by Craig Childs
Tethered nomadism is something the Anasazi managed on an escalated scale, except instead of moving and returning within a person’s lifetime, they did it over centuries. This pattern is reminiscent of monarch butterflies taking multiple generations to migrate away and then return to the same place, so that the one who returns to the breeding ground is several generations older than the one who left.
I watched familiar highway signs speed by, each side road leading to a wealth of places and recollections in my mind. What a treasure the Anasazi must have had, knowing this landscape not merely through individuals, but through a collective history, the experience of thousands of lives having crossed back and forth until the land beamed with their memories.
Varien had once directed me to the work of one of his colleagues, Lee Horne, who was looking at agricultural tribes still living in Middle Eastern deserts. The adaptations of preindustrial farming communities in that arid climate are much like the adaptation of the Anasazi. In the Khar o Tauran of northern Iran, there are adobe villages—some abandoned, others still in use—that closely resemble villages from the pre-Columbian Colorado Plateau. They lack the grandeur and public architecture that was commonplace among the Anasazi, but their adobe residential sites look like what one would have found in the Southwest several centuries ago.
Horne noticed the presence of far more villages and habitation sites in the Khar o Tauran than were required to accommodate the number of people. No site seemed to be permanently abandoned, as ruins were frequently returned to and rebuilt into livable conditions, either in an ad hoc fashion by itinerant families or wholesale by an incoming population. These communities expanded and contracted over the years as residents moved frequently into central regions and back out to the hinterlands in step with small-scale climate changes. In the 1950s three-quarters of the core villages were occupied; by the 1960s nearly every village was full; and then in the 1970s most were empty. Smaller family sites beyond these villages grew and shrank inversely, absorbing the populations before funneling them back into their centers.
On the surface these sites appear to be erratic and unstable, quick to fall apart, but this is an illusion. The same Khar o Tauran villages have been in use for more than two thousand years. Agricultural life in capricious desert environments demands this combination of mobility and permanence, settlements ready to disband at any moment as rainfall recedes by an inch in a year—a matter of perhaps only one storm—and just as ready to reassemble in the same places when that inch returns. Seen from a short-term perspective, these cultures might appear to be weakly assembled, their histories constantly left in ruins. Longer observation reveals an ingenious social plan, one composed of slender strands of cultural connections stronger than any steel but very hard to see.
Varien’s right hand absentmindedly drifted toward the radio again, toying with its volume, tuning in the next station as the last one faded out. He told me that the mysterious disappearance of the Anasazi is a problem of vision. If you lay a frame over the ground and look through it, you will see people living in a place, say, in the tenth century. Then they are suddenly gone from your frame. Some time later, say in the eleventh century, they appear again as if out of nowhere. And then at some point they are gone again. The problem is that you are not moving your frame to follow them. You are simply looking at them through a narrow crack in the door, astonished whenever they pass from view, saying they mysteriously disappeared.
“When they moved, it was rarely into unoccupied territory,” he said. “Their migrations were formatted by a social landscape. Of course they moved to places where they could access water and croplands, but these were also places of social resources, where migrants had to negotiate where and how to live.”
People began moving into Colorado between about 1060 and 1100, which must have been a powerful time to be here, when everyone was coming home to roost. It was a time when it mattered who you were and what sorts of things you could still recall about where your ancestors once lived. The people who had maintained a cohesive memory of this landscape might have been ahead of the game, able to stride to a hilltop of rubble and proclaim without any quibbling that this was where their ancestors had built hundreds of years before.
As Chaco declined, populations in southwest Colorado continued to rise steeply into the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Designs painted around the exterior rims of Anasazi bowls from the thirteenth century contain a code that may explain how these incoming people related to one another. Prior to this, Anasazi bowls were painted only on their convex insides, while the exteriors were left a blank, glossy white. As people began crowding into southwest Colorado, however, potters started painting narrow, intricate bands around the outsides of their bowls, just below the lip. Each bowl now carried its own geometric signature, a black-on-white design that would have conveyed a message to onlookers, signs of identity. In a time when many groups were traveling, trading, and living among one another, it was necessary to express identity and perhaps origin, claiming who you were and where you were from. A picture has emerged of this complex period in Anasazi history—a convention center atmosphere of people mingling and scanning each other’s name tags.
Varien said, “Remember that on the ground these people’s lives were each a result of a unique history. I think they got mad at each other. They fought. They pulled up stakes and moved. Individuals were interacting with other individuals, households interacting with other households and with kin groups and with greater corporate entities.”
As Varien outlined the way in which people once moved, I placed my hand on my side window, feeling the outside temperature through the glass, the cold winter night racing by. We were driving so fast that we cut open ceaseless frames of the Anasazi world. Such a strange way to move, I thought. It is no wonder that we have difficulty imagining the mechanics of Anasazi migration, that a number of researchers resist the notion that these people had the ability to move their entire cultural system from place to place like a shell game. Whole schools of archaeologists have believed that migration was not something that happened here. This widely felt resistance arose, I think, from the advent of the automobile. The land became inaccessible when asphalt highways were strung across this region. Entire pieces of the Southwest turned blank as cars were sent on long detours around mountain ranges and canyons. Walking is out of the question. The tone of this conceit can still be heard among certain scholars who speak as though places such as Chaco and southwest Colorado were so far apart that groups of people living in them were carrying on wholly separate lives, only distantly aware of each other.
It is only a couple of hundred miles, though, from Chaco to southwest Colorado, a long distance to drivers who sail along a highway that renders the surrounding land untouchable. Walking a couple of hundred miles is a different experience entirely, shorter in a way, filled with a heightened recognition as each landmark takes hours or days to reach. As you walk, over the days landmarks such as Sleeping Ute Mountain and Mesa Verde acquire personality, their faces slowly changing on the horizon. You discover that Chaco is merely a front porch to the house of southwest Colorado. This may have been the actual center of the Anasazi world.
I kept looking into the dark, my mind tricking my eyes into seeing waves of people passing through nine hundred years ago, families loaded with their most crucial belongings, caravans trekking through gaps and along washes. They marched past with domestic dogs drifting out ahead and behind to keep an eye on things, barking suddenly at the sight of other people: other processions of cousins and uncles, nobles in macaw robes exiled from Chaco, and also people who must have looked not familiar at all, the darting lope of hunters and scouts from other tribes. Everybody was coming back to Colorado.
MOVEMENT
NORTHERN SAN JUAN BASIN
The light grew thin and golden as the winter sun dropped toward the western horizon. I was trying to reach high elevation for sunset, climbing toward a 9,000-foot crest, boots and shins plunging through ha
rd, windswept snow. The Northern San Juan Basin spread below me, the neatly contained heart of southwest Colorado. The basin is not a depression as the name suggests; rather it is a plank of land tipping ever so gradually away from the Rocky Mountains, its scattered creeks flowing south to the San Juan River like water off the back of your hand. It is a cold place in the winter, receiving far more snow than would ever be seen at Chaco. I had to hurry up this crest to catch the sun before it was gone. The wind bit sharply at my face, pushing me the other way, streaming around my body into the gulf of sky to my back.
I came bundled with as many warm layers as I could wear, and still the wind reached its chill, bare hands all the way to my flesh. My eyelashes froze, the tops and bottoms pinned to each other every time I blinked. I arrived at the top of the crest a couple of minutes before sunset and found a fire lookout there at the end of a road that no one had driven since October. The lookout radio antennas moaned in the wind with an eerie, celestial sound. I stepped up over snowdrifts and pawed against a window. I looked inside at a sheltered wood interior, maps neatly stowed as if on a ship’s bridge. It was a curious mark of stillness in this gale, an optical illusion of peace.
A carnal light touched me from below, the sun now riding beneath me, just about to set along the southern tail of Sleeping Ute Mountain. I turned away from the lookout and pushed farther through the snow so that nothing blocked my view—no window, no wailing radio antennas. I came to the edge of the crest, where cliffs and ravines fell thousands of feet into the basin below. I was out on the tip of the earth.
The Northern San Juan Basin was the most populous region of the Colorado Plateau in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, probably in the whole time frame of the Anasazi in the Four Corners. Migrants broke through the gates of surrounding regions and moved into growing, preexisting communities or built quick settlements of their own on the outskirts. An increasingly dry period had set them in motion, leaving much of the surrounding desert vacant.
From this summit the basin looked like a map spread across a table, mountains and mesas holding down its edges like paperweights. In the last direct light I could see the basin’s varied terrain, nothing like the desolate country around Chaco. It has all kinds of topographic nooks and crannies, dotted with high points instead of being sunken into a brooding hole as at Chaco. This is where I would have come, too, I thought. The place had the feel of a geographic neighborhood, an intimate circle of land eighty miles across, with views looking out through gaps between exterior landmarks.
As the sun set, I could not help staring directly at it, the remaining half circle burning into my eyes, an apricot welding itself onto the earth. It dropped just beside a nut of a butte. I watched as the sun became a crescent, and then the quick closing, a final shaving of light pinched out.
What was left was a bright, painful light lingering on my retinas. I blinked it away, eyelashes frozen and snagging on each other.
An archaeologist named Donna Glowacki followed the prehistoric movement of pottery throughout this basin, tracking the origins and destinations of vessels as if she had her nose to the ground and was sniffing around the skirt of Mesa Verde, across canyon rimsoutlining the Great Sage Plain, and up the slope of Sleeping Ute Mountain, all contained within the Northern San Juan Basin. She knew that tounderstand how people actually lived in the past, one must see the lay of the land, must grasp how it is shaped and how humans would have once fit into its folds.
Thirteenth-century Mesa Verde Black-on-White bowl found in the Northern San Juan Basin. In storage at Crow Canyon Archaeological Center CRAIG CHILDS
A trim woman in her thirties, ivory face framed by raven hair, Glowacki had not intended to become a student of landscapes. Her interest began with ceramics. Trying to understand patterns of Anasazi movement, she took more than a thousand pottery samples from the Northern San Juan Basin and through analysis of atomic structures determined the geographic source of the clay. This told her where the vessels had likely been manufactured, different from where they finally ended up. Glowacki then drew a map showing pots starting in one place and ending in another. The movement of decorated wares most likely represented trade, while that of utilitarian vessels conveyed the uprooting of whole households. The pots had to have been transported by people, so her map became one of human travel, the patterns bold and indelible where populations had tramped paths back and forth into the ground.
“It’s just the way people work,” Glowacki told me once. “If you have a migration, then you have return migrations. People go somewhere, and then some of them move back, or they just come back to visit, and you get information flow that keeps turning around on itself, making pathways. All their travels across the area helped pave the way for larger, later movements. These people were constantly setting the stage for motion.”
Studying this Anasazi traffic, Glowacki noticed that vessels had a tendency to move from only one place to another place, evidence of regional alliances and trade relations. She was able to see what looked like political boundaries, borders opened in one direction and closed in another, as people from Mesa Verde related more closely to people from Aztec in the south, while those on the Great Sage Plain in the middle of the Northern San Juan Basin had strong affiliations with Utah to the west. What was usually thought of as a broad wash of generic Anasazi looked to Glowacki more like a congress of individual parties traveling and trading among one another.
As Glowacki became more familiar with this landscape, she realized that patterns of movement she had defined were ruled by geography. People used the shape of the land to determine their interactions, their boundaries, and their routes. Glowacki said, “I never thought of it that way until I got out on the ground, where I had to survey these community centers and actually have a good look at this place.” Mesa people lived in a different way than canyon people. Some accumulated in longtime settlements on the Great Sage Plain in the middle of the basin; others formed roving groups that traveled in and out among peripheral hills and slopes, leaving behind peripatetic villages and encampments. The surrounding landmarks struck Glowacki as signposts delineating one local district from another, as if the migrants, pouring into a processing station, looked up at the signs to see where they were supposed to go.
I watched small storms gather around Sleeping Ute Mountain. Streaks of snow spun up Mesa Verde’s gray-green flanks. The behemoth, timberline range of the San Juan Mountains stood theatrically to the north, a snowy backdrop.
Like stars, lights began to appear on the land below. Bright blue and green dots came on, ranches and farmsteads revealing themselves. As they appeared, I began to see the outlines of small settlements, houses and their vapor lights forming long lines that showed the presence of farm roads. The lights increased toward the distant town of Cortez, a dish of bright jewels laid at the foot of Mesa Verde.
The Northern San Juan Basin was once the most populated region around. For every house I could see, there was an Anasazi village, or a prominent pre-Columbian town, beneath it. The settlement patterns have hardly changed, with people now living in the same places they did before, building along the same grids. The landscape still tells us where to live, where to go. I watched distant headlights creep along invisible county roads and across the strand of an east-west highway. Do they know they are tracing paths marked out centuries ago? I wondered. As they sit in their cars, following their casting headlights home, do they realize they are living in homes built atop ancient buildings, tending farms where crops were grown long before them?
I looked down into these pinpoint lights and remembered that when a new swimming pool was dug at a Cortez motel, the work revealed a block of masonry rooms in the ground below, where human bones stuck up like bent cornstalks. Some of the older residents still remember having picnics beside the weathering hulks of great houses, Sunday afternoons spent with the family digging up artifacts for mantelpieces. I know of a man living just outside Cortez who bulldozed straight into a great kiva on his proper
ty—roof beams snapping across his steel blade. He parked a collection of wrecked cars in the kiva’s open circle, adding himself to the procession, the next step beyond Glowacki’s map, where people move their belongings from here to there and back again.
I stood over all this movement taking the edge of the wind against my face. The temperature was dropping rapidly as the sky began to freeze. Time is moving, I thought. I could feel it. There are places in the world where no clocks or calendars are needed, landscapes where time is as palpable, as abrasive, as any of the elements, sharp as hail. The swift clouds parted for a moment, and in that instant I saw stars. I craned my neck around and watched them race by.
THE ART OF LEAVING
GREAT SAGE PLAIN
Susan Ryan called to tell me that her excavation, a four-year obsession on the Great Sage Plain in the middle of the Northern San Juan Basin, was going to be buried. An ancient village she was carefully unearthing would soon disappear under the blade of a tractor, turned back into an unrecognizable hill of greasewood and dry grass.
Ryan, a field archaeologist, wasn’t remorseful; this was part of the plan. An archaeological research group had given her four years to excavate the site and to map its labyrinth of rooms and ceremonial chambers. Then she had to bury the whole thing, making it appear as though her crew had never been there. This is simply the business of modern archaeology in the Southwest: before you leave, you clean up after yourself.
But her time was running short, and when she called, her voice was tinged with urgency. “You need to come see what we’ve found,” Ryan said. “I’ve got a new map in my head. You need to come before it’s buried.”