by Craig Childs
A team of archaeologists in the 1980s went in, using more refined techniques than earlier surveys had employed. This more recent work consisted of grids laid across the central part of the Valley of Sonora on the west side of the Sierra Madre, where the remains of hundreds upon hundreds of previously missed settlements were recorded. This survey team found large towns that had been occupied around the time of the first Spanish contact, and surrounding them were numerous satellite villages. Excavations revealed the foundations of sturdy-walled pueblos, pit-houses, and courtyards. Within a relatively short distance the team recorded the foundations of well over a thousand individual structures at more than two hundred different settlements.
When the survey was complete, William Doolittle, a principal investigator, wrote, “Although the Spaniards on occasion did stretch the truth for various reasons, they appear to have been quite accurate in their reports on conditions in eastern Sonora. The [previous] archaeologists, on the other hand, simply used a survey technique that resulted in their overlooking much important evidence.”
This new survey estimated that ninety thousand people were living below the west slope of the northern Sierra Madre when the Spanish arrived. High signal stations had indeed been employed on strategic hilltops, just as the Spanish had reported. Cursory ex-cavations of these signal platforms revealed layers of charred earth and heat-shattered stones beneath the surface, evidence that fires had been lit on these highly visible points connecting distant regions. There is ample evidence of temples and ball courts, as well as markets trading heavily in brightly colored birds, textiles, shells, turquoise, and colorful ceramics made around Paquimé and other places in the Southwest. Indeed, the maps of the last population centers in the pre-historic Southwest should now include a huge accumulation at the foot of the northern Sierra Madre. When people split up in the fifteenth century—when Salado, Hohokam, and finally Paquimé fell—this was one of the strongholds that survived.
Highly structured warfare had probably been common in this region. The first Spanish stepped into a hornet’s nest when they arrived, showing up during a period of massive cultural restructuring and conflict much like what had been seen earlier in other parts of the Southwest. A temporary settlement the Spanish military established in northwest Mexico is said to have been destroyed in a conflict with local groups, and the Spanish fell back into the Sierra Madre for protection. The fact that heavily armed conquistadors who had battled their way north through Mexico now had to flee into the mountains pursued by a mostly Stone Age culture is testament to the military prowess of these natives.
When the explorer Obregón passed through one of these indigenous Sonoran towns in the late sixteenth century, he saw dead bodies strung up in the streets. Heads, arms, legs, tongues, and ears taken in battle between warring indigenous states had been hoisted like banners from houses and terraces. These were not a people to trifle with.
How did the sixteenth-century Spanish find a landscape of stra-tegic warfare and highly organized societies and the seventeenth-century Jesuits witness only a ruined people? The answer is simple and catastrophic in its scope. European plagues that followed the Spanish were terrifyingly efficient. Smallpox was carried in dry cotton, able to travel rapidly along trade routes, where it landed in bustling marketplaces. A host of European diseases moved faster than the Spanish themselves, spreading to places the Spanish had not even reached. It has been estimated that up to 80 percent, and in some places 90 percent, of local populations perished. Even in Europe the plagues had not been so devastating. American natives had no immunity to the diseases, and towns of a thousand people were reduced to a hundred. In a village of one hundred, ten may have lived, and those who survived were branded with images of horror, having witnessed unimaginable deaths by bleeding from the skin, coal black corpses left unburied all around them. Diseases moved up trade and travel routes along the Rio Grande and entered the last northern pueblos. Between 1629 and 1641, the remaining Pueblo culture in Arizona and New Mexico lost about 70 percent of its population and abandoned half of its settlements.
Such devastation would have easily broken the back of this civi-lization, leaving exactly what the Jesuit missionaries encountered in the seventeenth century when they reached northern Mexico: a crushed people clutching to the land with their last breaths. Towns and villages in Sonora had fallen into disrepair and within half a century became ruins. After a few hundred years little if anything was left on the surface, the wind having sewn the earth back together, closing over the wound of humanity.
The way was effectively cleared for Spanish colonization. Eventually, fair-skinned Spanish mixed with what remained of dark and ancient races, giving birth to the mestizo culture, to this town of polished faces, each a different shade of red, brown, or tan. The old civilization has been mostly forgotten now, still widely and wrongly thought to have been nothing but a lie.
As we watched the morning parade, a man came up to us and introduced himself as José Tena, a professor at a local agricultural college. His manner was cordial as he shook our hands, speaking Spanish slowly for our benefit, asking if we were from the United States.
“Sí. Arizona y Colorado,” Regan said.
He smiled, nodding, pleased to see us here. He was curious what had brought us. “No vemos muchos Americanos en este pueblo,” Professor Tena explained. They did not see many Americans in this town.
Regan said that we had archaeological inquiries in this region. Hearing this, Professor Tena lit up with a broad smile and explained that we would of course be very interested in certain things that he knew.
“Aquí mismo, en este pueblo. Tenemos nuestra propia arqueología,” he said, explaining that there was archaeology right here, in this town.
Professor Tena quickly looked around. The parade was about over, the marching band disassembling down the street.
“Tienen que venir conmigo,” he said, beckoning us to come with him.
He was almost laughing at his good fortune of meeting people who shared his own zeal for el pasado. His hospitality was infectious. We followed him and talked as he walked swiftly. He asked where we were parked and said someone should ride with him. I offered, and he said, “Sí, sí, aquí.”
I stepped up into his big Ford pickup and slid onto the clean bench seat. Professor Tena hung an arm over the steering wheel and started the engine. We turned down one dirt street and then another as I pointed to where my truck was parked. He honked and waved at Regan in the driver’s seat to follow. As we continued through town, Professor Tena told me of a mammoth skeleton eroding out of a wash not far away, which he would also show me if I wished. I had no reason to doubt him about this. Folsom hunting points from the last ice age had been found north of here. But I was interested in the archaeology of Professor Tena’s town, asking him about the site he had mentioned.
Professor Tena flashed his hand in the air over the top of the steering wheel, saying, “Usted verá muy pronto pero todavía falta.” I would see very soon, but not yet.
We passed by old houses, buff-colored adobe worn and cracked, brightly painted window frames encasing rippled panes of glass. Some of the houses stood empty, roofs buckled, walls in ruins. Ancient knots of bougainvillea climbed some of the remaining walls, rushes of pink flowers.
We drove out to the edge of town to where fields were freshly plowed, and we pulled over beside a barbed wire fence. Pigs called gruffly from a wooden pen nearby. I could see the full spread of the land from our position, the dark foothills of the Sierra Madre swollen by mirages in the distance, and between here and there a gently knolled terrain faded into blond horizons. Regan drove up behind us and parked.
Professor Tena let down the fence and looked around to see who might be watching. He told us it was not his land, so we should not spend too much time here.
“Miren alrededor,” he said, gesturing with his hand for us to have a look around.
I stepped over the dropped lengths of barbed wire and walked into soft soil
recently plowed by a horse-drawn blade. I immediately saw potsherds roiled up from below. I dropped to a knee. I lifted one piece and then another, a broken piece of Babicora Polychrome with spools of painted designs just beneath the lip, and then a Madera Black-on-Red sherd with hard geometric figures. Another after that, and another. I shoveled my hand into the soil and came up with sherds slipping between my fingers. There was no need to put them back exactly as I had found them. They had no future but to be continually broken down by plows until they became the very beans and corn being grown here.
We all four had dropped to the ground within feet of the fence. We looked up at Professor Tena, astonished at this overabundance of pottery. He smiled and assured us, waving his hand, “Vayan, mas adalante.” Go out there; look around.
We went, but slowly, eyes gripped by every inch of ground. An immense amount of numerous kinds of pottery was turned up, dazzling points of color and pasty, reddish gray sherds incised with complex, textured hatching. Most pieces were the size of silver dollars, evenly broken by years of plowing. I was dumbfounded and stood with my hands cupped together, holding bits of pottery I had gathered, intricate white, black, and red designs that might have been Villa Ahumada Polychrome or Ramos Polychrome, ceramics of the later periods. This had not been some modest village. It had been a center, a meeting place of trade and production. I looked across at Regan about twenty yards away. She also held her hands cupped before her. She looked toward me at the same moment, and our eyes could say nothing more to each other.
Like crows in a recently sown field, we kept dipping to the ground. I gathered what I thought were the finest pieces, dumped them, and then filled my hands again. I did this walking out to one of the adobe ruins, a place probably built in the 1800s. I stepped up to its one remaining wall and let spill whatever I was carrying. I reached out and touched the grainy, wind-hounded face, startled to see pieces of pottery sticking out of its surface like teeth. The adobe had been made of local soil rich with potsherds. My eyes ran up the one-story wall, seeing little disks and dishes, as if the remains of this past civilization could not be kept in the ground. They swept skyward, building a new culture.
As we toured the field, we passed by one another, stopping occasionally to look at the finds we held in our hands. Such wealth should have been no surprise, the Jesuits having been soundly discredited in their assessment of northwest Mexico. But it was impossible not to be awed. We were standing on a ruined trade center from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. This was the time that Paquimé fell, only decades before the Spanish arrived, the threshold between prehistory and history.
Following the drift of cliff dwellings southward from the Colorado Plateau, through the central highlands of Arizona, and down into the northern Sierra Madre, one would come next to Barranca del Cobre. In a landscape of enormous canyons in northern Mexico live a people known as the Tarahumara, or more locally the Raramuri. Some still live in caves, their complex kinship structure based on a lifeway that is part agricultural, part hunter-gatherer. It is an adaptive strategy that suits this sort of complex environment well, the same strategy that seems to have been employed by ancient people all across the Southwest.
These people’s name, Raramuri, translates as “those who walk well.” A reserved people, they are in fact famous for their ability to run great distances. Wearing only thin sandals, some Raramuri are known to cross 100 to 200 miles in only a few days. They have carried on kickball races for 450 miles, running day and night in difficult terrain. Runners from these southern barrancas recently came to Colorado to participate in a 100-mile ultramarathon on rough trails over timberline mountains. When they arrived, they made sandals by stripping old car tires and nailing treads together with metal pegs. They won the race hands down.
The sense of distance many archaeologists have concerning the Southwest is cast into question by the Raramuri. They could have closed the gap between northwest Mexico and Chaco in a week at even a casual pace. Whether they actually traveled to the north is unclear, but at least there is incontestable evidence that they or people like them could have traveled to the Colorado Plateau and back in short order. For them the whole Southwest would have been a close neighborhood.
Among the mountain shrines that have been documented between the Colorado Plateau and Mexico is one cave containing more than four hundred woven sandals. Most of these sandals are small, circular waffles that would have protected only the ball of the foot: runners’ sandals. It is tempting to see this as a sign of the ancient Raramuri, “those who walk well,” a shrine left in a land their ancestors once crossed with astonishing ease. Perhaps these are the Lost Others about whom the Zuni speak, a relic population of what was once called Anasazi now living in northern Mexico.
The modern Raramuri lay just beyond the reach of our journey, past the whistling arc of the first Spanish musket ball. This field of horse-plowed artifacts below the slope of the Sierra Madre, Professor Tena standing at the fence, was far enough. After this, prehistory ended and history began. The pre-Columbian era was done.
Regan and I moved on to join the others. With hands filled, we showed one another what we had found: pottery, beads, and small stone tools. Eugene picked up two conus shells, a kind imported from the Sea of Cortés, used as little tinkler bells with the ends sawed off and polished, the spires cleanly removed. Holes were drilled through them so that they could be attached to the fringes of dancers’ skirts, around wrists and ankles, where they would have rasped to the beat of a dance. Eugene handed them to me, and I rolled them in my hand.
Professor Tena looked approvingly at what we had found. He then said that this was nothing. It was just one place among many. He swept his arm at the horizon where there were small mounds everywhere in the distance. They were all over the horizon, parts of a buried civilization extending as far as I could see.
“Ven, estan en todas partes,” he said. Everywhere.
Plow-broken potsherds and conus shells found in a field at the foot of the Sierra Madre. REGAN CHOI
As we walked back to the trucks together, the pieces of artifacts we had found fell out of our hands, dropping one by one into the plowed field. By the time we reached the barbed wire, all I had left were the two white shells. I turned and looked across the low desert hills, the unnamed city. The Sierra Madre, the Mother Mountains, lay farther, spreading across the horizon like a ravishing god. I rolled the shells between my fingers, feeling their polished smoothness, the wear of centuries. I reared back and tossed them. They sailed across the field and landed in fresh dirt, where they would be plowed under yet again.
AFTERWORD
Early-winter sunlight passed between adobe buildings the color of spent straw. Shafts of light and shadow crossed narrow dirt avenues, landing on faded wooden windowsills, their paint flecking in a cold breeze. An old white pickup took a left turn and then a right as if navigating a maze, hardly room to drive between these closely packed residences. Sitting in the pickup’s corrugated metal bed, I looked into passing alleyways, streets with no signs. I was in a Hopi pueblo in the dry plateau country of northern Arizona. Some of the buildings had sixteenth-century stonework showing through fading, unkempt adobe walls. Others were made partly of cinder blocks, an architectural technique picked up in the past century.
I had my son in my lap, his tiny hands mittened, cap pulled snug against the morning breeze. We were riding with a pickup load of surplus produce sent down from fields in Colorado, apples and onions mostly, sacks jostling and shifting around us, lumpy against my back. I felt like a thief of sorts, smuggled into this pueblo in a bed of winter foodstuffs. I thought about pulling out my journal and writing every salient detail I could see in the architecture, in the way these narrow streets ran. But someone might spot me. In the Hopi pueblos it is illegal for outsiders to take notes, pictures, sound recordings, anything. I simply kept to myself, watching adobe structures go by at two miles per hour. The closer we came to the center of the pueblo, the more adobe I saw and the
fewer cinder blocks. One thing I did not see anywhere was a T shape. As an overall architectural feature, the T shape seems to have gone south and stayed there, having for the most part disappeared into Mexico. The shape is perhaps a marker of a more restless people, exiles maybe, or travelers who followed an ancient edict into the south and never returned: Anasazi. The Hisatsinom, by contrast, stayed on the Colorado Plateau, forebears of the Hopi.
In the older, inner reaches of the pueblo, we began stopping at certain doors. With Jasper on my hip, I hauled out bags and set them in the dust. I was directed by the eighty-year-old man who was driving the pickup, his rickety finger pointing this way and that, telling me the names of families we were delivering to—long, difficult names in a language far different from my own. Wearing gloves with the fingers cut off, I rapped on each door where I set the produce. Some doors were sealed tightly, others just slabs of wood barely keeping out the wind. No one answered.
It was not that they were hiding. Everyone was gone today, attending an important dance at Bacavi on Third Mesa, leaving this pueblo empty. It felt like a ghost town. On other days I knew Hopi pueblos to have kids in jeans running from door to door, old men sitting in the warming light, and decrepit Dodges and Pintos rolling by every half hour or so. Today it felt as if I were moving through an abandoned settlement, its residents swept away by an unexpected wind. In a few hours they would be back.
I set down another bag of apples and onions and knocked on a door. I stood for a moment, listening, hearing only a withering, dry breeze running through the pueblo’s causeways. I returned to the pickup bed and snuggled Jasper into my lap as the engine groaned into first gear. We lurched ahead.
Papery onion skins blew around us as we rode through the pueblo’s center and took a turn around a kiva. I sat up immediately for a better look at the building, setting Jasper’s diaper-padded rear onto the cold truck bed. I got a knee up on a bag of onions as I watched the kiva go by. It was a simple aboveground structure standing alone, square-shaped, with tar paper showing from recent reconstruction work. An oily black stovepipe aimed straight out of the roof next to the leaning tips of a wooden ladder. The ladder led down through a ceiling hatch into the dark kiva below. I knew the ladder stopped in front of a depression in the kiva’s floor, the sipapu, the fabled passage-way from the underworld to the world of the living, a place that is both a threshold and a center point. Inside this sipapu, below the surface of the earth, is a legendary watery realm left only to spirits and gods, a place of katsinas.