by Craig Childs
The slope let me off on a ledge, and the ledge led me to another canyon, this one more gentle than the last. I followed it, not knowing whether Eugene was close behind or had taken another route, in which case we would not see each other until nightfall back at camp. I walked on dry leaves until I reached a concealed cave. Inside was a cliff dwelling. I walked into the cave, where I passed from a wash of daylight into shadow, entering a field of adobe rooms rambling off into the dark, one-story blocks arranged facing each other. It was a husky village with a low bedrock ceiling.
One of the large, round storage chambers I had come to know among these cliff dwellings had toppled on its side. It looked as if it had been pushed over, broken open like a ceramic piggy bank. Many of the olla-like chambers we had seen were damaged, usually by a single hole punched through the side, where it appears people broke into them long ago. I walked into the chamber’s debris, then dropped to my haunches, finding a small shaft of wood in the dust. I picked it up.
Two circles were burned into the shaft, each tapped by a notch. A third circle was broken off at the tip. This was a fireboard. A wood drill had been spun against it, twirled back and forth until the wood grew hot enough to sprout an ember. The artifact was hardly longer than my index finger. I turned it slowly, feeling with a fingertip down into the smooth drill holes. It was a very human artifact, capable of starting a fire with nearly the efficiency of a match.
Would I have been surprised if I had walked into this cave and seen a man crouched over a hand drill, his back curved toward me as he worked swiftly down the wooden shaft? I would have stepped quietly through the half-light, he so intent that he did not notice as I came around and crouched nearby, smelling the soft burn in the air as he produced an ember. Once his fire began, snapping up through dry twigs, I would have waited for him to look up, for our eyes to meet, centuries passing easily between us.
A Sierra Madre cliff dwelling with a round, olla-like room in the foreground, probably a grain storage chamber. CRAIG CHILDS
I set the fireboard back into the dust, placing it on edge the way I had found it. It seemed important not to alter the lay of objects in these dwellings. Everything had its place, as if each artifact were a dial tuned precisely by hundreds of years. I made my steps as slow and methodical as possible, boot soles planted on the dimly illuminated floor among broken pottery and a litter of corncobs.
A woven mat lay on the ground, rumpled as though someone had set it aside that morning, leaving behind an unmade bed. Partially unrolled in the dust, it was about four feet long, some of its edges chewed by decay. Its diamond twill weave was greasy and russet--colored. I crouched beside it and almost touched it with my fingers, but then thought, Burial blanket.
I looked through the vaporous light of the cave and saw a long bolt of a human leg bone nearby, a femur. It lay haphazardly like a discarded piece of firewood. Not far from it was a second femur, its ball standing out like a small white globe. A pothunter had found this place before me. He had dug up a burial and shaken a skeleton out of its woven mat right here. Perhaps he was the one who had pushed over the big olla to get inside.
I backed off from the mat and stood, turning slowly. Now that my eyes had adjusted to the light, I saw part of an arm and then the vacant mask of a pelvis. Narrow at the sockets, the pelvis belonged to a man. I realized that the reddish color in the mat’s weave was flesh and organs turned to oily dust.
I took another step, feeling the softness of the ground. No one had been here since the robbery, maybe as long as a hundred years ago, judging by the accumulation of dust. Human bones stuck up from the ground like the ribs of a shipwreck dissolving at the bottom of the sea. Little clubs of hand and toe bones were almost out of sight.
The femurs, I noticed, were as long as my own, belonging to someone who may have stood a few inches short of six feet tall. That was unusually lofty for people of the prehistoric Southwest, who tended to stand at less than five feet. I recalled a tomb unearthed at Chaco where a perceptibly taller group of people than most was discovered. Those Chacoan burials have implied a specific ethnicity to some researchers, a genetically distinct family or group living among many others at the time. Perhaps the bones scattered around me also belonged to a certain people, a clan of significant stature in fifteenth-century northwest Mexico. If I could see the bones of more people from here, I could compare them and move toward an academic conclusion, but I wished to see no more bones.
I walked on into rooms where bats stirred through the dim, gray light. Brief whisks of sound and wings circled and darted around me, quickly escaping through doors and windows into other rooms. I continued along adobe alleyways until they opened into a vacant space in the back of the cave. There was no water in this spacious chamber, just a white stain of evaporated minerals where water had once dripped out of the ceiling, a memory of wetter years. I stopped and waited for my eyes to accommodate the withered light. The floor was smooth with chalky dust, no sign of artifacts anywhere. A hole had been dug, a crypt the size of an adult curled into a fetal position. I stepped to its edge and looked in. The hole was empty, its sides slumped. The pothunter had known exactly where to go, digging for grave goods.
So they buried their dead back here, I thought. This space was a graveyard. It made sense. The home of Tlaloc, a place known as Tlalocan, House of Rain, is where the dead go, a watery paradise within a mountain. Maybe that is what such open chambers behind the cliff dwellings symbolized, the legendary place of the dead.
I studied the way the pothunter had dug, the slice of his shovel still visible. He had taken everything of value, leaving a scattered skeleton and its burial mat. A hollow feeling entered my body, standing at the site of a grave robbery.
I walked back out through the pallor, passing rooms and returning to the litter of human bones. Another of the man’s arms was visible, and near that the fan of his shoulder blade. His skeleton had been dragged in a burial mat from a grave out to near the cave entrance. The light had been better here to sort the goods. Had this body been finely dressed? I wondered. Was he wearing jewelry, in his hair a bone pin inlaid with turquoise? Had the pothunter found vessels, clay figurines, copper pendants? There was no telling. All that remained were bones and the burial mat.
I walked slowly around what remained of the man, a step for every two breaths. I kept my mind as still as I could, although a ravenous hunger boiled beneath my skin. I had starving eyes, having come here to find a lost world, a sunken civilization. As I cleared my head in the muted light, the hunger faded, revealing itself as a simple question. Who were you? I looked around at the castaway bones, recognizing them as similar to my own, a man who had once lived, full of emotion and thought. A father, perhaps, a man who hunted or farmed, a weaver of baskets. A man who bent over with hurt upon the death of a family member or close friend. It was not so long ago that this man had been here spinning fires to life on a fireboard. We have hardly changed in this short time. Tools of stone have been replaced by plastic and metal, but our capacity for imagination, for sensation, has not altered.
I walked more slowly across the gravity of all these bones, taking three breaths for every step, and then five. Then I was still.
I heard a sound beyond the cave. Eugene was crashing through the brush. I listened to his labored approach. In this knotted topography he had somehow come to the same geographic conclusion as I had, exploring up the same cleft in the rock. I was not surprised. He and I were looking for the same thing, hunting for ruins. I turned and walked toward the entrance, where I came almost into the sunlight.
Eugene appeared from stacks of boulders wrapped in vines and thorned plants. He was dragging his fingers through his hair, pulling out twigs and crushed bits of leaves. He let out an animal sound, half frustration and half relief. Just as he got to the mouth of the cave, I said, “Hold on. There are human remains in here.”
I knew Eugene did not like places with human remains exposed, where they could be seen. They filled him with dread.
He was not entirely comfortable with this business of archaeology.
He stopped the moment I said something, one step into the cave’s shadow. He saw the dim shape of my body. He took a half step backward. For a moment he did not move, his eyes tracking the ground until he saw the familiar billiard ball knob at the end of one of the femurs.
Standing not far from him, I said, “Pothunted.”
Eugene looked at me and backed farther away, reaching the sun, his body stiff, draped in light. We faced each other like night and day. He swallowed.
“What are you going to do with it?” he asked, peering past me into the cave, where he could see hulks of old adobe quarters.
“With what?” I asked.
“With the skeleton.”
I was confused by his question. But then I realized what Eugene meant. I had stumbled onto something. A robbery in progress. With the thinness of time here, it did not matter when the skeleton had been dug up. He wanted to know what kind of gesture I was going to make, because to him it mattered. These things have weight, they stack up.
Eugene stayed safely outside, as close as he wanted to get. Too close even.
“I don’t know,” I said, dumbfounded, looking at the ground, at the dusty bones scattered about.
I glanced back up at him and asked, “What would you do?”
Eugene shook his head and took another step back. He was regarding me as if I had fallen into a trap.
“I don’t know,” he said. He turned and walked away from the cave, saying, “I’ll see you ahead somewhere. Good luck.”
I stayed for some time at this edge of light and dark. The story needed to be put back in the earth, I thought, returned to its lightless depths, to the nameless well that lies beneath the sipapu. There would be, no doubt, orders of violation in my touching these bones. I was a person uninitiated in the meticulous lines of kinship that must have run through the people who lived here. Beyond that, though, a greater tribe exists, a landscape of humanity unbound by time. I owed this one deed to whoever this man had been.
I turned back into the cave. I reached down and picked up one femur from its dust bed, then the other, cradling them in my arms like wooden staffs. They clattered as I went, gathering more bones and carrying them back to the looter’s hole. I poured them in. I returned for more—the pelvis, knobs of vertebrae. I picked up fingers and a kneecap, little knuckles in my palm, a shoulder blade carried like a dish upon my fingertips. I did not put flesh back on these bones in my imagination. My thoughts remained as still and delicate as everything else in this cave.
The last item I fetched was the woven mat, about the size of a bath towel. Its weave was ruddy from the body it once held. I carried it in both of my arms through doorways leading to the back of the cave, where I knelt at the looter’s hole and tucked the mat around the bones, covering what remained of a prehistoric man.
With the blade of my boot, I shoveled dirt into the hole. I circled, pushing in twigs and wood rat droppings from every side. A choking dust lifted all around me, swirls and arms climbing, weaving up and over my shoulders. When the hole was full, I reached down with a hand and scuffed out my prints.
THE STORY THE CONQUISTADORS TOLD
AT THE WESTERN FOOT OF THE SIERRA MADRE
It was the fifth of May in a small Mexican town on the desert plain. A marching band of schoolchildren paraded down a dusty street. People in clean shirts and combed hair milled in front of the colorfully decorated tiendas, laughing and clapping as the band marched through: a wheezing pair of clarinets, a trombone blatting into the air, and the rest of the musical assembly one would expect. It was on this day, in 1862, that Mexican troops defeated French forces, sent to take over Mexico, at the Battle of Puebla: Cinco de Mayo.
The four of us had come down from the mountains on a long and broken road, arriving in town unaware of the day or even the month. We would have bathed in stream water had we known a celebration was going on. We would have washed our clothes, then wrung them out and hung them to dry among the maples and pines. We would have taken off our hats and combed our hair. But we showed up like dirty animals walking into a party, startled to be here after weeks of living among ghosts. The air around us flashed with life. A pair of barefoot children ran after a bicycle that was far too large for the little boy pumping its pedals.
A column of young girls marched past in their proper school dresses, a drumbeat leading them along. They were the pride of the town. Some teachers marched alongside, keeping their students in line with stern snaps of their voices. Other teachers smiled and laughed, carried away by the morning’s festivities. Then the boys arrived in jeans and button-down shirts, spit-polished shoes scuffing along the street in formation.
We must have looked like strange creatures, the four of us standing close together and alert to every motion around us. We were still of a wilderness mind, trained for the single leaf falling, the bone on the ground. This town was uproarious in our eyes. I saw many faces, the coffee-colored skin of mestizos and the chocolate and burgundy complexions of natives. Three Opata-speaking women wearing bright shawls huddled together, little stumps of people compared to the taller Hispanics.
The high school girls came next in the parade. They were all seriousness and laughter, watching each other, forgetting the steps of the march. I noticed the way the Opata women looked upon these Hispanic girls with cool, reserved eyes.
A hundred years before the Mayflower reached the eastern seaboard of North America, the Spanish were here. They arrived in waves of military expeditions and marched across Mexico, a force never imagined in this land. Their horses wore steel chamfrons over their faces with protruding steel spikes as protection in battle. Never before had the natives seen such an animal, much less one bound by armor and ridden by a man with a glimmering shield on his arm, his body layered in breastplates and impenetrable leggings, his fingers like steel claws, his helmet like a scythe. Platoons of foot soldiers followed these horses, carrying wooden matchlock muskets and lances fifteen feet long, their polished steel points the length of a man’s forearm. They must have been an awesome and terrifying sight as they crossed northern Mexico.
On their journeys Spanish scribes and generals reported endless indigenous settlements in northern Mexico, adobe pueblos and houses terraced all across the landscape. They wrote of encountering native communities with well-planned streets running between buildings, an attention to detail that impressed even these foreigners who had already waged war in the great southern city-states of the Aztecs and the Maya.
The Spanish conquistadors found elaborate markets in northwest Mexico—slaves being bought and sold, exotic goods arriving from extensive trade networks. In the late sixteenth century, the Spanish explorer Baltazar de Obregón mentioned traveling from “town to town and from province to province,” telling of large cultural centers surrounded by satellite villages laid out with surprising and strategic regularity across the country. One expedition moved for eight months through this region and every two or three days came upon yet another central town that had never before witnessed a European face. This land appeared to be widely populated with a highly ordered civilization.
Early journals of Spanish travelers in northern Mexico relate their discovery of indigenous priesthoods and ceremonies of a celestial religion. There were native leaders with great wealth and power, their arms and chests draped with turquoise, their palanquins hoisted on the bare shoulders of young men. Of course, conflict started quickly between natives and the Spanish. Upon key hills and peaks fire signals were said to have erupted, sending word of war for hundreds of miles in all directions. In the battles that ensued, the Spanish were met with standing armies. Thousands of fighters—perhaps as many as ten thousand in one reported confrontation—gathered against them to the pounding of drums, the ringing calls of shell trumpets.
The musket ball was fired in return, singing swiftly through the air, naming the end of an era.
This story of cities and bejeweled leade
rs in northern Mexico spread far and wide. Returning conquistadors made this region sound like an undiscovered Arabia, where they had taken rest in adobe rooms decorated with fine textiles and turquoise, the women shy and beautiful. Anxious for countless Christian converts, Jesuit missionaries headed in this direction in the seventeenth century, a hundred years after the conquistadors, but they found neither great towns nor beautiful women. The few natives they encountered in this far region seemed sickly and pitiable, their faces weathered, their clothes threadbare if they had any at all. Barbarians, the missionaries called them. There were no standing armies, no pueblos to the horizons, and no fire signals on key hills. Believing that they had been lied to, the Jesuits indefinitely postponed any bid to construct missions in Sonora. The conquistadors’ fantastic stories were utterly discredited. It was all, apparently, a farce.
Even twentieth-century archaeologists who briefly surveyed the flanks of the Sierra Madre in northern Mexico concluded that the first Spanish had probably met with only small, scattered populations, feeble resistance to thundering columns of conquistadors clad in leather and steel. Now when archaeologists draw maps of how populations ultimately fared in the prehistoric Southwest, they show a final massing around Hopi in northern Arizona and around Zuni, Acoma, and the upper Rio Grande in northern New Mexico. The Salado and Hohokam regions of central and southern Arizona are left blank, as is southern New Mexico and northern Mexico. But this map appears to be only partly correct. A small number of archaeologists have been looking closer at Sonora, Mexico, and have found surprising signs of late occupation. The tide is beginning to turn away from the Jesuits’ story back to what the conquistadors said.