by Craig Childs
The bird I saw inside this chamber had arrived long after the place was abandoned, though. It was not a cultural artifact. It couldn’t be, the dust too thin on its bones. I thought it to be a dervish, a wild bird that had become disoriented inside the dwelling decades or centuries ago.
I sent my light along the train of its vertebrae, where the neck came to a sudden end. Its head was missing.
“That’s strange,” I said, almost a whisper.
I ran my light around the inside of the adobe hollow, thinking I would find a bird skull tumbled off to the side, but it was not there. I felt suddenly cold, aware that the head of this turkey had been intentionally removed.
Farther south a piece of Mayan artwork depicts a man playing a hand drum, which looks like those found buried with decapitated turkeys at Paquimé. The man seems to be presiding over a human sacrifice, in front of him a bowl containing the head of a turkey.
Among indigenous Mesoamerican cultures still active today, turkey heads are severed and offered to deities who control the waters within the earth. Among the modern Maya and the more northerly Nahua, the turkey represents Tlaloc, living in what is called the House of Rain, an underground realm full of water. The Mixe continue to sacrifice turkeys to mountain spirits, decapitating the birds at hidden springs, in caves, and on mountaintops. The Zapotec behead turkeys with stone knives, and numerous cultures sprinkle the blood of decapitated turkeys on their croplands to invite water. In the Southwest among the modern Pueblo people, turkey feathers represent rain. For the Hopi these elaborately colored and banded feathers are suggestive of the underworld, and the Zuni still place them in the fields where corn is planted. But there was no one currently living in the northern Sierra Madre to leave a decapitated turkey in this ruin. Was there?
This cliff dwelling had obviously been abandoned since at least the fifteenth century. I thought, Someone must have come back. A ritual was held by people who remembered old rites. A turkey was brought to this room and decapitated, a call to Tlaloc, a plea to an ancient water god.
I lifted my head from the chamber and turned off my light. For as long as I could, I stood without breathing, mouth barely open, eyes tracing across each shocking, remarkable shape.
Is that you? I asked silently. Are you the ones I have been tracking all this way?
There is a lonely history of explorers who have come into the north end of the Sierra Madre looking for cliff dwellings. Carl Lumholtz arrived in 1890 and reported on mysterious adobe villages deep in the wilderness of northern Mexico. Later, in the 1950s, Robert Lister came from the University of Colorado and dug out a number of cliff dwellings, proclaiming that the people who had lived here were part of a cultural complex that extended clear up to the Mogollon Rim. The next in this succession of archaeologists is Beth Bagwell, from the University of New Mexico, an unassuming woman who moves comfortably through the outback of rural Mexico.
Bagwell once showed me photographs taken during her doctoral field research in the Sierra Madre, shots of her truck mired midstream on a valley floor, muddy water up to the doors, and of multistory cliff dwellings snug inside their caves nearby. She wanted me to understand the physical sense of isolation she enjoyed, as well as the geographic rigor of sites she mapped and excavated with a small crew of Mexican assistants. Though the cliff dwellings Bag-well documented lie in another part of the Sierra Madre, a few hundred miles from the ones I was visiting, they were nearly identical. They had the same style of ceiling and roof construction, the same thick, smooth walls of adobe set around numerous windows and doors—wall plaster incised with artwork—and the same kind of timbers shaped into planks with stone tools. Bagwell was particularly fascinated by the work put into these timbers. “It’s in excess of what is structurally needed,” she told me. “It took a lot of labor to whittle all those beams and sand them smooth. You see that kind of overworking of details in Paquimé, and actually you see it in Chaco, too.”
Like many archaeologists, Bagwell believes that architecture offers clues to social organization. Here she sees people doing a lot more work than may have been required, work organized on a large scale. Based on what they built and how they did it, Bagwell imagines that residents held certain positions, a culture of specialized laborers. A guild of trained adobe masons may have existed alongside expert potters, as well as weavers, farmers, jewelers, and tool makers. Bagwell sees a middle-range society here, something that lies between extensive, state-level societies such as our own, and small, modestly organized groups of people arranged simply by age and gender. There was a form of governance in these barrancas, an articulated social structure extending beyond households into a far larger cultural entity.
As Bagwell documented site after site, she saw ranks of T-shaped passages that piqued her curiosity. She found that these portals b-elonged mostly to larger, more well-plastered rooms positioned near the fronts of dwellings, close to light and fresh air. She believed that they may have accessed preferred living spaces, but she also thought they may have carried some kind of social meaning. She saw the T not only in door shapes but in ceramic designs, in the shape of floor hearths, and in basketry and textile designs.
As I walked through the cliff dwelling where I had found the beheaded turkey, I came upon a broad, T-shaped door. Its shape had the auspicious air of a smooth black obelisk, an idol. I stepped through into a room with a ceiling made of neatly laid ceiling beams, each coated with black soot. The floor was nearly covered with long fingers of corncobs. Each wall surrounding me had a T-shaped doorway built into it. Choices. As I turned, glancing through the doors, I noticed a niche in the wall behind me. It was in the shape of a T, a recess only large enough to hold a candle. Seeing so many of these shapes was dizzying.
I lifted my hand in front of the niche in the wall. It was slightly shorter than my fingertip to my wrist. I had seen something like it at Chaco, a nook formed into a T in one of the western rooms at Pueblo Bonito. That was three hundred years earlier and seven hundred miles away.
As Bagwell has suggested, the T was probably a sort of symbol. It may have begun as a defensive measure, forcing people to slow as they entered a room so they could not charge through unchecked. Perhaps its shape allowed light into rooms in a different way or assisted with ventilation in the still, interior spaces of great houses and cliff dwellings. Whatever it started out as, the T shape was now an emblem, a cultural identifier connecting the Colorado Plateau to the Sierra Madre. In ancient Mayan hieroglyphs, the T shape stands for ik’, meaning breath, wind, and vital essence. Cliff dwellings with Ts may have belonged to a certain belief system or history, their rooms marked with the symbol of a sacred wind.
Back at Paquimé, Di Peso’s crew had dug into a small ceremonial room and there found an altar. Upon this altar was a toppled block of stone carved into a T shape. Its edges were so perfectly straight and clean that it looked as if the monolith had been made with a modern lapidary tool, and it was so large it could barely be hefted by one person. Di Peso also realized there was more to the T than simple expediency. He thought the T represented Tlaloc. He wrote in his notes that passing through one of the doorways, you would have been passing through the very eye of Tlaloc. Inside you would reach the legendary seat of this rain god, a fabled underground lake. Perhaps cool air flowing through T-shaped doorways was like moist air that ushers from caves, the breath of Tlaloc.
The door at the back of the room was much smaller than the door I had entered to get here. The narrow space of the T knocked my knees together, and I almost tripped. On the other side I found a step placed just for the purpose of making the passage easier. My balance returned, and I came into the next room, where I crouched in the center. Daylight tapered into a thin gloom.
I noticed that time had changed. It felt slower, my every motion given weight. Perhaps the shape of the doorways had done this, the first one forcing me to pause, the second damming my movement into a deliberate pace. The T required a changed stride, like the bow made before steppin
g onto the mat of a martial arts dojo.
I pulled a small red lamp from the pocket of my cargo pants and turned it on, sending a faint beam across the ground. Red was a good color for a place like this, allowing my natural vision to see beyond the burning circle that would be left by a white light. Part of a basketry dish lay like a dirty moon on the floor, its decayed edges revealing stranded lines of warp and weft. I did not touch it.
The next door slowed my movements even further, and I passed through feeling as if I were no longer touching the ground. I trained my light around me, finding the positions of ceiling beams and crumbled matter on the floor, bones and pottery and corncobs. At the back of the room the wooden ceiling ended, giving way to the cave’s dark bedrock eaves. I kept walking to where I saw no more corncobs on the floor, no scraps of artifacts, only a fine, dry dust dimpled with mouse prints. The cave in the back of the dwelling had been left absolutely empty.
We had noticed this same phenomenon at a number of other cliff dwellings in the barrancas. In fact, Spruce Tree House up in Colorado had the same feature, an area nearly the size of a dance floor in the back of a Mesa Verde cave, accessed through a succession of T-shaped entries. It, too, had been found empty.
This stone vault funneled down until my head was cramped into my shoulders. I came to a shuffling crouch and shined the light up at a low, raw ceiling, where I saw daddy longlegs hanging by the hundreds, black masses of them, their legs spindling in every direction. They were vibrating all across the ceiling, rising and falling in a syncopated mass, troubled perhaps by the presence of my breath. I ducked my head beneath them, an inch of clearance all that remained. I set my hand down for balance and my open palm printed itself into dust as fine as bone powder. I thought my tracks might remain in this dry dust for the next thousand years, like the strange boot prints of men on the moon.
Then I heard something unexpected. A drop of water struck a pool ahead of me. I lifted my head and peered into the darkness.
I once spoke with a Hopi man who told me that the T-shaped portals I had been tracking represented underground mountains filled with water. I was sitting at the breakfast table in his home, his shelves decorated with old wooden katsinas: small effigies of dancers set on shelves like votive candles. They were representations of rain gods, painted and feathered spirits born from out of the clouds. Katsinas are very similar to Mesoamerican Tlaloques, which are the rain god Tlaloc’s children and family: feathered, long-haired spirits said to brew rain, to pound on drums and create thunder. Among Mesoamerican tribes Tlaloques are often associated with certain mountain ranges, much like the Pueblo katsinas of the Southwest, who dwell in the clouds that gather around isolated mountains.
I was drinking tea, the Hopi man coffee. “You’re interested in the T shape,” he said.
I said yes and then lifted my tea and blew across it.
“I believe the T shape is a mountain underground,” he said, and then was quiet, his face relaxed but thoughtful.
I did not want to ask an inappropriate question and halt the conversation, so I took a sip of my tea and set it back on the table. We both peered out the window, watching ripples of people moving outside. Children were on their way to school.
“How so?” I asked.
“I think it symbolizes an inverted mountain, a mirror of what is aboveground,” he continued. “The mountain aboveground gathers clouds and rain. The mountain below draws rainfall into an underground lake.”
The process he described sounded familiar. I had spent time studying the actions of rain and water in the Southwest, documenting stream flows and rates of groundwater recharge, patterns of rainfall and snowmelt. Mountains are where storms collect, where they unload the bulk of their moisture. That moisture then enters the ground and fills water tables and aquifers. The clockwork mechanisms of this cycle are made especially clear in an arid region like the Southwest, where every nod and turn of climate broadcasts itself through the ground, and through years, even generations. There are metaphorical mountains underground that mirror the tangible ones aboveground, bodies of water within the earth fed by precipitation on peaks scattered across the Southwest.
“It’s the hydrological cycle,” I said with a tone of realization. “A mountain aboveground sending water into a mountain belowground.”
The Hopi man nodded slightly.
Of course, I thought, pre-Columbian people knew the hydrological cycle, the way in which water transfers from the atmosphere to the ground and back. Living in the Southwest for thousands of years, people would have been keenly aware of the rhythmic relationship between precipitation and spring flows. They would have known how many years of good rain it would take to fill an underground lake, an aquifer, able to predict chances of survival and calculate how soon a migration might need to begin.
The Hopi man said, “The shape of the T is a mountain upside down. Its stem leads into the underworld where there is water.”
Mythology and science tell the same story. Caves lead toward mysterious pools from which people are said to have emerged: the Tewas’ p’okwi koji, the Hopi’s sipapu. A religion is centered on the mechanics of water. Even modern hydrologists cannot adequately explain the direct correlation between climate shifts and water table fluctuations. Sitting at the man’s wooden table, I thought, Perhaps they cannot explain it because they have not had to live and die by it for thousands of years. They are unaware that Tlaloc is breathing.
In this cave hidden behind the cliff dwelling, I remained absolutely still, listening again for the sound of water. It came, a second tone popping out of the dark, a pearl of water striking a pool.
As I listened longer, I heard two different drips falling from about the same height, landing in different depths of water, their tones barely off from each other. I moved ahead, and at the farthest corner of the cave my red light fell onto a dish of crystalline water. I crawled the last couple of feet to the edge of the basin. Constructed by hand, it was a bowl made of adobe sunken into the ground. Every ten seconds or so a new drop fell into the pool, followed shortly by the next. With each drip, fans of shadows arced and dissipated under my red light.
A spring was coming out of the rock. Two points of water budded from the ceiling, letting their drops go at a measured pace. I looked into the water. Small, clean stones rested inside. This was much like a cave in one of the Sky Island mountains in southeast Arizona, where in total darkness, through stalactites and swollen, lustrous walls, there is a natural dish of limestone standing like a baptismal font. All around it were once placed ancient beads, precious stones, coins of broken pottery, and seashells. All over the Southwest, caves are loaded with such offerings, springs decorated with feathers and prayer sticks. These places where water emerges from stone, dark holes into the underworld, are profoundly sacred.
As far as I could see, no one had left offerings at this water hole within the cliff dwelling, the entire back of a cave cleared out to present only a bowl filled with spring water. My breath trembled in the small space. I could hardly move, one knee on the ground, one palm flat and holding me still. I had passed through the smaller and smaller eyes of Tlaloc into a mythical lake inside the mountain.
Falling on each other’s heels, these drips made a persistent rhythm. It was the cadence of cultural history in the Southwest, the ceaseless fluctuations of underground water slowly responding to precipitation. Drips patter quickly during wet years and shrink back to a bored tapping in times of drought. This is the timepiece that told people when they could stay and when it was time to leave, ticking through the centuries in the back of this cave.
Tlaloc is hydrology, I thought. The deity is a metaphor for the full hydrological cycle of moisture, ice, rain, snow, dew, and fog; pooling, draining, and evaporating. It is the movement of water, the lifeblood of the Southwest, a meter that any civilization here must obey.
I turned off my light in the back of the cave. I closed my eyes. It felt as if all these centuries, these thousands of years, were contai
ned here, their processions playing out again and again as drips strummed the pool beside me. The same routes are traveled repeatedly, the same meridians followed across horizons, over hundreds of years. Anasazi, I thought, was never a people. It was a rhythm, a form of motion stirred up from the land. People merely fell into step.
PUTTING BACK THE BONES
FARTHER INTO THE SIERRA MADRE
Eugene was somewhere behind me. We had become separated while moving through steep sluices of scrub oak and poison ivy. I listened for him, for cracking branches and sought footholds. He was not there.
I climbed down wedges of boulders, looking off my shoulder a thousand feet into the forest floor below. I was climbing down into a canyon. Steeples rose all around me, trunks of toast-colored stone tapering into the sky.
With every handhold swept clean, tested with a knock of my fist and then weighted with my body, I dropped notch by notch. Tree branches poked me in the back, some so stiff they would not budge, and I had to wrap myself around them in order to pass by. I was looking for cliff dwellings, seeing what people had tucked into recesses. If I fell, I would crash through these nets of oak brush and would probably be caught, snagged by roots and tree limbs. If I was not caught, I would fall a good few hundred feet. I paid close attention, hot breath burrowing into my outstretched arm as I lowered myself.
I kicked at a toehold, checking to see if it was solid. It was not. A rock fell through oak branches. Dry leaves, shocked loose, showered down the corridor. I waited for the rock to finish as it thumped off ledges. It dragged my mind hundreds of feet down as the sound dwindled into the distance.
When I heard nothing else, I kicked again and found the next good hold. Oak branches made steady ladder rungs. My body stretched and contracted, fitting into whatever space was given. Aware of the length of my bones and muscles, I spidered down this passage, picking up a rhythm. I poured through holes in the brush and rock, nearly falling but with a touch of restraint, weighted, sliding down a pole of gravity.