by Craig Childs
Beside me a single T had been painted on a second-story wall, its white pigment now faded against fawn-colored plaster. There were T shapes all around me, even more than I had seen at Aztec and Chaco, a sign carried here from the desert. This was one of the bread crumbs that had led me here.
While working at Spruce Tree House in 1891, an anthropologist named Gustaf Nordenskiöld found these many precisely shaped doorways to be far more than just architectural convenience. He noted that in the ruins at Mesa Verde, the T shapes belong to the rooms that were most frequented in everyday life, fashioned to allow expedient ingress and egress, as opposed to the rectangular doorways, which could be sealed shut with stone slabs. In his mind the T shapes denoted public spaces rather than private ones, doorways that remained open, while others could be closed.
Wooden ladder leading down into a kiva in front of T-shapeddoorways in Mesa Verde’s Spruce Tree House. REGAN CHOI
Nordenskiöld also noticed that the T shape arrived late in the occupation of Mesa Verde, associated with sites he found to have been constructed with more care and skill than sites lacking T shapes. It was as if a specific group of people had arrived late in the game, people of the T—perhaps former residents of Chaco or Aztec taking root in Mesa Verde. Or perhaps the T indicated a sort of growing social identity, a cult or a rising religious faction.
With the T came an era of conflict. The late thirteenth century saw cultural turmoil and pockets of extreme violence across the Four Corners region. Even before substantial evidence of violence was unearthed by archaeologists in the twentieth century, Nordenskiöld believed that the Mesa Verde cliff dwellings were defensive wartime settlements. Near Spruce Tree House he noted “a number of very small, isolated rooms, situated on ledges most difficult of access.” He posited that these rooms could have been defensive turrets, “archers being posted there when danger threatened, so that the enemy might have to face a volley of arrows from several points at once.” He continued, “In such a position a few men could defend themselves, even against an enemy of superior force.”
When Nordenskiöld mentioned these turretlike rooms to Jesse Walter Fewkes, a prominent Four Corners archaeologist of the time, he was presented with a very different view. Fewkes believed the small structures to be shrines where offerings to the gods were deposited. At least one was built very near a spring, which must have been considered especially sacred during the Great Drought of the late thirteenth century.
The views held by these two researchers epitomize a debate, which will probably never be resolved, over whether cliff dwellings in general were urgently defensive or were simply good, safe places to live, holy places even. On the one hand, Mesa Verde’s cliff dwellings were indeed built at a time of escalating hostilities in the surrounding countryside. Some of their outer walls were built far thicker than necessary, as if to fend off a frontal assault. On the other hand, very little evidence of violent death has been documented at Mesa Verde, even while archaeologists excavating the land below have uncovered sacked villages and legions of charred human remains.
Many modern archaeologists are beginning to question the warfare hypothesis at Mesa Verde, looking toward more complex social explanations for why people moved into these cliff dwellings. Perhaps they came here to get closer to water sources. Or perhaps, rather than strict battlements, the dwellings were built to hold a place in the imagination—signs of extraordinary endeavors, a loftiness surpassing everyday architecture. In this way they may have been like the high monasteries of the sixteenth-century Qing dynasty in China, where buildings supported in the cliffs with spans of timbers were reached by stairwells carved in stone.
Whatever these cliff dwellings were, they represent a transformation of settlement styles as the people of Mesa Verde left open country for sheltering canyons. T-shaped doorways appeared in great numbers at this time, their dark, sharply outlined forms standing boldly on the faces of dwellings. These may have been the first gated communities of the Southwest, people taking their prosperous lives out of view from the teeming masses in the land below, guarding themselves within the bowels of Mesa Verde. The T shape may have been their symbol, their flag, in this time of change. With one glance you would have known who they were.
I slipped through a T-shaped doorway and into a room where I found an extension ladder leaning against a wall. An archaeologist had been working here as part of an intensive architectural survey measuring every stone, every swab of plaster inside this dwelling. I stepped onto the ladder and climbed through caved-in ceilings, three stories up, where white streaks of bird droppings ran down the wall like candle wax. The ladder bowed a little, stretched to its full extension, the top padded with fabric so as not to damage the plaster against which it rested. As I remained with my hands on the top rung for a few minutes, looking over the head of Spruce Tree House, I began to hear voices. I peered across half-broken rooms to where a light snow was falling outside. Visitors were coming, the afternoon tour.
Like a mouse startled back into its hole, I climbed down the ladder. I passed quickly through one low doorway and then another. As voices rose into the sandstone cave, I skulked back into the shadows, the storyteller rhythm of the ranger nipping at my heels. I had permission to be here, but I did not want to be seen, Gollum lurking in the halls.
As the tour group gathered at the front of Spruce Tree House, I shifted back through deeper rooms. I looked over my shoulder at the tour through gaps and openings. What were they seeing here? Where did their attention lie? Some were caught in wells of curiosity, squinting into dim rooms, trying to imagine what this place was like eight hundred years ago. Others watched the snow outside, inhaling the serenity of this cold day. Still others listened with schoolroom attentiveness while the ranger told familiar stories, hands clasped behind her back.
After several minutes I noticed a young boy staring at me through a long shaft of doorways. He startled me. I did not move. I didn’t think anyone could see so many layers deep into the ruin. He was not listening to the ranger as he peered straight in my direction. He does not see me, I thought. I recognized the peculiar look of hesitation, uncertainty. He thought he saw something inside the dwelling, maybe a set of eyes in the dark, framed by sequential doorways; maybe a ghost; probably nothing. I stared straight back at him, not daring to move and prove him right or wrong. I wondered what memory was being planted, what impression would remain in his mind. I wanted to whisper to him, Yes, it is true. There are things happening back here in the dark—layers of rooms extending deeper than you can see, archaeologists sweeping and measuring, a writer hovering at his journal.
The boy’s mother said something to him, told him to listen to the ranger. The boy looked away for a moment, and I slipped out of view so that when he looked back, no one was there, a daydream gone.
The tempo of the ranger’s voice changed slightly, and I heard the shuffle of clothing, people moving another few yards down the chain to see the next archaeological feature. I darted into the open when their backs were turned. I reached a wooden ladder poking out of a floor hatch and climbed down into the ground, swiftly vanishing into the darkness below.
The day ended there. In fact, the entire world seemed to end as I descended into the ceremonial kiva, a place to wait out the tour. Passing through the cold cellar light—my hands tracing grease-worn rungs, my boots softly touching the floor as voices outside subsided into a muffle—I closed my eyes for three slow seconds to adjust to the diminished light. When I opened them, I saw dust floating in a faint shaft of halfhearted daylight.
I let go of the ladder and turned slowly inside this underground sphere. Six smoke-blackened masonry pilasters emerged from an encircling bench, giving the walls a sharp, three-dimensional appearance even in the dim light. The ceiling was made of wooden beams corbeled across each other, and they dripped with the dark syrup of rodent urine. The circular room smelled of old molasses, the familiar odor of a cave.
I walked around the back of the ladder, where I c
ame upon a flat stone planted like a plaque in the floor. The stone was original, something used to deflect drafts of air that would have poured down the ventilator shaft behind it. Every kiva has one of these deflector stones, as customary as a welcome mat. I stepped around the stone and crouched at the ventilator shaft. The square masonry hole in the wall was the size of a shoe box, down low so I had to set a hand on the floor and drop to one knee to peer inside. I could see a shape, something that appeared to be a large feather. I had not noticed this before. I squinted through wasted spiderwebs and reached in, tentatively. I lifted out a feather, seeing that it was old, stripped by weather and rodents. Still, I could tell by its squared-off top that it had come from a turkey. I settled back on my haunches, turning the feather between my fingers. An odd thing to find in this shaft, I thought.
The Anasazi once kept pens full of domestic turkeys. Their feathers were used for blankets and robes, and they were an abundant re-source for ceremonies, especially as the importation of exotic feathers dwindled in the thirteenth century. But this was no Anasazi feather I had in my hand. Turkeys still inhabit these canyons. This feather looked to be no more than a few years old. It had drifted in from the wild, a dervish.
Among the modern clans of the Hopi who are descended from the Anasazi, turkey feathers represent the scintillating underworld, their white, flat tips symbolizing water churning up from underground. Turkey feathers are planted in fields to attract rain. Some of the surviving tribes far south of here, in southern Mexico, Central America, and South America, believe that the turkey represents Tlaloc, one of the most powerful and ancient gods in the Americas, a governor of water said to live underground in the House of Rain.
In certain societies of ancient America, turkeys were killed in place of humans, their heads ritually cut off as offerings to water spirits. Even in Chaco both intact human skeletons and those of beheaded turkeys have been found in kiva floors, buried in the hollow spaces between deflector stones and ventilator shafts. Buried, as a matter of fact, in spaces nearly identical to where I was now crouched with this turkey feather in my hands.
I slowly turned the quill, wondering whether someone had intentionally placed it in the ventilator shaft. Perhaps this had happened during a private ceremony. The park allows for such things when native tribes claiming local ancestry seek permission. A person may have come with a recollection of arcane traditions, knowing the connection between turkeys and ventilator shafts, placing the feather as a way of saying that the Anasazi have not died.
I reached into the shaft and settled the feather back into its hammock of spiderwebs. It’s best to leave such things where they lie.
From outside the kiva I heard the ranger’s muted voice. Instead of calling these people Anasazi, she used the term Ancestral Puebloan, respecting the connection between these cliff dwellers and the modern Pueblo tribes still living in the Southwest. In a pleasant tempo she told a story that has been repeated through the decades: the everyday lives of these people came to a sudden and mysterious end late in the thirteenth century. No one knows why. They left only these ruins for us to consider.
The ranger did not mention that kivas were burned, either in an act of ceremonial departure or as a ravage of war. In this very kiva, late-nineteenth-century excavators found human skulls stacked inside the ventilator shaft where I had picked up the turkey feather. Air flowing down the shaft into the kiva would have passed through the nose bones and unhinged jaws of human skulls. She said nothing of this, nor of the skeletons unearthed around Mesa Verde with faces chopped out, limb bones smashed open with stone hammers. Perhaps wisely, the ranger avoided such controversial subjects, describing the Anasazi only in a pleasant, upbeat voice as she led the afternoon tour away from Spruce Tree House. I remained in the kiva, my face turned toward the winter light falling down the ladder.
DEVASTATION
BELOW SLEEPING UTE
Playing the pedals of his pickup, Hugh crashed us through a plane of fresh snow, the truck lurching and falling back as the rear wheels fishtailed and his hands spun the steering wheel first in one direction and then the other. We were on a final pier of land northwest of Mesa Verde. The road had been swept nearly out of existence by a recent storm. All that remained was a clean surface of snow cast into elliptical drifts between plumes of juniper trees. The pickup swished for miles across this white and drifted world, Hugh’s palm guiding the steering wheel. He didn’t dare to slow down for fear of becoming stuck.
The crease between Hugh’s dashboard and the windshield was a museum of small animal skulls, various feathers, and peculiar root burls—the kind of display I had seen in many different trucks, the treasures of peregrine adventurers. A winged knot of a vertebra swung from the rearview mirror. The cab smelled of motor oil and old paper. Two dogs plunged their black noses against the camper-shell glass behind us. Hugh’s vehicle was the same model as my own, same year, same smell, only a different variety of objects on the dashboard.
Hugh had been doing research up at Mesa Verde, sketching hundreds of designs from thirteenth-century serving bowls. He was edgy from too much time indoors; he needed to move. When I had last gone through a storeroom of artifacts with him, he had used the tip of his pencil to point out some of the more curious ceramic designs.
But then he had looked at me and said, “You know what I really want to do is get the hell out of here.”
Hugh was nearly incapable of working inside. The bowls he was researching, no matter how ornately painted, were all starting to look the same under a wash of fluorescent light. He had told me he knew of an intriguing place down in the canyons beyond the iso-lated rise of Mesa Verde, out where he thought the true center ofthirteenth-century Anasazi life lay. A couple of years back he had surveyed an archaeological site in the bottom of Yellowjacket Canyon where a massive wall of bedrock rises, a place nearly encircled by kivas.
Now that we were out here, Hugh was not sure exactly where we were. As snow came up across the hood, he stayed crouched over the wheel so he could see out the windows, taking quick bearings off the mountainous train of Sleeping Ute to his left, the bergs of the San Juan Mountains standing in a clear, crystalline sky to his right. Straight ahead stood the snow-blue island of the Abajo Mountains in Utah.
“Far enough,” Hugh said, and he swiveled the steering wheel, causing us to wash sideways against the road so that we could see Mesa Verde plainly and suddenly out the windshield.
Before momentum was lost, Hugh dropped the gearshift into reverse, which sent us kicking backward, then quickly into first, where the tires only spun. He pulled the emergency brake, and for the first time in half an hour the pickup came to a halt. We had carved a snowbound line for miles.
Hugh got out to have a look around. I did the same, breaking through the wind crust on top of the snow, sinking knee-deep. The sun fell into a long winter slant, and I wondered about how far we would be able to walk before nightfall.
Hugh called out, “How’s that side?”
I crouched at the back wheels with my haunches resting on the crust. We were in over the tops of the tires.
“Deep,” I said.
Hugh flipped open the camper shell, and out blew two dogs. They plummeted away, their muzzles probing the snow. Hugh crawled inside and banged around.
The closest landmark was Sleeping Ute Mountain, its 10,000-foot-tall body soft with snow and low afternoon light. The mountain, sacred to the Utes and strictly off-limits, had long stood in my own personal landscape like a haunted mansion. I often found myself traveling around its flanks, glancing up and wondering what might be hidden in its woodland slopes, in its concealed basins. I had never dared to go up there.
The density of archaeological sites around the mountain is mind-boggling. One survey found nineteen pit-house villages packed within a couple of square miles. In the final years of occupation, late in the thirteenth century, migrants were arriving and establishing itinerant villages, until the area became a ring of busy encampments.
This fieldworker explained that he and his colleagues had found a grinding stone that contained crushed human finger bones. At that point they knew that the slaughter had gone beyond the bounds of customary violence.
The surveyors had loosened a stone slab in the ground, exposing a deep, teardrop-shaped storage chamber below, its rounded walls lined neatly with stonework. The chamber was conspicuously empty but for a single, bold human defecation laid right in the center. One of the surveyors had done his master’s thesis on pre-Columbian human feces, and he identified the material immediately, noting its pumice white color, which indicated that the person had been eating bone marrow. He said, “We shaved it down to a core that we knew would not be contaminated by any of us, and then it was tested, and they found the presence of human DNA. Not only one person’s DNA, but DNA from four different people.” Whoever left the excrement had been a cannibal.
What one hears about prehistoric violence from fieldworkers often differs from what archaeological scholars say. When I presented this excavation account to a widely published archaeologist, she dismissed it as ill informed and technically misleading, saying that the surveyor’s description of the site was so surreal that most archaeologists would have difficulty recognizing it. What the fieldworker described as a crime scene would have been handled far more clinically by her—aspects of dreadfulness tidied up by an academic language. Such a sanitized view comes not from a lack of imagination, but from an understandable reluctance on the part of established researchers to openly discuss taboo issues. Cannibalism and warfare among the Anasazi have hardly been popular topics, often being handled with reticence, grimacing, and even denial.* Native Americans especially regard archaeologists who have addressed such topics as meddling and insensitive, asking why such an unpleasant history must be brought to light. Many archaeologists respect this view and speak guardedly about prehistoric violence. Fieldworkers, however, often come back wild-eyed with tales of crushed finger bones, terribly disarticulated skeletons, and a cannibal’s shit dropped into a storeroom, the lid closed over it.