by Craig Childs
As I wandered through natural rock rubble beneath the granary—boulders shattered wide open where they had fallen—I noticed an ivory curve in the ground. I flicked it out with my fingers, startled to see it was a seashell. A little olivella as delicately scrolled as a shaving of white chocolate, it had come from the sea seven hundred miles away. In all these years I had never encountered a single shell artifact in Utah, and now I could not suppress an astounded smile, the rush of promise quickening my blood. In my imagination lines of trade routes suddenly fired across the continent, long threads winding through deserts, over austere, cracked mesas to arrive here. It completed a triad for me: feathers from Mesoamerica, bighorns from the canyons, and a shell all the way from the sea.
I rolled the shell into my palm, thinking it had come from a necklace, someone’s prized possession carried through who knows how many years and villages and hands to end up in Canyonlands. Its string had snapped one day, a tinkling of a hundred small shells on the ground. The owner had crouched to pick each one up like a grain of rice, recovering all except this one, which had rolled under the nearby couch of a boulder, impossible to find until it washed out eight hundred years later.
Looking for this? I asked silently, holding the prize between the tips of two fingers.
I showed my find to Greta and Paul. They detected the excitement in my voice, understanding how far we were from the nearest ocean, perched on a high desert plateau landlocked in the Southwest. I slipped the shell back into the ground, and the three of us sat on boulders below the granary, looking across the dry mouths of farther canyons.
Paul mused that if people had shell necklaces, they must have had good lives. He said that maybe a family could be raised in this hard country.
“What finally happened to the Anasazi who lived here?” he asked.
“They didn’t last,” I told him. “Not out here. I figure they had some good days retiring in the cliffs, watching the river pass by. But now they’re gone, so the evidence is pretty clear that they didn’t make it.”
“They could have made it, maybe,” Greta said, always hopeful.
I shrugged. “I’m sure they could have. I think it’s a case of bright lights, big city. I mean, if this is your refuge, you’re safe, but you’re out of reach, far from contact with civilization, and you still remember what it was like in the big city, living at the glorious heights of your people. No movie theaters anymore, no cafés; no bustling trade routes; no churches with full congregations and altars crowded with ancient ritual objects. Just a prized shell necklace you brought with you to remind you of the old days. They got away just in the nick of time, and maybe they barely made it out of the great abandonment alive. But I imagine once they got themselves settled here and dusted off, they looked around and said, Now what?”
Paul said, “I wonder if we could do it. I mean, if we had to.”
I just breathed, wondering if the Anasazi of Canyonlands enjoyed their last years in seclusion, imagining them alone, their children gone to find what happened to their civilization. Setting traps to catch wood rats and lizards, tending marginal crops, painting shields on walls to frighten enemies away—maybe they had a good retirement in this dead-end landscape I so adore.
If we had to, I thought, maybe we would be able to survive. With a pair of twins and Jasper growing up strong and sticking around at least for a little while—and with some other skilled companions for making tools, tending check dams, and hunting rodents—maybe we could maintain a viable community in this beautiful oblivion of canyons. But often, I also thought, I would find myself pausing at the tops of the high buttes, looking beyond our local ring of snowcapped mountains, wondering whether civilization was still ticking along.
RED
THE HEAD OF COMB RIDGE
Two mirror-image buttes stood before us in a high basin dotted with piñon and juniper trees. The buttes looked like a pair of salt and pepper shakers arranged on a table. Rings and mounds of ruins surrounded them and were even stacked upon their two flat heads. The place looked like the remains of a crowded citadel out of a Tolkien novel, a Rohan capitol. Behind the two buttes stood the awesome white gnomon of the Abajo Mountains, glazed in a fresh spring snow.
As we emerged from the woodlands, we lifted our hands to shield our eyes from the mountainous brightness, high and distant snow gleaming in the sun. We stopped and stared at the perfect assembly of buttes before us as if they were statues, twins turned to stone right where they stood. We were a small group of travelers, archaeologists and friends out walking for several days around the northern end of Comb Ridge, about fifty miles south of Canyonlands in Utah.
Many archaeologists have dismissed this area as culturally underprivileged, an empty quarter, but we were seeing otherwise. The Anasazi had once come here in significant numbers. This morning we had already found the remains of a great kiva among the piñons. We had seen vestiges of ancient settlements nearly everywhere we walked—ruins sometimes mistaken for hills back in the woods, masonry structures shouldered with sage on high points between canyons. Some with fallen towers looked like thirteenth-century Hovenweep; others resembled the terraced eleventh-century great houses of Colorado and New Mexico. Civilization had once taken hold out here, not strings of loosely affiliated settlements, but communities packed with public architecture. A place thought to be isolated and nearly off the Anasazi map turns out to be an entire map in itself.
This must have been some sort of city, I thought as I walked, aiming for the space between the two buttes. Not a city like the ones we think of now, but a city for its time and place, an industrious center inhabited for centuries by many different peoples. The pottery I saw on the ground, gray pieces of kitchenware and black-on-white sherds scattered around my feet, came from numerous different ages. The most visually striking ceramics were red wares with candied-apple surfaces. This color must have stood out in its day among the customary whites and grays.
I knelt and flicked up a piece of broken pottery as red as lipstick. Painted black designs crossed its curved face, exactly the same geometric images one would see on an Anasazi black-on-white vessel, only on a much different-colored canvas. Red is the color of a specific geography, maybe a different people: the western range of the Anasazi, sister to Mesa Verde, cousin of Chaco. I had not seen much of it in the east, in Colorado or New Mexico. It was new here.
Around A.D. 725 people in southeast Utah began making this striking red pottery by using iron-rich clays and slips and by allowing excess air into their kilns, oxidizing the vessels to an amber, pink, or tomato color. When you see this kind of pottery in Chaco or around Mesa Verde, it generally means it was acquired in trade. Finding so much of it beneath the twin buttes told me I was moving into new territory, where red wares had been manufactured over a span of about four hundred years.*
Production of red wares ended in the twelfth century, at about the time populations were moving out of the Chaco region and into the Four Corners area, where they built up places such as Mesa Verde and the Great Sage Plain and began erecting great houses in the far country of southeast Utah. At that point red ware manufacture moved a couple of hundred miles to the south, into the Kayenta region of northeast Arizona. The next type of red pottery to appear was Tsegi Orange Ware, which emerged in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Unlike the red wares that preceded it, which were tempered with rock, Tsegi Orange Ware was tempered with fine bits of crushed pottery. New ceramic techniques and the movement of production to Arizona suggest some sort of cultural shift to the south, the appearance of a new center away from the bustling Anasazi core. Looking for the escape route the Anasazi had used, I found a passage to follow in this red pottery, an arrow pointing to the south.
Back at the head of Comb Ridge, I rubbed my thumb on a sherd’s smooth red surface, tracing what had once been the inside of a Deadman’s Black-on-Red bowl. Red may represent an old, western lineage of Anasazi. This kind of pottery was made by people who once lived out on the edges of Chaco
in this red sandstone country, staying away from the urban hubs but carrying on trade with settlements in Colorado and New Mexico. When the eastern populations sprawled in this direction, bringing great houses and municipalities with them, the red ware makers left, moving south. I returned the sherd to the ground, fitting it back into the mosaic of thousands of other sherds, wondering whose territory I had entered.
As we continued toward the paired buttes, it dawned on me that I had seen such sites before. I knew of buttes topped with ruins around Chaco, right along the Great North Road. And Chimney Rock in Colorado had its own great house, vaulted above everything else. I also had encountered numerous ruins perched on buttes and high rock stumps all across northwest New Mexico and southwest Colorado. Here in southeast Utah the Anasazi were up to their old tricks, building on the most remarkable and elevated pieces of land they could find, as if stepping onto a soapbox to announce their presence. The red ware on the ground indicated a regional variation, but the daring style of settlement told me these people were pure Anasazi.
The Anasazi around the Four Corners had many provincial differences, such as the scrupulous masonry of Chaco versus the slightly looser stonework of Mesa Verde. The farther west one travels, the less regimented the masonry becomes. Perhaps the Anasazi of Utah and Arizona were more rural, less interested in the urban edicts and niceties of Chaco.*
Different as they may have been, the Anasazi were also a single entity, held together by corn, kivas, T shapes, and intensely geometric pottery designs. I was following a collection of many people bound together by a civilization, similar traits shared across a vast landscape. I was tracking a cultural organism.
The ruins ahead of us were trademark Anasazi. They stuck out of the ground as I walked, surges of walls and inner chambers mostly buried by soil and sage. Hundreds of rooms encircled these two buttes. Jonathan Till, one of the archaeologists in the group, was convinced that this was the site of a great house similar to those of Chaco. It was a western great house, he said, a red ware great house.
Till paced out grids on the ground ahead of me. He had been to these buttes before, but he was still not able to define exactly which cluster of ruins represented the great house he believed was here. He walked back and forth with potsherds in both hands, his eyes tracing the footprints of buildings.
Till was interested in twin features in the landscape. He had been roving this region surveying sites and finding significant archaeological remains wherever a noteworthy set of geological twins appears—matching pairs of buttes or boulders or alcoves. He felt as if he was getting into the psyche of the landscape, beginning to understand some aspect of how people once related to their geography. His pet theory was that these western Anasazi had aligned themselves with twins on the land, going to great lengths to build their settlements and shrines to look through natural goalposts and gateways on the horizon.
Till felt that these twin buttes were a major landmark in the western Anasazi pantheon, where people’s eyes turned not back to Chaco or Mesa Verde, but back to the flare of Monument Valley in Arizona and Utah, maybe to the swollen, redbrick bends of Canyon de Chelly, and across to the high, pine-covered mesas of Kayenta. We had been teasing Till about his theory—pointing out twin beer cans abandoned on the side of the road, peeping between twin tree stumps in the forest—and he laughed with us, a gentle man in his thirties, short kinky beard framing a white, freckle-peppered face.
I followed Till as he scrambled up a rubble slope to the top of the easternmost butte. The coral-colored bedrock around the butte’s rim was punctured with drill holes, places where timbers had been inserted into stone so buildings could be erected out to the very edge. These buttes must have been impressive to look at, I thought, geologic twins rising into multistory masonry blocks surrounded by a mosh pit of kivas and housing complexes below.
“Maybe it doesn’t matter if there was a great house here,” Till said, his voice buttered with a Tennessee accent. “Maybe the whole place is a great house.”
Till was hoping to convince Susan Ryan, one of his closest colleagues, that this region had been loaded with riches—not some Anasazi backwater, but a bold and populous center. Skepticism came naturally to Ryan, who came up behind us and crouched among the ruins, her eyes scanning the floor plans around her. As Till crouched beside her, she conceded that she was surprised by the extent of settlement here.
“They definitely had a way of building,” she said, gesturing with her head in Till’s direction. “They’re aligned with the landscape.”
Over the coming days we moved south by several miles, and the Abajos began leaning behind us. Along the way ruins stuck up from the ground like gravestones. We found red pottery at nearly every site, rose petals lining the path. The pottery led us through ranks of great houses built around the head of Comb Ridge in the thirteenth century, the last of the Anasazi great houses. They seemed to be a mix of eastern, Chacoan architecture and western pottery, perhaps the final expansion of an old guard civilization into the hinterlands before falling apart.
Till led the way among gullies and sagebrush-lined washes, showing us up steep, terraced slopes on the side of a hill. Partway up I realized this was not a hill; it was yet another great house. They were everywhere it seemed. The terraces we climbed were built by hand, each one littered with the remains of masonry structures. This was a stout, pyramidal building, part natural rise, part earthen fill, and part stonework, erected so that it could be seen from miles in all directions. Its bare, ruined frame reminded me of unexcavated Mayan temples in Guatemala or Honduras, suggesting a connection to a much larger civilization—a familiar shape from Central America and Mexico.
Ryan sat beside me at the peak of the great house. She twisted a piece of dry ricegrass between her teeth as we watched Till pacing through sage below us, hunting for shapes in the ground. He stopped every once in a while and looked up for a long time, framing the horizon around him. Looking for twins, I thought.
“He doesn’t stop, does he?” I asked.
Ryan shook her head.
Eventually, only the three of us remained on this southward journey. Till, Ryan, and I were the last of the group. We moved through sage lands where reddish sandstone bedrock began to appear beneath our feet. The gentle downslope of erosion unveiled more bedrock, until the sage disappeared entirely. Small, naked washes cut beneath us into rivulets that we followed into dry streams and, below them, cascading wells of stone. Discreet cliff dwellings began peeking out of high coves, the hermit crabs of the Anasazi world. My eyes traced bare-boned ledges and fissures in the rock for routes connecting one unlikely place to the next.
Canyons rose around us blush red and gaping, until we were at the bottom, pushing through tamarisks, seep willows whipping at our hands. Till knew the particular side canyon we wanted, one of many. He took a turn at its mouth and led us along a quickly narrowing passage filled with spattering sounds of springs. We heard musical echoes, the sounds of dripping and running water rising into the rafters of cliffs above us. At the back of this side canyon, the walls were round and smooth as eggshells.
Here the Anasazi had carved and painted numerous images and symbols. It was as if we had walked into an open book, words printed around us. We moved slowly under these rock art messages, our heads tilted back, finding faces painted above us. The faces were set in a row, their eyes watching us pass, and nearby was a human figure bearing a bird on its head—a duck it seemed.
Just beyond the rock art, a pale arc of sandstone rose out of sight above us, the end of the canyon. But it was not the end. Directly up the face was a hand-carved stairway, its steps as deep as cabinet shelves. It looked much like the staircases I had seen carved up the walls of Chaco Canyon, reaching toward roads above. The three of us stopped, eyes traveling along the clean steps cut in the bedrock.
Susan Ryan and the author ascending stairs carved into a rock face near Comb Ridge, southeast Utah. JONATHAN TILL
Till looked at Ryan.
&
nbsp; Ryan nodded, impressed to see such a bold and ancient path.
“After you,” Till said.
THE GREAT WALL
COMB RIDGE
This was the clearest pre-Columbian road I had ever seen. Walking along its faded trough, I could not tell whether it looked this way because my eyes had grown accustomed to discerning obscure Anasazi features or it was actually the bold, straight road it appeared to be.
Jonathan Till assured me that it was the latter. Along with Susan Ryan, we were following this ancient road across a rolling plain of blackbrush east of Comb Ridge. As we went, sage sparrows scattered from the brush before us. Miles ahead Comb Ridge stood in a line all the way from the one visible horizon to the next. It looked like a stone tidal wave rolling across the land, solitary and enormous. This road was leading us there.
That is not to say that the road was especially easy to see in the light softened by low and swift storm clouds riding in from the west. The road was several hundred years old and badly weathered. Where it seemed to disappear, we had to crouch to get it back, framing the low-angle horizon with our hands. When we found it again, we kept walking, noticing the way that cheatgrass shimmered around old cuts where the road had been built, patterns of low chops in the ridges.