by Craig Childs
Excavators at Sand Canyon found a bedlam of human bones. The corpses had not been formally buried but instead were left scattered about in the pattern of a slaughter. Death had come quickly to these people, terror raining down on them.
A white ceramic bowl sat on a drape of black felt. It had been excavated from Sand Canyon Pueblo. Wearing cotton gloves, I reached out and tipped the bowl slightly, as if arranging the moon in the night sky.
Inside this vessel lay a geometric filigree of thin black lines. The center was an empty pentagon. From it black paint radiated outward, like the ripples created by a stone dropped into the water. These kaleidoscopic ripples—enlarged, crosshatched, and locked together—filled the bowl to its rim.
I was photographing vessels from Sand Canyon and Castle Rock. I took a picture of the bowl, then stepped back. From site reports I knew that it had been found not far from the skeleton of an eight-year-old. The child had been thrown onto the hearth of a kiva, left arm and leg twisted horribly backward. A lethal blow had been struck with an ax to the back of the head, and cut marks on the skull indicated scalping. Archaeologists who worked on these sites are hesitant to use any provocative language, but what they found calls up scenes of hysteria as warriors sacked the pueblo, weapons and shields clattering, mothers crying out for their children. One archaeologist told me that hysteria is far too sensational a term, suggesting that the attack—which she called a “warfare event” in keeping with archaeological nomenclature—may have happened at night, when the people were asleep, as if carnage wrought in darkness was somehow more peaceful, slumber rolling over into death.
Such a quiet annihilation seemed strangely plausible from where I stood eight hundred years later—vessels resting calmly around me—but I knew that it had not happened that way. Most of the recorded deathblows had come from behind, the backs of the skulls depressed or smashed in. The holes in the skulls matched the size of stone axes found in the area. People had been taken down in hand-to-hand combat; these had not been quiet deaths.
A man walked in through the open door behind me, carrying another vessel, a grapefruit-size seed jar that he held in front of him as if cupping a newborn. He was the director of this lab, keeping track of all the artifacts removed from a number of excavations in southwest Colorado. He set the seed jar on a table behind me, adding it to a growing assembly of beautiful intact vessels.
The lab director admired the jar for a moment—its small round mouth and black inward scrolls of paintings down the sides. He turned to retrieve another from the storage room.
I went on with my work, moving from one vessel to the next. So many intact vessels had come from these two sites, and fine ones, too. Susan Ryan’s great-house excavation on the Great Sage Plain had not produced anywhere near this number or quality of vessels. Ryan had dug into a site that had been formally abandoned, its rooms prepared for departure like a body bathed and dressed for the grave, artifacts neatly arranged on the kiva floors before the roofs had been set on fire. The more valuable vessels had been carried away as the people had left on their migrations. The residents of Sand Canyon and Castle Rock had had no such opportunity. They had been caught unaware, leaving everything in its place.
I had handled vessels from Ryan’s excavation, and they had seemed cold, like museum pieces. These pots from below Sleeping Ute were vibrant against my cotton gloves, hot in my imagination. They represented unfinished lives, people caught and killed in the middle of their days. The seed jar that the lab director had just brought in was only half-painted, part of it seemingly unfinished, as if time had run out unexpectedly.
Seed jar found in a kiva at the Sand Canyon Pueblo. In storage at Crow Canyon Archaeological Center. CRAIG CHILDS
I picked up a bowl that had been found in a room with an unburied infant and a decapitated man. Every bone in both of the man’s legs had been spirally fractured, indicating a great deal of force; his long bones had been beaten into splinters while they were still fresh. Torture, perhaps, or a brutal desecration of the dead.
As I set this bowl on the black felt, I saw shadows streaking across walls, women with knives slashing furiously at their attackers. At the same time, I sensed the daily clatter of life, the bowl set on the floor as someone turned to fetch a bundle of firewood, a baby toddling toward it with an irresistible grin, her fat little fingers latching onto the fine ceramic rim. And then a warning cry. A crash of bone. A figure in the doorway.
The context of these vessels from below Sleeping Ute belies the common notion of the Anasazi merely as peaceful farmers, naked and quarter-dressed peasants strolling barefoot through museumdioramas, their tiny brown faces agreeable and intent. This widely held concept of a purely tranquil people strips them of their authenticity, making them either woefully simplistic or divine in their serenity. In a world racked with thousands of years of wide-scale violence, where even Buddhists have gone to war, perhaps we invented the idea of the Anasazi to soothe our troubled minds. Meanwhile, there is ample evidence that these people were not at all immune from hostilities. Like the rest of us, they engaged in death.*
Next I photographed a mug excavated from the floor of a kiva. Other mugs like this had been found at Castle Rock, and material caked inside them revealed the molecular remains of myoglobin with chemical signatures found only in humans. The same material had been found inside two corrugated cooking vessels. Human muscle tissue had been cooked. Although cannibalism has been a hotly contested issue, signs of it among the Anasazi have been appearing in different forms for more than a hundred years: the same kind of butchering marks on human bones that you would find on the bones of game animals and wear marks on the bone tips consistent with bones cooked and stirred in a pot. Skulls have been found baked, cradled in a fire so the backs are burned and the faces subsequently chipped away, perhaps to get at the simmered brains.
A great deal has been made of these finds, and for some the perception of the Anasazi has shifted from passive agrarians to brutal cannibals. The evidence, however, does not wholly support this view. Signs of cannibalism appear to be very localized, in places where violence reached a peak and everyday lives gave way to a holocaust. If nothing else, cannibalism suggests that these people were more complex and some faced a more troubling end than we previously imagined. As I photographed the mug, I thought, what would we make of Auschwitz if we excavated it a thousand years from now, or the Cambodian killing fields? Wherever there are humans, there are atrocities.
Why did this happen among the Anasazi? Perhaps there were factions involved in Mesoamerican-style death cults borne into the Southwest on trade routes from Mexico, dangerous splinter groups able to gain power in a time of crisis and drought. There may have been people indulging in the darker sides of a religion holding cannibalism as a tenet. Or eating a person may have been an act of supreme political or military dominance, as it has shown itself to be in cultures around the world when one group utterly obliterates another, eating the hearts or livers of exceptionally potent enemies. The evidence left behind at some Anasazi sites points to ritual killings—not just people being eaten for food value, but people butchered in precise manners. Perhaps this is merely what happens in a multifaceted cultural environment that has suddenly collapsed. No doubt there were both heroes and barbarians. If this evidence of violence in the Southwest proves anything, it proves that the Anasazi were human, prone to both flaws and glories.
The lab director came through the door again, now carrying a large jar. Paint danced fancifully across the clay, a sashay of black curves. The room was full of pots, no more space on tables and shelves, so he handed the jar to me. It rested like a globe in my hands, the whole of the world.
As the director left, I stood with this vessel, looking down at its swaying patterns. The paint had been applied more quickly than on some of the others, especially the lidded jars that had been found in kivas. On this one a number of lines overshot their marks, brushstrokes laid too long, a smudge of pigment mixed with too much water. The
personality of the artisan was somehow made more real than in a work that shows no defect at all. The vessel seemed to move in my grasp, singing of effort and a trembling hand, a story of the living. And yet it contained a story of annihilation. I moved pots aside and set it down, exhausted from all the death.
In the canyon light slid back like screens of silk, the world darkening, blue upon blue. Hugh and I had an hour, maybe an hour and a quarter, before evening stars would begin to show. In a canyon of ice and boulders hooded with snow, I kicked in every step to find solid ground below. My pants were frozen like iron bells from the knees down. I stopped and glanced behind me. Hugh was coming up along a trough I had cut through the snow, his steps as slow as mine.
The reclined cliff we had descended earlier was not an option, an impossible bare-handed climb on a sheet of ice. Instead we aimed for the head of a steep side canyon we figured would take us up through the forest and back to the pickup. Tumbledown boulders made the bottom of the side canyon too treacherous in the snow, so we balanced along the sidewalls, attending to contours of short cliffs and inward gullies. The dogs poked in and out of every route they could find, but I did not trust their choices. I took my own way, at my own level of comfort, passing into a ravine of fallen piñons, boot soles navigating under the snow, a gloved hand down for support.
There was no extraordinary danger of getting lost. Chances were good that we would reach the top and find the pickup. If not, we had enough gear to live through a single night—the makings of a fire, the ability to dig ourselves a snow cave—although we would probably be heavily frostbitten. This was the hard kernel of winter. It was the time of deep cold when, in the thirteenth century, the hatches would have been sealed closed, the pueblos huddled in isolation. Maybe only the scouts, the hunters, would have been out, returning at dusk, ducking into rooms in their robes and leggings. Everyone else would have remained in their chambers, perhaps gathered for warmth in the kivas. It seems significant that in these higher elevations north of Chaco, kivas became much more prevalent than in previous centuries. Communities hoarded kivas like coins. These underground chambers may have become sacred for new reasons, places for everyone to gather in winter firelight, wishing the long nights away.
In these darkest months I imagine kivas filled with the sounds of snores and blankets pulled up, a dog waking with ears perked to some movement, a family drifting down the ladder looking for a place to lie down, wrapping the children in turkey feather robes.
As I dug ice out of my boots with the crook of a finger, I thought this would have been an especially dangerous time. There could be no more devastating an attack than in the middle of winter. Where would you run in your bare feet, in the thin blanket grabbed in the last reckless moment as your pueblo burned behind you?
Every returning scout, I imagine, would have been a blessing, the stamping off of snow, a report that all was frozen and quiet in the land beyond.
I found myself at a dead end, stuck at a snow cornice over a drop. Hugh shifted direction, breaking trail up and around through pillows of brush. I backtracked and followed him. We crawled through low gaps in the trees, hands clearing branches out of the way, gloves tinkling with shards of ice.
Hugh found the way out, emerging onto an arm of smooth land. The sky opened, clear but for a thin whorl of high clouds. This night was going to be rich with stars and vacuously cold.
The snow was harder on the plain, its surface smooth and windblown through a maze of juniper trees. We padded across the snow crust, breaking through in weak places, shattering into shards at our shins. We moved with the quickest steps we could muster, looking for our prints from earlier in the day. I paused to catch my breath in this final glacial light. As I glanced through the piñons, I saw Hugh in the distance. He looked like a ghost in these halls of twilight, his movements appearing in one place and then another, a missile of a dog diving into view every now and then. Whips of wind scoured the snow, stinging my face.
It was a relief to be out of the canyon and up where I could see the full sky again. I thought of Susan Ryan’s excavation, her site out in the open. It seemed meaningful that she had found no signs of violence there or at any of the nearby sites, while the canyon country below bears so much evidence of war. The old great houses and their rings of villages were not built in canyons, not piled against cliff bases. They were clearly open to attack should anyone have wished, yet they seem to have been left alone. Perhaps this is because they are much older than, say, Sand Canyon Pueblo. They may have been part of deep-rooted alliances. Many were in view of two or more nearby settlements, so that if one was invaded, the others would have been notified immediately, able to mobilize fighters at a moment’s notice.
Who was attacking whom? Wandering gangs, hunter-gatherers, old enemies, warring clans? No definitive answer has been found. For a long time researchers have been looking for evidence of outsiders, people who were not Anasazi, but no outsiders have been found. The attackers, it appears, were the Anasazi themselves. The Anasazi were not merely one group of people. They were many. Even in the context of a single settlement, multiple ethnicities have been found, some groups of skeletons within a pueblo displaying more injuries—both healed and fatal—than others. In one case, a number of buried female skeletons from a distinct ethnicity were marked with healed wounds indicative of those seen in modern domestic-abuse cases. Perhaps these women were captured from another group and treated poorly. Whatever the case, there were differences among people that may have fueled conflict in times of strife.
Traveling beneath the dark throne of Sleeping Ute, we finally found our prints from earlier in the day—the crust broken open, plates thrown sideways as if an icebreaker had barged through. We fell into these old steps, plodding now.
Our trail led straight back to the pickup, its grille peppered with clods of snow. Hugh let the dogs into the camper shell—a scrabble of claws on the tailgate, fur shedding continents of ice. We got into the cab, our clothes crackled and bunched, our shoulders pressed against each other’s, cushioned by our coats. Hugh started the engine. The heater roared, slowly melting the windshield, shapes clearing from the ice matching the various items on the dashboard. My beard dripped into my lap.
Hugh pushed the stick into first gear, and the tires took hold. It was cold enough now, the snow clotted and hard, that we sailed across this jetty of earth, a lone pair of headlights moving through the night.
LONELINESS
NEAR HOVENWEEP
Mountain lion tracks led across banks of old snow and between boulders that had fallen midway down a canyon. The tracks were no older than an hour; round pads, round toes, claws retracted for travel. I followed them, glancing farther ahead through the frozen shade of piñon trees. The lion had been heading toward the edge of an inner canyon. I hoped it knew the way to fresh water.
Cold as it was, I had not seen good water for days. Carrying a winter’s camp on my back as I hiked west toward Utah, I melted a pan of snow for drinking every morning and every night. For several days I had been traveling alone among ruins of pueblos and small, scattered villages, their broken pottery slowly disappearing back into the ground. I had picked up the lion tracks a short distance back and now followed them to a shelf of rimrock dropping off to an inner canyon below. What looked like the remains of a classic, defensive thirteenth-century settlement appeared at the edge of the canyon, just heaps of masonry stones and the outline of a half-moon-shaped tower the lion had walked through.
From here I could see down tiers of cliffs to the canyon floor, where cottonwood trees stood bare. It was February. I did not see any water down there. The mountain lion tracks went over the rim, down along a narrow chute where a stone house had once collapsed. I followed.
Cliff dwellings were built into the bedrock eaves below the rim, and I walked under them, careful not to step directly on the lion tracks, a habit of respect or maybe just a whim of attentiveness. The lion’s path led me along a ledge to the back of the canyon, where
I found an overhang dripping with springs. I let my shoulders drop, relaxing. No need to melt snow tonight.
The springs had carved a shallow cave beneath the head of a cliff, an elliptical eye weeping into beds of stone and moss. I passed beneath winter-killed monkey flowers, where beads of water gathered at the tips of dead leaves and flower stems. Water croaked and mumbled. Drops fell onto bare rock. The fastest outpouring stuttered into a pool, falling from a bulge of moss hung from the bedrock ceiling. I would hesitate to call it a breast if it were not one. I touched it, gingerly, feeling the swollen cushion of water inside. The lion had come, too, and had left its tracks in wet clay below. It had paused at the pool, had raked water up with its tongue, paw prints planted at the edge. I moved to the same spot—still careful not to cover the lion’s tracks with my own—and opened my mouth below the green, translucent nipple. My mouth filled even before I needed another breath.
I let my pack down and unbuckled my water containers. Holding each one up to this falling water, I listened to them fill, the musical sound of abundance. The Anasazi had done the same, I thought. Late in the thirteenth century, whoever lived in this local settlement gathered water here. We animals always come to the same places to drink.
The shadow of evening overtook the canyon. I needed to find my place for the night, a burrow somewhere to wait out the encroaching cold. I stowed full water bottles in my pack and walked back up through the ruins—coat, hat, and gloves on now, gratified by the weight of spring water on my back, enough for another couple of days. Whichever water bottles I did not keep in my sleeping bag tonight would be bricks of ice by sunrise.