House of Rain

by Craig Childs

  Maybe these people were castaways looking for a better life in a far country, a religious sect fleeing the decline of Chaco, or the fortunate few who anticipated the social breakdown and drought of the thirteenth century and were getting ahead of the game by migrating south. Herr sees them coming to a plentiful land where other inhabitants were few, at a time of booming populations and declining agricultural returns back on the Colorado Plateau.

  The day after touring the burned-out great kiva, I went into a place where the fire had not reached, Forestdale Valley, which lies immediately below the Mogollon Rim south of the Lake of the Woods—an idyllic landscape of pines and springs. Its brook and many green-bladed cattails had been spared the blackness of the burn, leaving stands of pines and healthy cottonwood groves.

  In Forestdale Valley, Barbara Mills was heading up the University of Arizona’s Archaeological Field School. She strode straight across a dish of ground that had once been a great kiva. Under the shade of full, green ponderosas, Mills’s steps were lively, stretched out like those of a parading soldier. She counted every step across the kiva. When she reached the other side, she looked at me with resolve.

  “About twenty-four meters,” she said.

  Nearly eighty feet across.

  I nodded my head, impressed. The dish Mills had crossed was what remained of the largest great kiva I had ever seen, a circle even wider than the one I had paced in the burn.

  Mills is a frank and tidy woman, her voice calm with certrainty. Although she has a rigid appearance—her body slender and strictly vertical—she has an elegant femininity about her. When she speaks, her hands sometimes move as if fitting on a necklace. Mills wanted me to understand the significance of this kiva—not merely that it was just about the largest structure of its kind in the pre-Columbian Southwest, but that right next to it a sizable pueblo had been built two hundred years later by busy northern migrants. The great kiva was contemporaneous with late Chaco, a twelfth-century relic. The neighboring pueblo and its wide-open dance plazas were associated with the later rise of Antelope Mesa and Homol’ovi in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, when the Mogollon Rim turned from a quiet frontier into an occupied boardwalk.

  “This became a popular place,” Mills said, giving me a brief and reflective smile.

  Mills walked me from the great kiva a few hundred feet over to the ruins of the fourteenth-century pueblo next door, where college students and graduate supervisors were working with surveying equipment, cameras, and notebooks, swarming like bees on their flowers. They were piecing together a path of Pueblo migrants who had come through and left numerous settlements with large rooms and brawny masonry. At their peak the fourteenth-century Mogollon Rim pueblos were very different from what Chacoans had left behind two hundred years earlier. The newer kivas were rectangular instead of circular, and they were relatively small, some only the size of a modest bedroom. In place of the larger kivas came great plazas.

  Mills and I walked into the middle of one such plaza, the pattern of a broad, open square outlined around us within the remains of exterior walls. This was one of the largest plazas in the Southwest. Mills, a ceramics specialist, kept bowing to pick up potsherds from the ground. She oriented each piece in the air for me, grasping it lightly between her thumb and forefinger and angling it in just the right way to show how it would have fit into a vessel’s original shape. She knew the ceramics in this area well enough to distinguish families of different brush techniques in the painted designs, to tell the work of a left-handed potter from a right-handed one.

  The pieces she picked up were colorful, a style of decoration known as polychrome. This new style marked a dramatic change across the Southwest. Black-on-white vessels, which had been a staple for seven hundred years, were hardly made after the thirteenth century. White wares suddenly came to a halt and were rapidly replaced by colorful new styles. In some vessels the black-on-white essence was preserved when bowl interiors were painted with black designs on white backgrounds, and bowl exteriors were completely washed in red paint. Designs became more brazen than their predecessors, employing new off-symmetries and large iconic images. Such a swift and thorough change strikes Mills as a cultural revolution.*

  Fourteenth-century Tonto Polychrome bowl with black-on-white imagery on the inside and solid red paint on the outside. Prepared for cataloging at the Arizona State Museum in Tucson. CRAIG CHILDS

  “This was about migration,” Mills said. “It has to do with people moving, new social institutions being formed, new technologies coming up. The designs on these vessels were being used to broadcast regional identities, social identities. You can see individual potters in their work, and those potters were making a decision to be part of a larger cultural entity, reinforcing a new homogeneity in designs, participating in some broad, new cultural context.”

  Mills noted that fourteenth-century polychrome serving bowls are physically larger and more boldly decorated, especially on their exterior surfaces, than those of the black-on-white tradition that preceded them. She picked up a red rim, the broken lip of a vessel, and filled in the rest with her imagination, using her hand to form a broad, orbital rim in the air. She told me that the kinds of serving bowls found at this pueblo are some of the largest known. Since this site also has the largest plaza around, the size of the bowls is not surprising.

  All across this region Mills has found that serving vessels correlate in size with the plazas where they are discovered. Pueblos with exceptionally large plazas have exceptionally large bowls with well-defined exterior designs. Those with smaller plazas have smaller bowls with less daring designs. She sees this as a function of visibility, that the vessels were broadcasting messages that needed to fit the spaces around them. In a large plaza one would have constructed a big enough vessel to serve many people and would have decorated it with imagery that could be read from clear across the grounds.

  “There is no doubt these bowls were made to be seen,” Mills explained. “First you have the white wares, which are bright. They did well for hundreds of years. Then they start using red. It’s a psychological effect. Fire trucks are red. Stop signs are red. It is a strong, innately meaningful color. Then they burnish the reds to make them shinier. Then they start painting black designs on the outsides of red vessels, and then they outline their designs with white paint, and all the while the bowls keep getting larger. It’s a continuum toward greater visibility.”

  It is a continuum, I thought, of plateau people, Pueblo ancestors expanding their reach. These migrants liked things big and flashy, building high on the land, moving easily into showy polychrome pottery. They were full of change and influence wherever they went.

  I once spoke to a colleague of Mills’s, a ceramics specialist named Patty Crown, who had exhaustively studied thousands of fourteenth-century polychrome wares. Crown concluded that their designs contain an artful language in themselves, a detailed expression of an ideology that once spread rapidly and completely across the Southwest.

  In her analysis Crown noted an abundance of flowers, birds, stars, clouds, and butterflies painted on vessels—images never seen here before. The hard geometry of an earlier era of black-on-white styles softened into spiraling imagery, still orderly and mathematical in its approach, but given over to more playful asymmetrical scrolls and serifs. Crown concluded that this shift in imagery signaled the rise of the Flower World, what the Hopi call siitálpu, a belief in a beautiful and chromatic spiritual dimension that parallels this physical one. It is an ideology that perhaps arose when desert dwellers moved from the austere country of drought into the mountains, with their silver flashes of creeks and springs. The stiff sunlight of the Southwest becomes mollified through pine boughs. Less infernal than the desert, less bitter, this is a region where moss grows and damp fields of ferns spread around springs. A different mind-set is created in a place like this. The cultural transformation that came to these people might have resulted as much from a change in scenery as from the consequenti
al mechanisms of mass migration.

  Crown noted that these new designs and their accompanying pottery swept like wildfire through the Southwest, arriving faster than any change she has ever seen in the archaeological record. It was like a sign from a prehistoric gospel, preachers from the north gathering their flocks in these southern lands. Everyone was beginning to communicate in a mutually agreed upon language of pottery as polychromes spread down off the Mogollon Rim into the cultures already living below.

  As Mills walked me through these ceramic gardens of color, I told her that this transition zone between the Colorado Plateau and the Mogollon Highlands seems like an important cultural juncture. I had noticed in my travels that people always returned to the same places to do basically the same things. People appeared to be pausing at the most remarkable geographic transition in the Southwest, where the Mogollon Rim splits the north from the south, where they left oversize kivas, huge plazas, and the largest, most ornately colored vessels ever seen.

  “Something about the land changes people, molding them into repeating patterns,” I said. “Maybe it’s just the changed sense of light here, the altered presence of water, a different way of moving.”

  Mills did not wholeheartedly agree with me: too speculative, too many circumstantial details of cultural histories to pin everything on the kind of environment the people were living in. Considering my opinion, though, she said there was a place that I must see.

  Mills and I packed our lunches, and she led me through the forest. Her pace was quicker than the one I usually have in the woods, and I had to increase my gait to match hers. Her movements were quick and willowy, like a deer’s. After half an hour of winding up a slope of pine shade, our steps sparkling in dry beds of needles, Mills and I reached the top of a bluff, where the ground slumped into weathered pits as big as houses. These depressions were old, well carpeted in pine needles. Thorned locust trees grew up through them, and many bulky pines. Among the pits were tall mounds, like pyramids clothed in soil and forest duff. We were in an ancient village of some sort. We stopped before one of the pits and peered down its deep and shaded slope. This was what Mills wanted me to see.

  “This is one of the first great kivas ever built,” Mills said.

  “How old?” I asked.

  “Fourth century A.D.,” she said.

  Surprised to hear this, I let the time and the place sit in my mind for a moment. I usually associate great kivas with the desert of the Colorado Plateau, where massive public architecture appeared at least in the eleventh century A.D., perhaps as early as the sixth century. I did not know that great kivas had been built this far south and so long ago, back in the beginning of time, when large-scale agriculture was just starting to take hold in the Southwest.

  “I had no idea they were making great kivas back then,” I said.

  “They weren’t making many,” Mills replied. “This is an isolated site.”

  Mills and I walked around the deep pit, skirting its rim. Mounds surrounding it marked the spots where nearly seventeen hundred years ago, wood and earthen buildings stood, structures that would have been truly colossal in their day. Something about this location invited a vast scale, I thought. Perhaps it was because this is the highest, most continuous region of green in the desert Southwest, a truly immense peak on the land. Perhaps it was wholly circumstantial, the nature of people on the move settling in a water-rich locale on the verge between north and south.

  We found a clearing at the edge of the bluff for lunch and opened our packs on the crisply needled ground. We sat beside each other. I peeled an orange. Mills ate her sandwich.

  “Curious that you get these remarkable sites in the fourth century, in the eleventh, and then in the fourteenth century all in about the same place,” I said. “Is there a connection between them?”

  “No,” Mills answered. “There’s too much time between each site. After these earliest sites people went on, and no one lived here for quite a while after that.”

  “It seems odd, though,” I said. “All this happening right here.”

  Mills merely shook her head. She was a scientist, a woman working with only the cleanest and most robust evidence she could find. Uncanny connections had their place, but not in her research.

  I felt that these old kivas must have been part of a rhythm drilled into the people who traveled through this forested country. Their feet beat the ground like drums.

  “No connection at all?” I asked once more.

  Mills stared off the edge of the bluff.

  “This place was unoccupied for long periods, enough to break the continuity between the people up on this bluff and those who lived later down in the valley,” she said. “As an archaeologist, I don’t see a relationship.”

  “And not as an archaeologist?” I ventured.

  Mills ate her sandwich and looked down through the trees, where ruins of pueblos lay along the green floor. Then she smiled, almost mischievously, as if to tell me what she could not say as a respected archaeologist: that the earth has lines, patterns to be followed, where people are pushed along by the very form of the land.

  “It is a beautiful valley,” she said.

  SALADO

  BELOW THE MOGOLLON RIM

  Slants of sunlight lead down into bracken ferns and the murmuring heads of Indian paintbrush. A cow elk moves under the applause of aspen leaves.

  Beneath the Mogollon Rim water pours from springs, whole creeks ushering from great open mouths in the rock. Climbing down edge by edge into heavy shadows, you might slip on the slick, dry pine needles and tumble a hundred feet before catching the anchor of a stump above layers of inner cliffs laced with lichen. Down there green squids of bear grass grow alongside agaves with daggers drawn. Fingerling ledges peep around corners into plunge holes of wind. Coming down, grabbing whatever root or trunk or shoulder of rock is available, you might feel like a metal lure thrown over the side of a boat, shining and spinning as you descend, growing darker through cobwebby oak trees and underbrush lapping arm over arm. Wild grapes shrivel into puckered raisins. Thorn-studded raspberry bushes crawl all over wracked boulders. Steep corridors of light and shadow level off into cluttered maple trees, their autumn leaves turned to fine red parchment. Freshly fallen trees lie in their own splinters and shafts of light. Yellow columbine flowers with ornate, stellar interiors have turned to seed. By January the hummingbirds have long fled south. In cataclysmic canyons the occasional winter rains turn to snow—but rarely more than an inch or two at a time. A hearty dollop of bear scat rests beneath its halo of morning steam. Cliffs lean into cliffs. A canyon floor is stricken with fallen timber, cockeyed bridges of old-growth spruce and Douglas fir toppled long ago and locked between the walls over a thunderous creek. Sycamore trees burst into maniacal white branches crawling all over the sky. The echoing laughter of water rises through alleyways of stone.

  As I gathered water from a creek along one of these canyon floors, the metal clank of my pot sent up an echo. Walking a full pan to my camp, I could hear every ripple and fall of water around me. Sleeping bag laid out, small stove set up, I had my life arranged. I sat on the cold bedrock floor. I poured fuel into my stove, then set flame to it with a lighter. A small torch ignited, brightening a sphere around me.

  To get here I had spent days pinching along ledges, grasping handholds above pools of gaping, dark water. It is rigorous work traveling in this country below the Mogollon Rim. The sandstone boneyard of the Colorado Plateau is gone. In the north a canyon like this would be brightly colored in reds and oranges, sandstone swept back like a woman’s long hair. Here the rock is dark, igneous in nature, broken into blocks and square towers.

  This is where cliff dwellings return to the archaeological record. I had seen them up in the crags as I was passing through, masonry houses slowly crumbling from their perches. Their ceiling beams were lashed together with bear-grass cordage. These were the first cliff dwellings I had seen since Kayenta, as if the terrain between here and ther
e would not permit them. In this next region south, geology gathers into deep mazes, into shelves and alcoves where cliff dwellers preferred to live.

  Many cliff dwellings below the Mogollon Rim are truly staggering, built flush into harrowing precipices, their rockwork precariously but somehow firmly balanced upon the thinnest of ledges or tucked into cracks thousands of feet up remote canyons. A great deal of labor was invested in these sites, yet many were occupied for no more than a single generation.

  Who were these fourteenth-century cliff dwellers? Often they are referred to as the Salado culture. Like Anasazi, the term Salado applies to a set of archaeological traits, to a period of time, to a region, but not to a single group of people speaking the same language or calling themselves by one name. Salado is a massive cultural convergence based in east-central Arizona, where migrants collided with numerous indigenous heritages that had been in place for centuries. The upheaval that ensued—a cultural florescence of new pottery and architecture, religion and trade routes—is known as Salado.

  Salado cliff dwelling in the highlands south of the Mogollon Rim. CRAIG CHILDS

  In the fourteenth century, large pueblos appeared on higher ground with the Mogollon Rim at their backs and with flanks of smaller pueblos guarding them out front. Farther to the south are columns of cliff dwellings like armor taking the brunt of a southward advance, as if cultural movement down from the Colorado Plateau was accomplished by strategic, broadly orchestrated tactics. Migrants had paused on the Mogollon Rim long enough to assemble themselves and create a solid cultural front before moving south again, pushing into the highlands.