by Craig Childs
OUTPOST
LITTLE COLORADO RIVER
It is hardly a river. A death rattle of water, more like it. I have tasted it before, as gritty as the water on a potter’s wheel. Barely wet enough to be called a river, it is named the Little Colorado. During the few weeks that it runs high—in late winter and again in July—it is a bloody froth of silt. Running toward the west, it falls into a quicksand gorge and then into the Grand Canyon, where it indelibly stains the greater Colorado River, turning it a turgid red.
It is the quixotic cousin of a river, never obedient, killing crops with drought before sinking their stalks under three feet of flood-driven mud. I carry a loyal respect for this river, admiring its capriciousness, its ruthless floods, and its long stretches where the bed lies as dry as cornstarch. It passes about sixty miles south of Antelope Mesa through a yellowish, empty valley 150 miles wide. The surround-ing vistas are a still life of distant, lonely landmarks, some buttes sprinkled on the horizon, the bat wings of the San Francisco Peaks barely visible far to the west, and ruins standing on prominent points all along.
In the center of this desolation the Little Colorado River passes a cluster of buried pueblos dating from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries, a place known as Homol’ovi. This is a Hopi word describing something mounded up, the mounds marking an ancient colony.
For three straight days a windstorm pumiced Homol’ovi. The hot dust of summer hissed across the backs of excavators unearthing one of Homol’ovi’s buried pueblos. The place looked like a refugee camp with its tarps snapping in the wind. Some twenty people crouched into their digs, the shields of their backs all facing southwest against the gale. Once or twice a day someone’s hat fled the scene, catapulting off the peak of this five-hundred-room mound. It would skate over an expanse of broken pottery below and be caught several hundred feet away on a sharp sprig of greasewood.
We looked like rumpled hoboes milling about, wearing bandanas and sunglasses, faces darkly peppered, rarely glancing up. Earlier in the day I had sat with two women who were up here taking a break from their more frequent work in Mesoamerica. They pulled their bandanas down, faces caked with dust, and said it takes a while to get used to all the sediment here, digging in dry holes full of dust and rocks. But they liked the break. Too much royalty in Mesoamerica. One woman said, “It’s just about kings, kings, and kings down there.” In the Southwest they could study households, the individual lives of families. They were thinking about staying here, maybe acclimating to desert excavations and not returning to the more familiar jungle temples of Mesoamerica.
Most of the time I spent in my own half of a trench, where I passed maddeningly slow hours prying at the ground with the point of a trowel. I was slowly revealing a masonry wall, chipping and scratching at it, and when part of another evenly laid construction block began to appear, I set down the trowel and reached for a whisk broom behind me. Sand ripples were gathering against my newly cleaned wall. No wonder these archaeological sites are always buried, I thought. If people were not working every day, this place would be full again in no time, its mouths of rooms choked with dust and sand. We were cleaners here, busy wrasses.
I leaned back onto my heels. My cheekbones prickled in the gale. I needed a dustpan.
Leaving my tools, I stepped out of the trench—three feet deep—and went off looking for one. I walked over a maze of chambers being dug out of the ground, heads bobbing to tasks, a woman ticking at a fallen ceiling beam with a dental pick, her face right down on the wood.
I stopped over a room that on the initial site map was being called a kiva, although the dig had not gone deep enough to confirm this. With small movements and tiny tools, three people raced the wind eight feet down in the hole. They were doing a particularly fine job, their trowel skills sinking them into a flawless cube of red soil, morsels of pottery showing through the walls. No sense in asking to borrow a dustpan here. This was a busy trench, discoveries made quickly, the dustpan used every minute or two.
Charles Adams, one of the directors of this dig, stood over the top of this room. He looked like a falcon—compact body, small facial features, and a ceaseless stare. I asked how things were going, and without taking his eyes off the work below, he told me if they didn’t find a ventilator shaft, a deflector stone, a bench—some characteristics of a kiva—he was going to become very frustrated.
So much hope here, I thought. So much anticipation of discovery. The kiva, an icon of Pueblo ancestry on the Colorado Plateau, would give Adams that much more of a grasp of what had happened here, who these people were. And when you’re digging, a ceremonial kiva is a nice feather in your cap.
Adams had focused a great deal of his life on deciphering Homol’ovi’s remains, working on its pueblos summer after summer under this clear, burning sky. He saw a thirteenth- and fourteenth-century ascension along the Little Colorado River, where elaborate katsina ceremonies became the rage, with masked dancers wearing feathered, shell-stitched gear and directing prayers to animalistic rain gods. These colorful gatherings had attracted people down from the north, urging them to leave their dwindling settlements around Kayenta and the western reaches of Mesa Verde and come to where the action was.
When I was in high school in Arizona, I went to hear Adams speak on his research at Homol’ovi. His description of up-and--coming prehistoric colonies at the edge of the Painted Desert riveted my attention. His studies in the katsina religion made it sound as if these colonies were almost religious protectorates, enclaves of an ancient rain god cult. Listening to him as an eager, young student, I was excited merely to taste the word Homol’ovi on my tongue, captivated by Adams’s scientific stature.
In his early work Adams found that the first Homol’ovi pueblo was settled around A.D. 1260, at about the time migrations were beginning out of Kayenta and the Four Corners. Although it stood magnificently upon a lone butte, this early pueblo lacked the expansive interior plazas that would appear in later sites, and its rooms were relatively small and close together. It was an outpost on the southern frontier.
This first site was abruptly abandoned at the end of the thirteenth century. Five new pueblos then popped up to replace it, as if to handle the many migrants moving south across the Painted Desert. Evenly spaced, each controlling identical units of floodplain, these five pueblos represented a strategic burst of growth. With this expansion from one founding pueblo into five, residents of Homol’ovi now had 400 percent more land under their control. The orderliness of this expansion—seemingly without conflict, the land evenly divided—appears to have been carefully managed. It could have resulted from an edict passed down from a higher power, perhaps from the pueblos north of here, at Antelope Mesa. Or maybe the people made up their own minds, a group of outcasts or refugees establishing their claim on the Little Colorado River.
Construction at Homol’ovi was swift and efficient. Thousands of new rooms went up around plazas and kivas in a matter of years or even months. Pueblos were erected on tall, artificial mounds that would have lent them an august air of authority in this flat, drab landscape.
One evening after we had pried off our sunglasses and taken showers from a day of digging, Adams told me, “I think they were down here securing this area during an unprecedented time of abandonment and migration. Locals came to consolidate their territories, claiming this place before migrants could get here and take over. It looks like it was a matter of politics and power.”
Pueblos were being moved like pins on a war room map, outposts established to maintain crucial resources, to act as stations for traders, gateways for migrants, homes for cotton growers.
Homol’ovi rose as a cotton-growing capital, its budding white fields spreading rapidly along the banks of the Little Colorado. Raw cotton was transported north to Antelope Mesa, where textile workers manufactured it into woven goods that were then traded all across the Southwest. As payment, it seems, yellow ware vessels were sent south to Homol’ovi by the tens of thousands, most of them
a certain size and shape so that they could be nested into each other for convenient shipping. From there the vessels were traded for hundreds of miles, becoming collector’s items across the fourteenth-century Southwest.
Along with yellow ware ceramics, there came substantial numbers of pots from the Kayenta region as people moved south out of their cliff dwellings. Specific and peculiar forms—shallow dishes with perforated edges previously known only in the cliff dwellings and pueblos of Kayenta—began accumulating here, a sure sign of migrants. People were knocking on doors, looking for places to live, beseeching relatives. They brought their pottery with them out of the north, offering it as payment to stay at these new pueblos.
Standing in the wind and heat, Adams perched hopefully at the edge of his excavation, posture rigid, the wooden handle of a digging trowel gripped in his hand. I was not going to borrow a dustpan here either. I walked on.
People appeared to be praying into the ground all around me, their bodies cupped over the smallest of objects. I paused above a trench where I noticed a dustpan set aside. I asked if I could borrow it. A man on his knees looked up and then looked at the dustpan. His cheekbones were dark with sweat and dirt, the rest of his face a mask of a bandana, sunglasses, and a hat brim. It was a lot to ask, I knew, like walking into someone’s office and asking to borrow the telephone. During long hours of work each trench becomes a very private space. He said that he was using his dustpan, apologizing that he could not get his work done without it. He thought that Room 266 might have an extra one; the excavators there seemed to have extra gear all the time.
He went back to his tiny, mind-numbing task. At Room 266 I approached two students in their early twenties who had an entire court cleared down about four feet. Two dustpans were set off to the side.
I dropped to one knee, looking in on their dig. They had exposed almost all of a coal-fired yellow ware bowl. I could see in the bowl’s placement, in the way it lay among decayed wood and cobs of adobe, that it had last been set on top of a roof. The roof had caved in, and the bowl was tangled in the debris, broken into a few pieces but mostly intact. It glowed a pale peach, a sun rising out of the red earth. Inside it was a message painted in brownish black pigment—fourteenth-century geometry, an import from Antelope Mesa.
Multistory masonry ruin near the Little Colorado River. CRAIG CHILDS
I asked the women if I could borrow one of their dustpans. They both looked up, faces haggard, eyes boggled as if they had been studying something microscopic for too long.
One of them quickly gathered herself, becoming suddenly professorial. “Sure, we can do with one,” she said.
I thanked them and took it, then began walking back toward my own little dig. Heavy sifting screens swayed from their wooden tripods around me. One of them was in use, a woman palpating the screen, dry-washing a bucket of soil with her fingers, plucking out turkey bones and ticks of charcoal. Dust from her work raced away in the wind.
I scratched my trowel along a masonry wall and brushed the debris into my borrowed dustpan, then dumped it into a pail. My trench was shallow. It would take weeks to dig all the way to its floor, where solid artifacts might be found. Picking through rubble and sniffing along underground walls was bitter work, very little to be found except rocks and dirt. Meanwhile, about three feet away from me a ceremonial chamber was in the process of being opened, the dig only hours away from reaching the floor. The hole was covered by a tarp to keep out the hail of dust. I could not see inside.
In other ceremonial rooms at Homol’ovi, floors had revealed macaw skeletons, beautiful vessels, rare stones, copper bells, and fetishes carved out of shell. Long-distance trade networks had been alive and well here in the fourteenth century. There was much talk about what exotic items might be found on the floor of the ceremonial room next to me. At lunch the room’s excavators decided that once the floor was uncovered, they would take off their work boots and walk barefoot on the flagstone surface, the first flesh to touch the floor in seven hundred years.
The tarp thundered beside me in the wind, its grommets straining. Suddenly, a man was standing over me. I squinted up at him, seeing that he was one of the excavators working under the tarp. I had been lost in a dream, scraping broken pottery out of the ground, but I composed myself and asked him if they had reached the floor yet. He said they were just now uncovering it and that bone had been found.
“Bone?” I asked. Other such rooms had contained the painted skulls of bighorn sheep and pronghorn antelope. “What kind of bone?”
He bent over, holding something small in his fist. I pulled off one of my leather gloves and extended my hand. He dropped a tooth into my palm.
I recognized its long ivory roots immediately. Human. The roots looked like porcelain tentacles. It was a molar. I brought it closer, sheltering it in the cup of my hand so the wind would not steal it. The tooth’s surface was worn as smooth as glass, belonging to someone who had tasted a full lifetime of sand in this desert.
The room beneath the tarp changed in that instant, darkening in my mind. There would be no walking barefoot on that floor.
I looked up at the man from my trench. He explained that it was a disarticulated skeleton, indeterminate sex. Maybe after the place was abandoned, someone had died here, the skeleton worried into pieces by coyotes and wood rats. Or a murder. Who knows? It was clearly not a formal burial. The bones seemed to be everywhere. Excavators were trying to work around them, trying to make the best of things. After having dug gingerly for weeks just to get to the bottom, they did not want to be turned back now. Current laws regarding dead bodies in the United States prohibit disturbance.
“We’re being careful, but I don’t know how much we can do at this point. This room might be off-limits,” the man explained.
I understood. This was a Hopi ancestral site; the dead were not to be bothered. If a margin could be found without human bones, they could keep digging to see what else might be on the floor. Otherwise, they would have to backfill the chamber, close it off.
He asked if I wanted to go in and help. The work would be delicate to keep from disturbing the skeleton.
With the tooth in my hand, I considered his offer. The thought of knowingly digging around a dead person was disquieting but at the same time alluring. I was following people, after all, and might as well acquaint myself with at least one person’s remains. Maybe my hesitation was only superstition. I remembered a woman telling me about excavating inside a bell-shaped storage room so deep and narrow that the ladder had to be pulled up behind her to give her room to work. She had found a skeleton down there. Alone in a hole, no way out until they brought the ladder back, she said she had been able to keep herself calm for a while—uncovering the back of the skull, some of the jaw—but eventually a wave of panic had overwhelmed her scientific sensibilities. She had backed up against the wall and begun shouting for help, for someone to bring a ladder and get her out of that grave.
I handed the tooth back to the man and told him I would help dig, thanking him for his trust.
I pulled back a flap of the tarp and peered down a ladder into the gloom. A woman was at the bottom, picking at the ground, and a man crouched beside her, writing on a clipboard. There was not enough room to stand under the sagging, whipping tarp. The man looked up and waved me in.
I descended the ladder; the flap closed above me. The room was strangely still. I had not been out of the wind for hours, and I could hear everything inside this hollow room: my dry hands rasping down the rungs, the creaking leather of my boots, the pinpoint sound of steel where the woman plucked with her trowel through hardpan. I crouched on the floor, careful about where I put my feet. The tarp drummed over my head. Hourglass sand poured through seams above us, forming little pyramids on the floor.
The man with the clipboard told me we needed to keep quiet about these human remains. At least for now. If word got out too quickly, it might filter through to the nearby town of Winslow. There were pothunters waiting fo
r notice of a skeleton, coming out at night to check whether a burial had cropped up with its numerous funerary artifacts that could be quickly dug up by lantern light and spirited away.
“It’s definitely not a burial, though,” he said. “Just a place where someone died or where a body was dumped. Whatever it is, this close to Hopi you don’t want to make any mistakes.”
I agreed. We were digging in a graveyard, a strange enough thing to be doing without speaking out of turn about it.
The man used his pen to point out what they had found. A disarticulated spine here. A pelvis over there. Leg bones. Foot bones. Some ribs. No skull. But one tooth, so the skull must be in here somewhere.
The person lay scattered all over the floor, as if she or he had simply burst apart. The bones were tanned by iron in the soil. The man pointed to where he wanted me to work.
“If you hit bone, just go the other way,” he said. “Let’s see how much of this floor is still available to us.”
He said he needed to speak with Charles Adams in order to decide what to do here. He climbed up the ladder and slipped through the tarp back into the wind.