No Farms at Chaco Canyon, Off-Road Vehicles, Lynx Surprise

A "great kiva," restored but roofless, at Chaco Canyon

¶ All boats, snowmobiles, and ATV's in Colorado have to be state-registered. Proof of ownership is required, but the state is fairly flexible about documentation.

¶ Chaco Canyon in northwest New Mexico is the site of a collection of ancient "great houses," multi-room dwellings. They were not built simultaneously, and it is unclear how many people actually lived there. And apparently they did not grow their own food, so apparently it was backpacked in by the Anasazi equivalent of serfs.  Or maybe they were willing pilgrims.

¶ With typical feline nonchalance, a lynx surprises skiers at the Purgatory ski area in southwestern Colorado. 

UPDATE, Jauary 10, 2017: A sad ending to the lynx story.

What They Drank at Chaco Canyon

Pitchers from Chaco Culture National Historic Park

Via Western Digs, more study of Anasazi pottery residue shows that people — at least some people — were not only drinking cocoa, but also the "black drink" associated with the Midwestern and Southern tribes.

The latter has caffeine, the essential ingredient for civilization — like at Cahokia.

Moreover, making both cocoa and ‘black drink’ required plants that grew in far-off climates, researchers say, indicating that the Southwest was part of an ancient ‘caffeine trade network’ that extended from the foothills of the Rockies to the heart of Mexico.

“There are no known plants in the Southwest or Northwestern Mexico that have caffeine,” said Dr. Patricia Crown, an anthropologist at the University of New Mexico who led the study.

  Kakawa in Santa Fe serves various cacao-and-chile drinks. How long until they add Yaupon holly-based "black drink?" 

Just don't use the botanical name, Ilex vomitoria.

I still think that the ancient Pueblo cuisine was pretty grim. How do you want your corn today, fresh mush or refried mush? 

Blog Stew with Corn. Just Corn. And Bigfoot

¶ The Baby Boomers? They lived about a thousand years ago. In the Four Corners area.

¶ Related: Have you ever noticed that there are no Anazasi restaurants? How many different ways can you fix corn mush? But maybe the jalapeño-filled tamales that I had yesterday are related. 

¶ I came home from a trip last November and found a young pine tree broken off at waist height. I blame the strong downslope winds from the southwest, which are a feature of winter around here.

But to the gang at Sasquatch Investigation of the Rockies, that would be a sign that the Big Guy had come by. On the other hand, here is a recent purported footprint and some other stuff from an undisclosed location in Colorado.

¶ Related: DNA samples are not being helpful for Bigfoot hunters. But you have to understand, sometimes the Big Guy is not corporeal.

House of Rain, House of Pain

National Park Service Ranger Pat Jovesama, a Hopi Indian,  set off down the canyon trail at a deceptively slow amble that still kept him ahead of the group.

It had rained hard all night, one thunderstorm after another shaking our little pop-up trailer at the campground at Navajo National Monument* in northeastern Arizona.

"Administration," he said, in his soft, low-key Hopi way, might order him to abort the ranger hike to Bétatakin Ruin if the weather looked too bad.

Setting off in the sunshine down the Betatakin cliff dwellings trail.

So he did not pause to talk about flora and fauna, except to briefly point out the Ice Age-relict stand of aspen and Douglas fir—seemingly out of place here in northeast Arizona—in one side canyon.

Following him were the couple from Tahoe with their elementary school-aged two kids (getting credit for "independent study" from their charter school—what a deal!), the couple from Middlebury, Vermont, with the rented motor home (you see so many of those in the Southwest, rented at the Phoenix airport), and the middle-aged Navajo woman, herself a former park ranger at Mesa Verde, with her two teen-aged daughters. 

Part of Tsegi Caynon on the Kayenta Plateau in NE Arizona. We were walking from the rim to the bottom.

Down, down we went, hundreds of feet, almost to the bottom of Tsegi Canyon, when the word was passed forward to Ranger Pat: the Navajo woman had sprained (or maybe broken) her ankle on the loose rocks of the trail. We gathered around where she sat with her leg straight out in front of her.

Ranger Pat was doing something with his first aid kit. The woman from Vermont offered some Motrin, which were accepted.

Dilemma. He had to stay with the injured woman until help came. Unaccompanied visitors are not allowed at Bétatakin, lest they walk off with it or something, so we could not go farther. He had radioed for help, which was coming. The rest of us should just walk back out of the canyon to our vehicles.

Rain was coming too, we could feel it. (The forecast was "80 percent chance of heavy rain.") On the descent, I had noticed that one section was just steps cut lightly into the slick rock, and I had wondered what it would be like to try to climb them in pouring rain.

I hiked out with the Vermonters, who were the fastest. The two teenagers were not far behind us. ("See you later, Mom.") At the parking area we met two park rangers unloading a folding stretcher. Three men still seemed like too few to carry a rather chunky woman up the steep canyon trail.

We offered again to help, but one ranger explained that "liability issues" prevented it. The message: We are park professionals. You are park consumers. Stay on the trail.

One more ranger was coming, so maybe with four they could break into two teams.

Bétatakin cliff dwellings, from the easy trail near the visitor center.

And then later the storms did come again, lashing and rocking the trailer, only to end in a sunny late afternoon.  For the second time, M. and I walked out to the overlook where you can see the ruin from across the canyon, which is enough for many visitors.

The woman's injury might have been a blessing, she suggested, because otherwise the storm (which spawned tornadoes elsewhere in Arizona) would have caught us hiking out of the canyon. Her pain, our gain.

I have been to many other Anasazi/Ancestral Puebloan ruins. To be frank, I was mainly curious to hear how a Hopi ranger would discuss the ruin, which the Hopi call Talastima, meaning "Place of the Corn Tassel." (The Navajo name, Bétatakin, means "House on a Ledge.")

Park Service interpreters always give a bland, non-controversial spiel, and Hopis keep secrets, but still, I wanted to hear his spin on the history.

Lacking that, however, here is a quotation from Craig Childs' excellent history House of Rain, which I reviewed earlier.

[The dwellings were occupied for less than a century. Tree-ring data reveals that] Mesa Verde ... produced no tree-cutting dates after 1280. Finally the large Kayenta sites of Kiet Siel and Betatakin saw their last construction in 1285....The Anasazi made their last attempts to hunker down, and finally no one was left. Ten years after Mesa Verde fell, Kayenta went down right behind it, like the successive toppling of dominoes, a wave of immigrants and abandonments heading south, pushing down walls as they went, uprooting everyone.

*Yes, the monument protects ruins built by the ancestors of the Hopi tribe, but the Navajos lived there later and their reservation surrounds it, hence the name, I guess.

House of Rain

M. and I are in Santa Fe, on a trip south to visit friends and soak up some warmth. Blogging will be sporadic.

One thing I want to do is to visit Salinas Pueblo Missions National Monument, which I have blasted past so many times while in a hurry on the "let's skip Albuquerque" route through central New Mexico.

There was a time when I tried to see all the Anasazi/Ancestral Puebloan sites that I could. Then I became mentally overwhelmed by the sheer complexity of it all.

It's like trying to understand Middle Eastern archaeology without even the imperfect guidance of the Old Testament about who might have done what where and when.

Then I read Craig Childs' House of Rain: Tracking a Vanished Civilization Across the American Southwest. Here is an NPR interview with him.

Childs has hiked, climbed, interviewed, and studied the prehistory of the Four Corners area (and a bit of northern Mexico), and his book begins to create a narrative that ties archaeological sites in different places together"

"The original Mogollon people were people of diverse resources," [Jeff] Reid said. "They preferred deer and rabbits in their stew rather than corn, corn, corn, corn, corn like the Anasazi did."

... Sitting in the dark, surrounded by cricket song, Reid said that his excavations brought to light a whole new way of seeing migration in the Southwest. His crews found northerly, T-shaped doorways leading into rooms where migrants were living, signs coming directly from Kayenta or Mesa Verde or even Chaco. . . . And always they kept their identities, easily visible centuries later. He thought the people from the north must have seemed pushy with their big architecture and big pots, probably religious zealots of some sort. The local hunter-gatherers were no match for these invaders, these travelers. Northerners were marrying their way in, inundating local traditions with their own, changing the whole show."

What I like equally well are passages such as this:

"I used to have notions about there being a cliff dwelling in the most isolated reaches, and people still living there, speaking a dialect of Hopi or maybe Tewa. I can frame it in my mind, winter smoke rising from a cluster of masonry rooms, the roofs freshly mended. . . . Someday I may round a corner and freeze, seeing smoke coming out of a cliff dwelling, fabric covering the windows, and a man in a denim coat shuttling a pail of water back into one of the rooms. In some of these dwellings eight hundred years of decay could be swept clean and patched in a manner of months.

So now with the warmer months ahead, there are some places that I want to see or see again. And I will visit them with House of Rain in hand.

The Anasazi Exodus

Writing in High Country News, Craig Childs profiles archaeologist Susan Ryan, who takes a new road between two views of the Anasazi, the ancient inhabitants of the Four Corners region. Not just refugees from drought or war, some of them apparently abandoned their pueblos in an orderly and ritualistic fashion.

Childs now can speak what archaeologists used to discuss only outside their offices: the evidence of war and violence, which has been known since the 1940s at least but which was not part of the official Park Service story of "peaceful ceremonialists":

[At one excavated site] The list of human remains revealed in the excavation reads like a war crimes indictment: infants, children, adults and elders, all found piled upon each other or scattered across the grounds and in the many rooms, their bones often disarticulated and thrown about. When the end came to this particular pueblo, it was sudden and decisive.

This tale of violence has become the new fashion among certain archaeologists. Evidence of prehistoric warfare has moved to the forefront: ancient towers found stashed with infants and children who were burned alive; skeletons discovered dismembered. Some researchers envision vicious thugs from Central America, roving gangs of cannibals overrunning pueblos weak from years of drought. Others imagine death cults and ritualized torture

Archaeologist Christy Turner finally blew the lid off that coverup in his book Man Corn: Cannibalism and Violence in the Prehistoric American Southwest , which reads like CSI: Mesa Verde.

Ryan, however, also found other sites where the burning of underground kivas seems to have followed the placement of offerings to the gods rather than violent attacks. She thinks some pueblos were depopulated in an orderly and planned fashion.

"There are all these theories about violence and drought," Ryan once said. "Why couldn’t it be as simple as it’s time to go? This culture is sedentary and nomadic at the same time. Maybe ecologically it makes sense so you don’t overstay your welcome. Sometimes you just up and go."

What impresses Ryan is that toward the end of the occupation here, the population skyrocketed. People were moving in from all around. Ryan thinks they might have been preparing for a mass exodus.

There is also a tale about a rattlesnake skeleton: Steve Bodio has more about it.