House of Rain

by Craig Childs

  When I had first visited Ryan at her site years earlier, I was struck by the way she moved, how her thin jeweler’s fingers touched each object with unusual care and inquiry. Although she was only in her twenties at the time, she had been handpicked to lead this dig. She was a natural at finding barely detectable shoulders of ruined walls buried beneath windblown dust and greasewood. Ryan could map ancient dwellings and structures simply by stepping over the ground, as if she could see through the earth itself. Her superiors said that she had the potential to become a great archaeologist.

  So when she called to say she had a new map, my interest was piqued. It was an emotional map, she said, woven of the countless strands of data accumulated as she watched the seasons and years tilt across the site. She was able to reconstruct centuries of Anasazi life in a very personal fashion, distilling the insights that come only from assiduous fieldwork, using her dusty hands to pursue her questions.

  Ryan said that she could see clearly what had happened in this place so long ago. But she could never publish or write about this map within the confines of her profession. The knowledge she had gained was too private and instinctual.

  I left right away to meet her.

  The Great Sage Plain in southwest Colorado is actually not much of a plain; it is a gentle slope cut apart by numerous canyons that cannot be seen until you walk right to their edges. Above these canyons are hilltops and ridges marked with high mounds that once were villages and great houses. Ryan and her crew had opened up one of these hills, revealing a cluster of stone houses and kivas ringing an elevated center, a sort of abbreviated citadel looking out across a landscape of other small citadels.

  When I arrived to see Ryan’s new map, an early-season snow was blustering out of the west, shoving and bumping over a hill in a country too high to be desert, too dry and scrubby with cheatgrass to be a pasture. Dressed warmly to meet the wind, I stopped near the peak of the dig site and peered around its seamless horizon. The cape of Sleeping Ute Mountain stood in front of me. Just off my left shoulder, Mesa Verde seemed smug as a cat on a windowsill, tail curled around its body. To my right and far in the distance stood the reddish, upright slabs of Monument Valley in Arizona and Utah, and farther away in Utah were the powder blue pyramids of the Abajo Mountains. At my back, the San Juan Mountains lifted like crystals of ice.

  Ryan once told me that she knew why people had built in this place: it felt like the center of the world. Of course one would build here. She was attached to the notion that people lived in places that felt good, that were visually familiar.

  The excavation had revealed a compact, early-twelfth-century great house standing on a hilltop that was the center of the site. It was built just after the height of Chaco. This great house was a smaller version of the structures in the Chaco area, about 150 miles to the south, only with a northern flare, a looser treatment of the stonework and kivas done in a recognizably local style. As populations increased dramatically from the twelfth to the thirteenth centuries, this great house acted as a magnet. A larger settlement accumulated around it, new kivas and residential structures built right up against the old great house, its rooms expanded and redone over a two-hundred-year period. The same thing happened on high points all across this region, where century-old great houses became cores of residential settlements as they were overcome by waves of incoming migrants. Ancient clans reunited in this country, marking the outsides of their serving bowls with ornate symbols to tell of ancestry and alliances. These serving bowls are larger than any made before, suggesting a time of feasting, of great gatherings.

  Up ahead, workers pushed wheelbarrows up a ramp, where they dumped all the previously gathered soil into a block of several rooms, burying the excavation back inside the earth. I could still see some of the exposed walls, fine masonry with horizontal courses banded like brickwork, going under with every heave of a shovel.

  I found Ryan moving among the pits. She came to me with a smile, her eyes sharp and blue. Her cold, pink earlobes stuck out from under her wool cap, sporting six small earrings. We hugged like bears in our robes of winter clothes and then walked around the site slowly, side by side, as she gestured down into the trenches.

  Ryan had been cautious in her four years at this site, preferring to dig only where she thought it necessary. In the last months, however, she had gone deep, straining the backs of her crew. Ryan was like an archer drawing her aim to perfection before letting the arrow fly; she waited until she had mapped the place in her head before driving down to its foundation. She found treasures down there—notnecessarily the kind that glitter on museum shelves, but small, private remnants of a complex and well-orchestrated society.

  I told her that I was surprised to see so much of the site exposed. I had worked here the previous summer, digging into a trench with a metal trowel and a small hand broom. The excavation had been delicate and slow, hours spent whittling around potsherds as small as pennies. Now I could see where this work had gone. Trenches that had been only two or three feet deep now dropped fifteen or twenty feet into the ground, revealing masonry walls all the way down—walls that had once stood in the open and after abandonment had been buried in roof rubble and centuries of wind-driven dust. The site turned out to be far more elaborate than Ryan had expected. Over time the Anasazi built village upon village on this high point, with an ancient great house buried in the center like a diamond.

  As we walked, Ryan explained the myriad technical facets she had uncovered, the types of pottery or architecture that indicated one pre-Columbian group or another. She told me that she felt as if she could see an ancient life teeming below her feet. After so much digging, she was now aware of interactions between groups of people, how the building of one room had affected the building of another, kivas of Chaco heritage erected beside those built in a more northern Mesa Verde style. In her eyes this settlement perched high above the Great Sage Plain was a cultural menagerie.

  These were people of ceremony, Ryan said—not just religious ceremonies but repeated, daily acts, similar to the way we set forks, knives, and spoons on the table and arrange our shoes at the front door. The way people left objects behind, even the way they sorted their trash, carried distinct signatures.

  Ryan had found spirals carved into stones on a prominent south-facing exterior wall of the great house, like address numbers on a front door. When the great house was later expanded, the spirals were enclosed by a room and concealed under fresh plaster, implying that they were no longer needed. Her excavation disclosed fingerprints pressed into wall mortar and artifacts left in purposeful positions all around. She could see ancient hands, see the people sleeping, see them choosing how to place objects on the floor or the hearth. But there was no methodology in her profession that would allow her to express this. After the dig was buried, she would write up the quantifiable data, filling volumes, yet there was no way to express this deeper map formed in her mind.

  What impresses Ryan most is how people finally left this place. Toward the end of their occupation, the population skyrocketed; people were moving in from all around. Then, late in the thirteenth century, the site was suddenly empty—and not only this site, but every site around here. This was the famous Anasazi disappearing act, the moment when these people are said to have vanished off the face of the earth. Ryan thinks that by enlarging their settlements, they might have been preparing for a mass exodus.

  “Are they gathering together so that they can depart as a single, cohesive group and build their own place somewhere else? Is there safety in numbers when you’re migrating?” she asked. “Is it easier to start a community down the line? Yeah, I bet it is. You need large numbers to do the different jobs, to get homes built. Maybe they all know that they are about to migrate, and so they come together to organize themselves.”

  As we walked, she said, “There are all these theories about violence and drought from that period. Why couldn’t it be as simple as it’s time to go? This culture is sedentary and nomad
ic at the same time. Maybe ecologically it makes sense, so you don’t overstay your welcome. Sometimes you just up and go.”

  Exactly how they up and went was Ryan’s most pressing question: what happens when a large and fairly stable population leaves all at once? The answer came from kivas she uncovered. Many of these circular, underground chambers were disassembled at some point, their large wooden ceiling beams pulled out and used for new construction elsewhere. This was not unusual for a place that was inhabited for a couple of centuries, but the last kivas to be used were treated differently. Almost all of them were burned, their massive wooden ceilings turned to char and crashed in.

  “It used to be assumed that fires like these were catastrophic,” Ryan said. “They were thought to be the result of warfare or accidents, someone cooking when a spark gets into the ceiling. That has been the explanation at least, because when you look at the floors, you find all these tools and goods left behind under a burned ceiling, as if they had to run to get out.”

  But it must have taken a lot of work to get ceilings like these to catch fire, and Ryan doubts that it was an accident. The next, most obvious conclusion is that invaders intentionally set the fires. The problem is that Ryan has found no evidence of violence at her site, nor at any of the other hilltop sites immediately surrounding it. In fact, the end seems to have been peaceful. When people finally migrated away, leaving the site empty, they did so in a very orderly fashion, burning their kivas behind them.

  But it was more than orderly. On the floor of one of these burned kivas, Ryan came upon a large bowl inverted like a helmet, the designs painted around its exterior rim indicative of the late thirteenth century, the moment just before the site was entirely abandoned. When she lifted this bowl, she found two baskets neatly stacked beneath it. The bottom basket contained a cache of coarsely ground corn. The basket above it held a small pile of corn, ground as finely as pastry flour. This was not corn stored for eating. It looked like an offering, one set there before the ceiling collapsed in a heap of fire and embers. Around this assembly, she found ceramic ladles nested into each other, and other artifacts placed just so. The kiva floor looked like a giant altar, everything situated for the burning.

  The fires could have been deliberately set as invaders approached, the way Russians burned their towns as Napoleon’s army drew near, but Ryan sees these acts more as ceremonial procedures, the kind of thing you must do before intentionally leaving a place. In cultures around the world, important objects that need to be retired tend to be dealt with in one of three ways: they are buried, put underwater, or burned. This is done to take something powerful out of circulation, so it can no longer be used if it falls into the wrong hands. In the case of the Anasazi, burning was the method of choice. This pattern of what Ryan and other archaeologists call ceremonial burning did not appear only in the thirteenth century. During the previous wide-scale abandonment of southwest Colorado in the tenth century, the same kinds of burned structures can be found, their floors left in a ceremonial fashion. Burning dates back even further, to the early centuries A.D.—the history of the Anasazi marked with pit-structures set on fire as people departed. It seems to be a sign of impending migration.

  “I’m a believer in ritual abandonment,” Ryan said. “I like to think these structures had a life, that they weren’t just stacks of rock. When it was time to leave, you did not just walk away. You paid your respects.”

  As we walked through these exposed ruins, the wind darted against our faces. Ryan looked to the west at low platinum clouds as her crew buried all that had been excavated. Her eyes were narrow against the spitting snow.

  “It looks like the weather’s chasing me out of here,” she said.

  Ryan returned to the backfilling and left me to wander around the site. My shoulders were down, my arms tight at my sides to hold my body’s warmth against the wind. The site looked like layer cakes cut open. I returned to a trench that I had dug the previous summer. When I was last here, it was no deeper than a coffee table. I was surprised now to find it as deep as a pair of armoires stacked inside the ground. The person who had most recently been working the trench—a woman who told me she was starting to make a career out of this single trench—was gone, called out to work on the backfilling.

  I climbed down a ladder to see what had been exposed. Snow fell like feathers to the floor, where the wind was completely blocked. A second trench opened even deeper below, and I came to my knees at its edge. I could see that the work had turned urgent—the dig narrowed to a smaller space as time ran out. The woman who had worked this trench told me that she had been expecting to reach the bottom of the settlement with every stroke of her trowel, coming upon sterile, natural soil, but instead the stonework wall keptleading her down. She had resorted to this furrow, a question mark that simply led deeper through a roof that had fallen in and through layers of refuse buried below it.

  Walls excavated at Susan Ryan’s dig in 2004. REGAN CHOI

  Peering into this dim second hole, I could see a third, smaller ditch inside. I had no idea the site went this far into the ground. The excavator told me that she had dug a space not quite wide enough for her hips, figuring that she was about to reach undisturbed earth. But cultural material had sent her farther down until she was suspended by her hip bones, digging the final groove with one arm extended as far as she could reach. There she had found a kiva, buried in the foundation of this settlement. I could see the slight curve of its bench and the square edge of one of its pilasters. It was an old-style kiva, the encircling frame made of earth and only its pilasters made of stone.

  I went down headfirst until my shoulders were wedged in the opening, my head dangling. How many abandonments had occurred here? How many different groups had settled this place over the centuries and then left?

  When I looked up, Susan Ryan was standing at the edge of the trench. Flecks of snow bounced off her jacket, falling fifteen feet down, then landing on me.

  “You found the kiva,” she said.

  I sat back on my haunches and nodded, looking up at her.

  “How old is this kiva?” I asked.

  She shrugged. “It was built in the late Pueblo II period, so I would guess it’s about A.D. 1060 to 1140.”

  And what would be found on its floor, if there were enough time to get down there? Another burned roof? An ancient rite of abandonment, artifacts left in a ritual departure? There would be no more digging in this trench, no more answers. The backfill was coming

  “I have to tell you something about snakes,” Ryan said, sitting cross-legged at the edge of the trench, looking into the rising wind. “Part of my map, I suppose.”

  I knew that from where she was sitting, she could see the range of the earth under oncoming clouds: Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico, all visible at a single glance.

  “You know we always had gopher snakes here,” she said. “I saw some five feet long.”

  I knew the ones, elegant cream-colored reptiles found in the morning under the trailer or slipping away through the greasewood in the afternoon. Ryan told me that for reasons she did not quite understand, she felt soothed every time she saw these snakes. They were good company, pliant, not poisonous. Sometimes she slipped a hand beneath their cool, pearly bellies.

  “At the end of the last season, rattlesnakes started showing up,” she said. “We just never saw that many rattlesnakes before, and suddenly I kept finding them.”

  Ryan said that she had the feeling the rattlesnakes were urging her off the site. She mentioned this to a few of her colleagues, but no one took her seriously. Such feelings, like her emotional map, are impossible to quantify and therefore unprofessional.

  I told her that I knew an archaeologist who had excavated a post-Columbian Zuni site down in New Mexico, and when he had asked around, trying to figure out why the place was abandoned, people had told him that a rattlesnake had gotten inside. As simple as that. It did not seem peculiar to him that in the desert, in a building with a sheet of
fabric for a door, a rattlesnake would show up. But it had made an impression on the residents, sending them packing. Maybe a rattlesnake is all a migration needs to get going, an omen that sets it off.

  I said to Ryan, “I can see why you think it’s time to leave. Rattlesnakes are a pretty strong message.”

  She nodded. “Fitting, maybe,” she said. “Driven out by the buzz.”

  It was more than superstition, though. A couple of years back, Ryan had been digging out the bottom of another kiva site when she unearthed an eight-hundred-year-old snake skeleton. The snake was stretched out on the kiva floor, and its skull was conspicuously missing. Usually, a dead snake is found coiled in rocks, its vertebrae scattered like dice, but this one was straight as a ruler, cleanly intact but for its head. Just before the chamber had been intentionally buried in refuse and rubble, before its ceiling beams had been pulled out, a headless snake had been laid across the hardpan floor.

  Shortly after finding the snake, Ryan brought a group of American Indians to the site in order to make sure they were comfortable with her work. When she approached this exposed kiva, she mentioned her curious find. One woman from a western pueblo suddenly stiffened. Without explanation, she turned and walked away, keeping her distance from the entire site. Ryan understood that the woman was carrying a private piece of knowledge, something that told her what it meant to find a headless snake on the floor of a kiva.

  Ryan said to me, “It’ll be good to have this place backfilled. I’ve noticed some decay in the walls. We’ve gotta get things closed up. I think we’ve done enough here.”

  Nearby, workers were backfilling a partially excavated kiva. One worker threw in ancient building stones, while another shoveled in dirt. The mix of dirt and stones was measured, so that once the room was filled, the ground above it would not sag. Future visitors would never know that anything had happened here.