by Craig Childs
Whatever attitude is taken, there is no getting around the evidence that for a period of time the foot of Sleeping Ute was most certainly an unfortunate place to be. I stood in the snow and looked up at the mountain, feeling a familiar sense of ghastly apprehension. There are places like this all over the world. In every country and from every age, there are mass burials, torture chambers, places of horror where the most rational mind cannot help being overwhelmed.**
The great-house village Susan Ryan had excavated was not far from here, a day’s walk at the most. Ryan had found her site evacuated in an orderly, seemingly peaceful manner, while nearby villages had come to bloody, appalling ends. Obviously, the Anasazi did not all share the same fate.
Hugh emerged from the camper shell with a jangling fistful of tire chains. In the other hand he carried an army surplus shovel, a sturdy German tool with a short wooden handle and a folding metal blade. He went to work right away digging out the tires with swift, pawing strokes. When enough space was cleared, we lugged the chains into place.
Hugh jumped into the cab and urged the pickup to move while I pushed from behind. The chains spit out the back end as the pickup got just enough purchase to spin in the other direction, yawing ten feet ahead. I ran behind it to push. When the pickup bogged down again, Hugh shut off the engine and stepped out. “At least it’s pointing the right way now,” he said.
I backtracked to haul the chains out of the snow, fingers pink and cold as the dogs romped around me. Hugh studied the snow, hands on his hips.
“The snow will harden up in the cold,” he said with a shrug. “We should start walking before it gets too late.”
Hugh threw on a small daypack and tightened it with a quick tug of the straps. He had the mannerisms of a climber, a person well versed in travel through difficult places.
I grabbed a satchel of warm gear, a pair of gloves, and an extra water bottle. Hugh was ready, waiting. I closed the cab door, and he gave me a quick nod before turning and running north across the snow, a swift, light-footed dance. I followed, heavier than Hugh, breaking through the crust as we set out in search of a small Anasazi fortress he had surveyed.
I followed Hugh’s prints, keeping on his trail as he faded through stubs of trees, the dogs lunging this way and that. I glanced around as I ran—keeping track of where Sleeping Ute stood and where Mesa Verde broke the skyline—so I could find my way back. The easiest place I know to get lost is in the topiary madhouse of a piñon and juniper forest, branches hanging at eye level, passageways opening in every direction, trees nearly identical in shape and size. At least we had the dogs with us; they would find the way.
Padding across the crust, distributing my weight so that I would not fall through, I finally caught up with Hugh, who had stopped at the edge of a fall. The dogs were poised beside him, their tongues lapping up the cold air. A canyon dropped into the earth below. The world turned from horizontal to vertical. Rims and cliffs of more distant canyons peeked over each other’s heads, erosion cutting the land apart. We stood at a drifted cornice, peering as far over the edge as we could. The topography changed so quickly from woodland to canyon that it felt aggressive, almost violent.
“This it?” I asked, using as few words as possible so Hugh would not hear that I was out of breath, so he could not tell that I was ten years older than he and that I had not been out walking enough over the past couple of months.
“Yeah,” he said, looking down. “This is the canyon.” He was not breathing hard at all.
The land below us was made of steep tiers and brittle bands of cliffs and boulder chutes buried in snow. At the bottom stood a horn of a stone, a natural geologic feature. It was a lone bedrock wall staggering up from the floor into the sunlight. It looked like a place for a last stand, a thumb of earth down in a hole.
“And that’s the site down there?” I asked.
Hugh looked down about a thousand feet at this sturdy butte. He nodded his head. “That’s the place. That’s where they went.”
Nightfall was on my mind. We had a few hours left, and once we started into the canyon, it would be a long way back out.
Hugh looked toward me, but not into my eyes. He was scrutinizing the horizon behind me, checking landmarks. This was the last place where any of the surrounding world could be seen. Once we were in, the canyon would have us. The sun was a brilliant marble lying low in the southwest.
Hugh said, “See you down there,” and suddenly launched off the edge. His boots kicked a tuft of snow from the lip as he shot straight down. The dogs leaped behind him, snouts swimming through the snow.
I hesitated for two breaths, watching Hugh bound between obstacles and then out of my sight off another edge. I kicked off, plunging into the canyon behind him, snow packing into the cuffs of my pants, sharp kernels of ice collecting deep in my socks and boots. Half in free fall, my body spilled into Hugh’s tracks.
Direct sunlight vanished on the north side of the canyon. We were no longer in a sweet-smelling juniper thicket. Down here piñon pines grew across the tops of outcrops and cliffs smelling of ice. I jumped down through piles upon piles of snow, skidding, falling, gloves soaked through and hands needled with cold. No longer was I directing my body with my mind. I ran on instinct, with my arms spread, flying in the air with knees tucked for one, two seconds, then touching ground, feet diving beneath the snow into boulders and the trunks of fallen trees.
Seven hundred, eight hundred feet down, I came breathing hard to where Hugh had stopped. The dogs stood at his side along the top of a snow-covered arc, a bedrock cliff reclining into the canyon floor below. Some places were too steep for snow to gather, falls revealing wet red sandstone as slick as ice. One of the dogs let out a whine and nervously glanced elsewhere.
Dogs are no fools, I thought.
Hugh was looking for another way, hand rubbing the back of his neck. I pulled off my gloves and snapped them out. One advantage I had over Hugh was that I had spent many years traveling in the winter canyons. He had been raised in North Carolina, not a place of snowbound cliffs in high plateau country. Now was my chance, I figured. I could get the jump on Hugh. Saying nothing, I leaped forward and skated down the tilted face of snow. Small avalanches let loose, slabs breaking from the bedrock. My knees buckled and my gloved hand scraped down behind me like a rudder as I carved a long slalom into the lower canyon.
My fingertips scraped against the rock below the snow, my boot soles cutting like brakes. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a sudden white mass shooting past, two dogs and a man poised downward.
Damn. He is quick.
Maybe fifty feet from the bottom, the bedrock became too steep. I hit my ass and my shoulder blades, and snow packed up into my nostrils as I gained speed, out of control. I flailed, went upright for a quarter second, and was down again, when I suddenly hit solid ground. With a sharp spring in my knees, I stood, staggering slightly but holding my composure, showing Hugh I was still alive, no broken bones. We had reached the bottom of the canyon. My heart was thumping up in my throat.
Hugh turned to me and said, “It’s right over this way.”
He jogged away.
I let my breath settle, watching him go.
In the sunlight along the canyon floor, Hugh’s gait remained swift as he navigated among juniper branches and wash-bottom boulders. He moved with elegance, as if guided around obstacles by a fine silver string. The dogs fanned out into the scrub forest ahead of him, slopping through the snowmelt mud. Low, snub-nosed cacti were all over the place, withered by the cold.
The day would be ending soon. Tonight the world would crackle and become still, the stars held up in a frozen sky. This canyon would not be a safe place for us, and I kept glancing up as we moved, looking for a better route up than the one we had taken down. It was a long way out of here. We were at the bottom of a deep laceration in the earth. Ahead the lone cliff we were aiming for lifted magnificently into the sun. We scrambled up its lower, south-facing ramparts, passing th
rough barbs of broken pottery where the snow had melted.
The bottom of this upright landform was sheeted in naked bedrock like a moat, a steep, exposed ring of land that had to be crossed in order to reach a settlement up higher. I could not see the settlement Hugh was leading me toward, but the pottery that had washed down was evidence enough that people had lived in substantial numbers all around the foot of this cliff.
Bedrock softened into terraces of soil, where we slowed our pace, stepping over impressions of ancient buildings, only their foundations remaining. Working on a survey crew, Hugh had roughly mapped four clusters of masonry dwellings and twenty-seven kivas wrapped around the rock face above us. Protected sites like this cropped up all across this region in the mid-thirteenth century, more kivas than had ever been seen in the past. One site several miles away sprouted more than four hundred kivas around the rocky head of Yellowjacket Canyon. As much as this had been a time of hostilities, it was also a time of alliances and collaborations. Settlements were cementing themselves together with communal architecture. Gatherings were held, feasts prepared in large serving bowls. Year by year the average size of cooking vessels grew, suggesting that labor was being reorganized, that extended households were living and eating together. Many settlements in the area looked identical to one another, with small household pueblo units facing south, their trash middens and small domestic kivas placed out front. Larger communities were aligned the same way, blueprints repeated on multiple scales, a sign that people were integrated into a larger ideology. At the same time, new pueblos were being built that looked entirely different, D-shaped buildings with floor plans reminiscent of Chaco, leaving some researchers to imagine a last-minute attempt to build Chaco once again. These sites were constructed at the heads of canyons and at defensible cliff edges and were often surrounded by formidable masonry walls. Rather than being based on strict north-south footprints, these new pueblos were built to fit into local topography. The combination of precise south-facing pueblo communities and those built into defensive terrain suggests that people residing near one another were living by two different sets of principles, or at least were employing markedly different strategies.
As I moved among these subtle ruins and looked up at the intimidating rise of this singular cliff, I thought not so much of accords as of defense tactics. These people had backed themselves into a corner with no escape route, a place for a final stand.
Hugh led me to a gap where we could see into another nearby canyon. A tower had been built in this gap, its north half still standing and its south half having fallen into rubble. It had been erected atop a huge boulder, yet another moat to be crossed. I circled the tower, checking its vantages, and noticed it had a clear view of nearly every angle from which people could approach. Eroded out of the slope were several older potsherds, early Anasazi black-on-white from the days before Chaco. I picked up one of them and rubbed it clean with a dab of spit and my thumb. It had thin black lines of paint dating back to a previous era of violence on the Colorado Plateau—not as devastating as this thirteenth-century upheaval, but a noteworthy period of aggression and early fortification nonetheless.
I asked Hugh about the sherd, and he said that a fair amount of tenth-century Piedra Black-on-White and Deadman’s Black-on-Red pottery had turned up at this site, styles telling of an earlier age. He took this to be evidence that the place had been used as a stronghold more than once. The Anasazi coming back to such defensible locations after centuries of abandonment could be likened to modern Brits moving out of Dublin and London to reoccupy the Norman castles of the Dark Ages. Taking up positions that others defended long before is a customary maneuver during ground wars. In World War II, for example, decisive battles were fought exactly where other battles had taken place during the Crusades, with the Germans backing into hilltop towns along the Gothic Line in Italy and holding ground that had been difficult to topple a thousand years earlier. The shape of the earth has long defined the strategies of men.
Seeing these older sherds in the snowmelt soil made me think that the thirteenth-century Anasazi knew what was happening at this location, that they were building once again on top of their own past. Did they experience hopelessness upon finding the remains of earlier people who had sought shelter at this cliff, or were they encouraged?
I asked Hugh what he thought about people returning to this place, about the correlations of potsherds and cycles of movement. He sat on a sun-warmed boulder, plucking tags of ice off one of his dogs.
“Who knows?” he said, his gaze roving the snowy escarpments just above us, keeping an eye on the receding day. The shadows were quickly deepening as he flicked ice away with his fingers. “It’s all speculation anyway. Too much black box archaeology if you ask me. Stick your findings into a computer and arrange them until the numbers prove your point. I think hardly anybody comes out here these days. Everything they need is in storage or in the databases anymore.”
Hugh stood and walked slowly away. He turned and gestured with his chin for me to come, a nick of a smile letting me know that he could not be taken seriously, that he was tired of archaeology today, that he had spent too many months sitting indoors analyzing pottery. He was down here for the snow, for the sun, for the feeling of getting his heart pumping and his muscles moving.
I followed him up to where the snow was completely melted. We stepped over former walls and through slight washes that had netted hundreds of pieces of pottery. A cold breeze began to blow from the lower reaches of the canyon, indicating a shift in the day. The copper light was coming in lower, stirring the first shadows of evening.
We reached the base of the standing cliff and crouched back into its rooms of fallen boulders, the wind blocked, our backs warm against a southern face. This cliff was a solar collector, a bolt of heat in the middle of winter. We squeezed off our soaked boots, pulled out their tongues and insoles, and draped our socks over warm stones. Steam rose from them and drifted away.
As the dogs panted and found places to rest, I asked Hugh about the lay of this island community, what he had observed when he had surveyed here. He shied away from my questions, eyes scanning the ground. “I’m not really an archaeologist,” he said.
I looked at him and then looked away. I knew already from his dashboard that he was a traveler, not an archaeologist. I wanted to tell him I wasn’t really a writer, but he did not need to hear that.
We sat in silence. Glowing boulders stood around us. We were sitting in the last oven of the day. The fluorescent lights of the research lab were being cooked out of Hugh’s eyes. The rings of keys and locked cabinet doors, the countless mysterious derivations of pottery styles—everything fled from him into the sun, rising in thin wisps of steam.
The archaeological record from the thirteenth century around the Four Corners reads like a war crimes indictment: infants and children burned alive, skeletons marked by butchery, entire villages left with bodies unburied. Rock art depicts people bearing round decorated shields and using weapons on one another. At the time, populations were consolidated into local alliances, some settlements becoming very large and elaborate, surrounded by walls and guarded entry gates. People began using landscape in a defensive manner, turning terrain into fortifications for cliff dwellings and canyon head settlements.
Normally during a drought, Anasazi population centers would have disbanded, sending people into the hinterlands to farm in smaller, more sustainable groups. However, with increasing conflict people moved closer together for protection rather than spreading apart. They were protecting themselves, it seems, from one another. Too many communities had been established in too small an area. Burgeoning populations were competing for dwindling resources, contending with language barriers and scores of divergent heritages. The era was ripe for civil war.
A number of large settlements have been partially excavated at the foot of Sleeping Ute Mountain, and two of them—Sand Canyon Pueblo and Castle Rock Pueblo—have revealed what looks like massacre
s. Castle Rock was built around a sturdy mast of rock, a natural watchtower at the bottom of the mountain. Excavating only about 5 percent of this site, crews came upon the partial remains of forty-one bodies in a state of disarray. Most of the remains of a man with much of his face removed were found in one room, while his right leg—the bones still articulated—was found in another room more than three hundred feet away.
A field archaeologist from the Castle Rock excavation felt that the attack must have been well organized, telling me, “Even if they picked a time when most of the adult men were not there, you’re still going to have some resistance. People are armed. Everyone is on foot, and all they have are bows and arrows, knives, and stone axes.” This researcher figured that up to two hundred warriors would have been needed to bring down the settlement.
Sand Canyon Pueblo, not far north of Castle Rock, came to a similar end. A massive fortification with 420 rooms, 90 kivas, and 14 towers, the pueblo had been built around the craggy head of a canyon, where it is now buried in the oceanic green of a piñon pine forest, its ancient mounds and pits evenly blanketed in dirt and piñon needles. Heaps of fallen buildings are gathered closely together, broken up by airy plazas and a prominent half-moon-shaped structure with the remains of smaller buildings within. Although construction of this site was swift, it was built with considerable planning as to how internal neighborhoods were to interact—precincts partly closed off from one another, divisions within divisions. The pueblo was enclosed by a one-story perimeter wall that must have made for an impressive sight, daunting to any invaders. But the wall did not hold.