by Craig Childs
*Ceramic archaeologist Patty Crown has noted this same phenomenon on certain Anasazi vessels. Original designs on certain ceremonial jars were covered over and replaced by new designs or by a simple white fi nish to give vessels a new look. Crown found that repainted vessels were actually fi red again, perhaps multiple times, to seal each alteration and give the vessels a variety of appearances over time.(back to text)
*During this major lunar standstill, the full moon of the winter solstice comes up between the twin towers of Chimney Rock at sunset. During the following spring equinox, the half-moon rises through the towers at midnight. Around the summer solstice, the shadowed new moon rises in the same place at sunrise. And at the autumnal equinox, the half-moon breaches the narrow gap at noon.(back to text)
*For alternative views, see Christy G. Turner and Jacqueline A. Turner’s Man Corn: Cannibalism and Violence in the Prehistoric American Southwest and Steven A. LeBlanc’s Prehistoric Warfare in the American Southwest.(back to text)
**The study of warfare among the Anasazi has made repeated appearances in Southwest archaeology. One archaeologist has noted that whenever the United States is at war, research in the Southwest leans toward the study of violence. In times of relative peace, researchers on the whole have regarded the Anasazi as a more nonviolent culture, momentarily putting aside evidence ofconfl ict.(back to text)
*For a historical, visual reference to orchestrated cultural violence in the world, see Jacques Callot’s 1633 woodblock print Les Misères et les Malheurs de la Guerre, depicting a mass hanging in France; the Japanese Momoyama screen paintings of an 1160 insurrection at Kyoto; or even brittle photographs of American Civil War battlefi elds.(back to text)
* In southeast Utah, Abajo Red-on-Orange dominated between 700 and the mid-800s, followed by Bluff Black-on-Red from 800 to the mid-900s, and fi nallyDeadman’s Black-on-Red from the 800s into the 1000s. The production of red wares ceased in Utah by the twelfth century. They were replaced by the rise of Tsegi Orange Ware in northeast Arizona.(back to text)
*Regional diversity among the Anasazi is perhaps best and most delicately revealed by the way murals were painted inside kivas in different places. The easternAnasazi in Colorado and New Mexico tended to paint kivas to look like the inside of a decorated ceramic bowl, the encircling walls bearing the same designs you would see within a vessel. By contrast, in the west kiva interiors were painted with designs more common in baskets and on textiles. The physical construction of kivas was more or less the same across the board, but the different decoration techniques imply ethnic or social distinctions, perhaps divergent bloodlines between the eastern and western groups.(back to text)
*Because the Anasazi appear to have been matrilineal, women lived in houses formed like their mothers’ and grandmothers’, while men left behind the houses of their families when they married. In the case of this cliff dwelling, Kayenta men may have been using their own masonry techniques to replicate the structural forms of Mesa Verde for their wives and their families.(back to text)
*The lineage of colored pottery comes clearly from the north, beginning with San Juan Red Ware in southeast Utah in the eighth century, followed by Tsegi Orange Ware in Kayenta in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, then yellow ware and polychromes farther south in the fourteenth century. This forms an apparent cultural shift from north to south across this time span.(back to text)
*The entire province of mesas in northeast Arizona was a key gathering place for migrants. Although Awat’ovi, the principal pueblo on Antelope Mesa, may have had the most complete ceremonial cycle and thus the strongest regional lure, the pueblos of Oraibi and Shongopovi on the nearby Hopi mesas each attracted their own migrating clans at the time.(back to text)
*Each region of modern pueblos in the Southwest has its own kinship structure, language, governing organization, and ceremonial focus. The western pueblos ofHopi, Hano, Laguna, Acoma, and Zuni engage heavily in a katsina religion and hold ceremonies known for rain making and weather control. The eastern pueblos of Tesuque, Nambe, Pojoaque, San Ildefonso, Santa Clara, San Juan, Taos, Picuris, Sandia, and Isleta are less involved in katsinas and are better known for ceremonies dealing with curing, hunting, and warfare.(back to text)
*One might imagine that nobody ever lived in the country where this story took place, an expanse of stark, colorful clay and bleak, rocky buttes. But archaeological surveys done in the desert south of Antelope Mesa have revealed densely packed settlements now buried by dust and sand. When excavators cut trenches for a gas pipeline expansion across this region, their backhoes kept unexpectedly revealing kivas and blocks of rooms. Nearby, a great house was found among trunks of petrifi ed trees 200 million years old. The few exposed rock faces are riddled with ancient art. This story came from a well-populated place in pre-Columbian times, a signifi cant cultural juncture.(back to text)
*The same kind of spiral is found on Fajada Butte in Chaco Canyon, arranged like a clockface so that daggers of light form intentional patterns at the winter and summer solstices and the spring and autumnal equinoxes. The same spiral-and-dagger arrangement can be found at numerous places across the Colorado Plateau. Other renditions have also been documented in Texas.(back to text)
*Design motifs appearing on many polychromes of this era and region are directly related to images seen on preceding Tsegi Orange Ware from the Kayenta region. In turn orange ware images date back to much earlier red ware ceramics from southeast Utah, indicating clear relationships through geography and time from north to south.(back to text)
*Such protective behavior is also known from Antelope Mesa, in northeast Arizona, where the most sacred of a pueblo’s ceremonial paraphernalia was removed from a kiva and hidden in a nearby canyon in the fall of 1700, just before the pueblo was sacked and burned by opposing Hopi forces.(back to text)