House of Rain

by Craig Childs

  An identical signal network was defined around Chaco, but many archaeologists are careful not to draw parallels. Mexico is Mexico, the United States the United States. Among many it is one of the deadly sins of Southwest archaeology to say that Paquimé and Chaco, hundreds of years apart and four hundred miles away, had much to do with each other.

  A paved highway runs northwest to southeast across northern Chihuahua, and at night the only significant lights along it begin to appear around the town of Nuevo Casas Grandes. First small houses are lit up, followed by gas stations and tiendas, and then you are in the middle of a well-lit town.

  We parked our two trucks on a street and stepped out into the buoyant marketplace atmosphere typical of so many Mexican towns. Families were strolling this evening, and Mexican men were drinking, already laughing loudly. Teenagers carried themselves in a way that spoke of sex, young bodies pressing against each other, flirt-ing, kissing. We walked through the many scenes of Nuevo Casas Grandes as if through a carnival, fresh from the wilderness, our clothes smelling of sweat and wood smoke.

  We bought tacos, many of them, and ate with drips of amber cow grease running down our hands. After the tacos we sat in a dark movie house with a dusty shaft of projector light flickering over our heads. It was some love story/western. I practiced my Spanish for a little while, trying to figure out what the dubbed voices were saying, but it was a Hollywood movie, dialogue unrealistic. Translating became a chore, and I eventually gave up and just sat in the dark, inhaling the profundity of civilization. When you come from the outback, it is enough to sit through a movie and not necessarily watch it. The smell alone was plenty for my senses, perfume and the disintegrating plush of seat cushions.

  I thought of the land around Nuevo Casas Grandes, places we had driven through to get here. For miles encircling this movie theater was darkness, nothing but scrubland and scattered ejidos (government-owned tracts) where Mexican farmers were now asleep.

  There is a reason this bright town is here, seemingly in the middle of nowhere. Nuevo Casas Grandes sits beside the great ruins of Paquimé, both the modern and ancient settlements built on a piece of land where the water table is high. In the middle of prehistoric Paquimé, Di Peso’s crews unearthed a well. In its day this well would have been accessed through a warren of hallways leading to an interior room with a hatchway that in turn led forty feet straight down to water dug out by the residents. They had built an ample staircase spiraling into the ground beneath the city to this subterranean pool. These stairs looked like altars when Di Peso’s crews uncovered them, jewelry and shells found littered down the winding steps, along with ceramic vessels, carved stone, and many precious artifacts. This well was not merely a place to collect water, but a ritual space leading to what must have been a serenely calm and dark body of water far below ground.

  This is why Nuevo Casas Grandes exists, and the prehistoric city of Paquimé before it: water exists in an otherwise empty land. Water brings admirers, commerce, movies, and taco stands. It brings outsiders and highways, a magnet in the desert.

  When the movie was finished, we walked almost dazed into this place of water, streetlights, and stolen cars. A well-dressed couple of youths, about sixteen years old, engaged in a feral kissing match against a lamppost, and we had to skirt around them. We grinned at all that we saw, astonished by the humming, electrical ambiance of civilization.

  We drove our trucks a short distance and set a quick camp just outside town along the shallow and warm-smelling Rio Casas Grandes. We sat on our tailgates facing away from the town lights toward the dark ruins of Paquimé, as vacant tonight as a cemetery.

  Settlements were established at Paquimé in the early centuries A.D., but not until the thirteenth century did the site become a crucial and heavily populated axis, rising in concert with cultures that were dropping out of the north. Paquimé reached its height in the fifteenth century, next in line for the southward cultural expansions, only this was larger than anything preceding it and had to do with far more than northern travelers. Even Chaco pales in comparison, in size, wealth, and complexity. This was now the paramount settlement in all of the Southwest, the biggest thing ever to happen.

  If you look down at the fifteenth-century remains of Paquimé from a low-flying plane, they seem unnecessarily complex, with walls zigzagging in and out of one another and rooms ranging in size from thirty square feet to more than a thousand. The floor plan appears to be a work of art in itself.

  What little was excavated by Di Peso and his crews revealed Paquimé to have been a revolution in art on many levels. Copper was being forged, made into bells and ornately detailed lost-wax pendants. Ceramic vessels were formed in the shape of women’s bodies, their ceramic skin covered with multicolored, geometric imagery, reclining figures complete with nipples and vulvas: one would have drunk from their heads. Similar vessels of men were made in relaxed, squatting positions, one hand almost absentmindedly hooked on the penis, the other smoking a pre-Columbian cigarette. Like the women, these men are painted head to toe with rich geometric forms specific to the sphere of Paquimé.

  The city had low-ceilinged sweatshops built for the mass production of goods, cramped workspaces where slaves or servants or specialists made shell jewelry. Meanwhile, whole houses nearby were occupied by prosperous artisans and the political elite who apparently ruled the city. There was a bold hierarchy, a vast difference between those who had and those who did not. Clear evidence for such divisions was found in the 317 rooms Di Peso excavated.

  My wife, our two companions, and I traveled through what Di Peso and his crews had unearthed, separating from one another late in the morning, slowly perusing Paquimé’s raised floor plan in private. I passed through broken-down hallways, some of the remaining walls knee-high and others up to my chest. A steady, dry wind blew in from the Sierra Madre in the distance, gusts of air darting through narrow passages, threading into ventilator shafts and numerous T-shaped doorways—more T shapes than I knew from Chaco or Mesa Verde. Just the presence of these shaped portals suggested a connection between northern Pueblo people and here, some kind of cultural, architectural thread. The wind sent yellowish dirt swirling around my feet, adobe crushed into dry meal.

  Di Peso had put together a comprehensive, eight-volume report on his excavations. As I walked, I thumbed through his pages in my head, rebuilding parts of this site: here a rash of human sacrifices buried neatly beneath a plaza; over there a space that had once been an indoor ball court; farther off rooms strung with stone gongs weigh-ing a few hundred pounds each. The numbers of artifacts Di Peso found verge on the obscene, ancient storerooms packed to their ceilings. Nearly four million shell artifacts were excavated, most found in storerooms and work spaces as if ready for distribution.

  I moved from room to room heading for a central, open area in what was called the House of the Macaws, one of the many precincts within Paquimé: House of the Dead, House of the Well, House of the Serpents, and so on, inventive names given by Di Peso himself. Just when I turned a corner to enter a plaza, I came upon a little red sign blocking the ruined doorway ahead. The sign lay in the dust, a piece of wood with the word ALTO painted on it.

  I stopped. The sign clearly meant “this place is not a playground.” The voice of Mexican authority. I looked at the sign for a moment, still carrying in my body the memory of wilderness, not accustomed to messages of this nature. I changed my posture, stiffened a little, and looked into the plaza beyond, not taking a step forward.

  The plaza was outlined with compact adobe boxes with perfectly circular openings in their faces and polished, cigar-shaped rocks that would have been slid into place to seal these openings closed. The plaza looked as though it were surrounded by an elaborate series of locks and channels. These were pens where tropical macaws had been bred and raised, captive birds brought up from jungles far to the south. The birds would have poked their red-feathered heads through these circular portals to see daylight outside. This style of pen kept th
eir bones from becoming malformed by sunlight deficiency, unlike the much poorer attempt at aviculture that occurred centuries earlier at Chaco, where only crippled birds were produced. At Paquimé the raising of birds was elevated to an art form practiced by specialized groups, the macaw pens humidified to replicate their home environment in Central America. The breeding of these birds was done on an industrial scale at Paquimé, thousands of macaws hatched for their bright green, red, and blue feathers. Four hundred forty-nine macaws and three hundred domestic turkeys have been found interred in centrally located burial pits throughout the city—probably a small number considering that most of Paquimé is still unexcavated. Many of these birds appear to have been ritually sacrificed, an indication that Paquimé may have been a ceremonial center where a great deal of artifact production went toward ritual events, burials, and sacrifices. The fact that Paquimé was a desert breeding center for tropical birds makes me think of the story told to me by T. J. Ferguson about the migration of the Lost Others. Ferguson had said that in Zuni oral tradition a large number of people once followed a parrot far to the south, away from their homeland on the Colorado Plateau. Did that parrot lead them to Paquimé, to a place that was no doubt a commercial source of tropical birds and feathers for the rest of the Southwest? The story may very well be an account of Pueblo people coming here to engage in aviculture and bird trade.

  Fifteenth-century macaw pens missing their roofs in a plaza at Paquimé. REGAN CHOI

  I did not go beyond the sign imploring me to stop, but stood at attention before it, the plaza in front of me a reservoir of bright April sunlight. The cool morning was starting to wear off.

  What a spectacle in the open desert, I thought. Rising five stories, Paquimé had been a grand cultural soapbox of the times. There are many theories as to what exactly this place was—an expensive, later knockoff of Chaco, or a creation all its own on the Mesoamerican fringe? A kingdom ruling the land, or a local bastion minding its own business?

  I drank beer with archaeologist Steve Lekson as we sat in folding chairs under the awning of a trailer. We were attending a symposium on Southwest archaeology and were relaxing between sessions in a dirt parking lot. The beer was cold, fresh out of an ice chest. Lekson, a highly respected archaeological scholar from the University of Colorado, was touting an idea he had conjured and was making famous around the Southwest. He called it the Chaco Meridian. He explained that if you drew a line north out of Chaco, you would hit Aztec, New Mexico, home of Chaco’s immediate architectural progeny back in the twelfth century. If you took that same line four hundred miles due south, you would end up smack in the middle of Paquimé in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. This four-hundred-mile line is so accurate that even modern surveyors would be hard-pressed to repeat it.

  “Coincidence?” Lekson asked. “I don’t think so.”

  Lekson’s voice is bookmarked with notes of irony and sarcasm. In his version of Southwest prehistory, a convoy of Chacoan elite left for Aztec, fifty-five miles due north of their original site, in the twelfth century. When they were done with Aztec, they turned around and followed the same line due south four hundred miles across rugged terrain, never once losing their bearings. Chacoans had already proven themselves capable of such navigational feats, having engineered roads across the desert as if charting courses at sea. When the Chacoans reached this part of what is now northern Chihuahua in Mexico, Lekson believes they found loose villages lying about, people growing plots of corn and making easy pottery. Newly arrived migrants from the Colorado Plateau whipped everyone into shape, shouting orders this way and that, and pretty soon had a new ceremonial city built for themselves at the foot of the Sierra Madre. Here they indulged in heavily ritualized habits of human sacrifice as they had at Chaco, wearing necklaces made of human bones and dressing in feathers of turkeys and exotic jungle birds as they presided over colorful rituals.

  “Everything starts with Chaco,” Lekson reiterated. “That place is the strongest and earliest stable pattern you get in the Southwest. Pueblo Bonito shows up, and then you get Aztec. All sorts of big things happen, and boom—Paquimé shows up right on schedule, third in line.”

  Lekson sat with his beer, posture perfectly controlled but relaxed, peering out at a hot New Mexico day beyond the awning.

  The academic papers Lekson has written are touched with relieving humor, something rarely seen in scientific journals. He has called this Chaco-Aztec-Paquimé union a ménage à trois, writing that “Chaco and Paquimé have been the subject of sordid, tittering speculation for some years.”

  He wrote, “Chaco was too old, Paquimé too young. We looked at their ages, we looked at the maps, and we knew it would never work. However, something cartographic caught my eye. Chaco and Paquimé were on the same meridian. That is, they were exactly north-south of each other. Chaco-Paquimé might be May-December, but, positionally, they made a striking pair.”

  I once looked Lekson straight in the eye, the two of us alone, and asked if he still believed his meridian theory after nearly every other archaeologist in the Southwest had choked when she or he had heard it. To have carried the religious, political core of a civilization hundreds of miles exactly along a longitude of 107°57'25", following a line set up between the key north-south great houses of Pueblo Alto and Tsin Kletsin back at Chaco, did seem a bit specific. Lekson looked right back at me and said yes, he still believed in his meridian.

  Everyone in Southwest archaeology has something to say about Lekson. He has stirred up academic dissent and discussion as far away as Central America, where archaeologists previously paid very little attention to what was happening in the American Southwest, a far and dusty corner of the world. Suddenly, it was sounding as though we might have a full-blown civilization on our hands, pre-Columbian people who were capable of making complex and long-distance decisions moving en masse along ceremonial corridors spanning countless horizons.

  Lekson wanted to test his theory. He halfheartedly wanted to be proven wrong, just to get more conversations going, to give Southwest archaeology a jump start. At the trailer Lekson and his colleagues had set up a table on which they had placed many potsherds unearthed at a crucial archaeological site between Chaco and Paquimé. They believed that they had found a missing link in the desert near the New Mexico town of Truth or Consequences, and the sherds partly proved their point. The sherds had the look of Mesa Verde pottery but had been made much later, coming from far south of Mesa Verde. Lekson was certain that these were signs of migrants who had walked down from the north across New Mexico.

  Lekson had invited naysayers to have a look at the potsherds for themselves. A troop of four researchers descended on us from across the parking lot, where a hundred cars were parked for the symposium. I lowered my beer to my lap as they approached through stiff summer sunlight. Laughter sparked by Lekson’s many joking comments faded as his colleagues straightened their faces to watch these gentlemen step into their camp.

  “Come in, come in,” Lekson said, beckoning them into his fortress of ice chests and shade.

  No one got up or offered a seat. Three of the gentlemen walked right past the potsherds that had been set out, but a particularly keen ceramicist from the Museum of New Mexico veered off to methodically study them.

  The first gentleman to approach greeted Lekson, old friends long parted. There was no need to shake hands. The debate took only four or five words to begin.

  “It is irrational to assume this is all about migration, that it isn’t simply a matter of trade, which as you know has been soundly documented,” the man said.

  There was not a second of silence before Lekson jumped in. “It’s irrational to assume it’s not about migration,” he retorted. “This is more than pottery moving around. We’re looking at large groups of people making great distances.”

  “You have nothing to back you up.”

  “I have everything to back me up.”

  I left the beer in my lap, captivated by this escalating a
rgument. I thought this is how it must have happened centuries ago in the Pueblo world, factions splitting under the summer sun, accusations thrown by gentlemen until camps divided.

  After carefully examining each of the potsherds, the ceramicist from the museum finally entered the circle. He carried one of the sherds in his hand, and he dropped to one knee in the dust in front of Lekson. The ceramicist spoke with a nearly continuous stutter that made it impossible not to pay very close attention to his every word. He was Lekson’s match, his intellectual equal. He began describing what he saw in these supposed Mesa Verde–like potsherds, explaining that Lekson may have been premature in his assessment.

  Lekson sat back in his chair and listened. The ceramicist talked with excruciatingly halting words, saying he did not deny the similarities between Mesa Verde pottery and these sherds, but this did not constitute a migration.

  Yes, something was migrating, the ceramicist continued. There is no question about that. But was it people or ideas or just vessels going from hand to hand and altering the iconic designs in places where they arrived? These questions were not answered by a mere collection of potsherds.

  Lekson knew this, and he accepted the ceramicist’s argument with ample quiet and consideration. Still, Lekson had been on the land, traveling between critical archaeological sites, and was sure in his gut that the connections went far beyond trade. Traits of Chaco are all over Paquimé: T-shaped doors at every turn, dramatic hilltop architecture, an overwhelming collection of never-before-seen artifacts, and the abundant use of birds. Great kivas around Chaco and Aztec, built in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, had huge stone disks stacked beneath their massive ceiling timbers, and these buried disks were found peppered with offerings. The same sorts of heavy disks had been stacked in a ritualistic fashion beneath timber posts in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Paquimé. There are bird feathers galore, fire signals, and pre-Columbian roads at both Chaco and Paquimé. For Lekson, Paquimé was the new Chaco.