post-Chaco period.”
Durand told me this just as she was making the discovery, her voice hopping along on the excitement. Perhaps the construction of great houses in outlying regions had lessened the need for long--distance pilgrimages as people began having their own temples at home. Instead of holding their ceremonies at Chaco, now they could focus on local rituals, actually beefing up their own religious lives.
Durand saw in the Anasazi world a cultural shift accompanying the fall of Chaco, a trend away from impressive wealth toward an even more dedicated form of worship. For her, birds are a key indicator of this shift. Birds began showing up in voluminous numbers in even small houses where prior to the twelfth century she had seen limited samples of avian remains.
Chaco had, indeed, fallen apart. Many great houses had been looted, entire blocks of kivas turned into trash receptacles or burned. Certain precincts had been left to deteriorate as violence became more common. But this may have been only the consequence of a cultural transformation, a reshuffling of priorities. At the same time, smaller, compact great houses were being built not far from the older ones: tight little boxes with a few kivas, their floor plans looking like computer chips rather than the expansive motherboard architecture of Pueblo Bonito, Chetro Ketl, and Pueblo Alto.
“I think more of the focus was on rituals,” Durand said. “You see, people left Chaco, but some stayed. I think the people staying had ritual knowledge, and they were parlaying that into nice situations for themselves in the post-Chacoan period. If you look at the modern pueblos, ritual knowledge is wealth. That’s where all these birds would have come into play. They were wealth, religious currency.”
High-pitched bird warnings flashed ahead of me through trembling cottonwood leaves. I listened across the island to the coded rhythm of a woodpecker, its hollow drum work echoing back in the forest. As I jogged along, the island soon gave way to the river, and there I reached a cutbank. On the opposite side, exactly where I needed to cross, was a row of large, modern houses built back into the trees. Picture windows peered across the water from out of deep green forests. I could see motion in some of the houses, people preparing for their day, the upper class of Bloomfield, New Mexico: gas industry employees, agribusiness owners, and government workers sipping their morning coffee.
Damn, I hadn’t expected this. I thought I would be crossing in total seclusion, a clean walk from Chaco to Salmon Ruins. Instead I would have to charge partly naked through people’s yards.
If I had given it any thought, I would have anticipated development along here. The Totah has long been a popular place to live on the Colorado Plateau. It is a broad flank of land connecting the desert to the highlands north of here, its growing season far better than that of the Chaco region. And it has water, free-flowing water coming down the local rivers. In the twelfth century, great houses were scattered about the Totah, and in between them appearednumerous hamlets and farming villages. The settlement pattern is much the same now as it was then. Preeminent ruins lie beneath the modern towns of Farmington, Shiprock, Bloomfield, and Aztec. The rural countryside is dotted with ranches and Navajo settle-ments. People have always lived here, and the San Juan River has long been a nucleus.
I had to get past these houses. Salmon Ruins, a late-edition great house, was just beyond, a site that marks the transition between Chaco and what happened afterward. One archaeologist working there felt as if Salmon had been erected by an advance party sent ahead from Chaco, people who did not even live in the place once it was built. Its construction appears to have purposefully coincided with the 18.6-year lunar standstill cycle, as if the work was timed down to the very year. Then Salmon remained virtually unoccupied until a later date, as if a carefully orchestrated migration were ineffect.
It has long been debated who built Salmon, whether it was a contingent of Chaco masons and engineers or local people from the Totah imitating the techniques made famous at Chaco. The question is an oversimplification, though. It is like asking who is building the modern suburbs of, say, Phoenix. Is it the Phoenix residents themselves, people from outlying communities, or migrant workers from farther away following a contractor’s instructions?*
I moved swiftly, reentering the water, stepping evenly over cobbles and sand waves. Currents mingled around my crotch as I headed for a thicket between two houses. On the other side I thrashed up a bank through barbed, chest-high Russian thistles that raked my cold, reddening skin. I found a clearing and sat there massaging the buzzing scratches all over my thighs and calves. I pulled on my pants and dry shoes.
Someone’s dogs—big dogs—were romping at the river’s edge. I could hear them. Of course they would find me, following my fresh scent out of the river. I snatched up a stick and rose to my feet just as they entered my clearing, tails wagging, slobber drooling off their tongues.
They had been out for the night, two black Labs, backyard escapees. They both smelled of skunk and sweat, their fur matted. One looked like a rottweiler mix and had a fresh gash across its head from leaping through barbed wire, blood thick as tar. I did not want to raise my voice, lest anyone out to fetch the morning paper hear me and call the Bloomfield police. I stared straight at the dogs and smiled as they panted and snorted, dangerously excited to see me, sloshing foamy saliva on my pants, whipping me with their soaked tails. I waved my stick around, thinking that the desert wilderness was a far safer place than a riverside encampment of houses guarded by dogs. I gave them my sternest, most affirming voice, whispering, “Good pups, good pups. You been out, eh? Keep down. You know how to sit? Sit...sit...down, down, girls.”
Barely interested in my commands, they instead wanted to jump on me, to paw at my face, maybe nip off a bit of flesh before moving on. When one poked its muzzle into my pack, I snapped it on the nose with my stick.
“Go on,” I rumbled. “Get outta here. Git!”
Which they did, bounding away, but only because they found me not as interesting as they had hoped. They broke pieces of wood as they went, tumbling in the grass, loping with the immeasurable wealth of their freedom. Alarms of yard dogs tripped through the surrounding neighborhood. I listened carefully to their path, mapping the barking trail, trying to decipher a clear way out of all this private property. Dogs were everywhere, erupting suddenly at one another. I closed my eyes, following the two escapees in my mind, setting a path. I ate breakfast quickly, nuts and a lemon drop. Then I shouldered my pack and followed the two black Labs, figuring they had at least broken th
e trail for me.
Now it was I setting off the alarms. An unleashed collie at one house, a small yapping troop at another. I did not look into their eyes as I slipped from one territory to the next, creeping directly beneath bedroom windows and into a ditch crowded with trash, up into someone’s hedge, and then sprinting across a patch of mown grass. Lightning seared the air. Everything flashed white for an instant. As I came out along a driveway, thunder hammered the ground. No rain yet. A grove of mailboxes appeared up ahead. Public property, a neighborhood street.
As soon as I reached the mailboxes, I was free. My gait slowed, shoulders dropped. Just a man out for a morning stroll, a small pack on his shoulders. I walked past mobile homes and the warm smells of breakfast. Could I knock on a door? Ask for a sausage, an orange maybe? I had not had a cooked meal in many days.
From behind bushes and a wire fence, a stone wall came into view. I recognized the guild of its stonework. It was the order of masons who had built great houses early in the twelfth century. Salmon Ruins was stashed here, acres of ruins protected behind a feeble fence. The great house had been constructed at about the same time as Pueblo Alto. Salmon and Pueblo Alto were twoanchor points, one in the south at Chaco, the other in the north in the Totah. Salmon Ruins’ southern wall continued for blocks, its diminutive stones evenly laid. An involuntary smile spread across my face, a sort of laugh. After having walked across the desert, I found myself in a forested neighborhood abutting this ancient compound. I had bridged a gap with my own feet, a distance that many archaeologists consider to have been culturally formidable. It was nothing, though. It could have been done in a few days by someone walking at a faster pace, paying less attention to scraps of artifacts on the ground, more to making time.