by Craig Childs
After tea we got in my truck and drove out of a gravel parking lot, keeping the headlights off. I could not really see the road, but I did not turn the headlights on as we left the campground, following a black corridor of crackled asphalt. The lights would have been blinding in this sleepy blue dawn. Better just to feel our way along at seven miles per hour.
The inside of my truck was in wretched condition. Cough drops and loose change occupied the beverage holder. The clock showed some obscure time having nothing to do with any other clock in the world. Points of books poked at our sides, and the floorboards and bench seat were cluttered with disheveled papers and folders wrinkled and water stained. The cab smelled of motor oil and rancid nuts. The passenger’s seat belt was inaccessible. This was my library, my den.
The road began to appear outside the windshield. Park signs became visible, black obelisks of regulations and friendly information about Chaco Canyon. After a few miles we rolled to a stop in front of a locked gate, turned off the engine, and got out. We leaned against the hood watching morning come on.
A landmark stood alone before us, Fajada Butte. It looked like a telescope observatory with a slightly round head standing in clear view of the sky, evenly distanced from the surrounding cliffs. As would be expected from any observatory, Fajada Butte’s stone faces are marked with ancient symbols carved into bare sandstone. A number of these insignias are oriented toward the sky, pointing directly at the sunrise during certain key months or inscribed by the full moon at the beginning of every lunar standstill cycle. They each have a specific purpose.
The more closely I have looked at Chaco’s craftsmanship—its rock art and its architecture—the more I have thought it to be the work of mathematicians and astronomers. Windows and doorways were built like compass arrows, and each great house lies on an axis pointing to particular celestial events, as if the people who came here carefully calibrated themselves with the seasons.
We leaned on the truck hood, watching a pink glaze creep across Fajada Butte’s top. The sun would be rising in an hour or so, impaling everything it touched. It was June, and that sun would soon be hot enough to bake any trace of moisture right out of the ground.
A park ranger had told me that when he moved to Chaco, sunrises became his specialty. It became a pastime of his, like morning prayer, to go to particular spots where, at certain times of the year, he knew the sunrise would be dramatically framed by shapes on the horizon. He kept track of the first shoestrings of light slipping through arches and boulder gaps, tracing them to where, for a moment, they touched a pointed rock tip or a hole in a cliff wall. He said that this pursuit felt natural in this particular land, with the sky so huge overhead and the horizon picketed with cliffs and buttes. You can’t help looking for the peculiar way the sun rises from one day to the next.
Apparently, the same sort of behavior was going on a thousand years ago. At least eleven great houses appear to have been designed to be architectural calendars, letting the sun or moon cast its light through their rooms, windows, and doors in a premeditated fashion. Some are oriented toward the 18.6-year lunar standstill cycle, others toward the spring and fall equinoxes.* When the sun reaches its daily apex, the center wall of the largest great house casts no shadow at all, regardless of the day of the year. Whatever is known or not known about the people who built here, it is at least certain that they were gripped by a profound order, imbued with an enduring sense of time and procession. Perhaps this is inevitable for anyone living beneath the sky. The sun rolls through a perpetual cycle, winter returning to winter returning to winter, and lunar rhythms span the heavens as if following a mathematical algorithm. It is only a matter of time before people on the ground, especially those without electric lights, notice all these things. Nearly every civilization has observed the odd syncopation of eclipses, recognizing that the moon and the sun are disks of exactly the same size and that the planets occasionally turn against the heavenly drift, every certain number of years or months pushing back through the stars. The period we now live in, the twenty-first century, is perhaps the only time in human history when common people have held so little knowledge of the sky.
As if trying to cobble some of this knowledge together, Adam and I had come this morning of June 21, the summer solstice, to see the sunrise. We were here at the turning of the annual tide—the longest day of the year, when the sun rises at its northernmost point in the sky, reaching the farthest swing of its pendulum. The sun has nowhere to go from here but south, swinging back toward winter.
The morning was absolutely silent, not a stir of a breeze as Fajada Butte’s flanks began to glow. A second vehicle arrived and parked behind us. The driver turned off the engine but did not get out. And then a third car arrived. Car after car began to appear, stopping one behind the other, until about forty of them made a long train along the broad floor of Chaco Canyon. People were gathering this morning to pay attention to time in a way that is steadily being forgotten.
Of course the ancient calendars of Chaco could be nothing more than a coincidence of neatly done architecture. Most American towns and cities, for example, are laid out on north-south grids, imbuing our daily backyards and sidewalks with apparent cosmological significance. I imagine that if we started looking, we could find beams of light breaking between fence posts on the solstice, illuminating bird feeders and water spigots, and moonrises that chart their way across windowsills with extraordinary accuracy. Some people argue that this is the case with Chaco. I once visited a pair of researchers who were convinced otherwise.
In 2000 John Stein and Rich Friedman were charged with the task of remapping Chaco Canyon, building upon plane-table maps made in the 1970s. Using more recent technology and a new set of questions, they discovered a rigid and fundamental order in all levels of the structures at Chaco, a master plan of alignments that had never before been recognized. They worked in an office cluttered nearly to the ceiling with folders and scrolls of maps, a back room of the sheriff’s department in Gallup, New Mexico. Most people working at the department were unaware that these men were even there, that in the back of their building the cultural apparatus of an entire civilization was being pieced back together.
Friedman sat before a bank of computer screens that rose from stacks of books and rolled-up maps. His hands moved from one keyboard to the next as images flashed onto the screens, one map and then another, some made into three-dimensional re-creations of archaeological sites, others flat-plan views showing lines of ancient roads and great-house walls projected through each other like neural synapses. Hoisted on my hip was my baby son, Jasper, who sputtered and squeaked at these maps. To my side stood my wife, Regan, complimenting Friedman from over his shoulder, appreciative of the many layers of data that he had made so visually attractive.
Stein stood back and interpreted what we were seeing. He explained that in the most recent remapping they had found hills in Chaco Canyon where there should not naturally be hills, places that must have been built by humans, so weathered now that hardly anything remains of them but heaps of earth. He said that ramps are barely visible on some of these hills, and some have steps leading toward their tops. They discovered that these hills were lined up with the great houses, which in turn were lined up with various heavenly features. Previously, the hills had been dismissed as indecipherable, left off the archaeological maps because no one knew what to call them. Now that Stein could see them clearly, he thought of them as small pyramids, human-made mounds capped by thin masonry veneers. Not living quarters, not structures with rooms or roofs, they may have been places just to stand and look, viewing platforms from where you could see your exact location in this cultural and earthen labyrinth of Chaco.
“Nothing is out of place here, nothing arbitrary,” said Friedman, shoulders hunched over one of the keyboards, face turned up to the computer glow. “The way we can see it now, everything has some sort of relationship to something else.”
The internal structures of buildings s
eemed to incorporate geometries of a much larger composition. Stein explained that if the scale of one’s perspective is limited to one building, there may be no apparent meaning in certain angles, alignments, or positions of architectural elements. But if you put it all together on a map, if you extend the lines of interior rooms and walls and the pivots of kivas out for miles in all directions, you see that they match up with lines extending out of other buildings, as if they were all formed by a single idea.
Stein and Friedman were genuinely excited about their work, voices charging ahead of them as they unraveled the many details they had brought to light. From reading their reports I knew they had a peculiar eye for detail. By profession, Friedman is a geologist, which gives him an edge on seeing how these sites fit into the land. Stein is a longtime Southwest archaeologist. He coauthored the maps of Chaco from the 1970s, having been present during an era when teams of fieldworkers, drunk on discovery, went driving and walking over every hill and dale in northwest New Mexico. These teams mapped whatever prehistoric roads were big enough to see, measured every mound of a great house moldering away in the desert.
Stein had wanted to go back to Chaco ever since. He was confident that if he looked more closely, he would find something different. He and Friedman walked the land again and in their office sorted through black-and-white photographs taken for a soil survey in the 1930s. They also looked at recent multispectral imagery acquired by satellites, showing shapes on the ground that can no longer be detected by the naked eye. Up from the bare earth rose a network of human-made contours and patterns. Friedman and Stein saw an incredible amount of earth that had been moved and formed, mesas sculpted into courts and ramps and platforms. They were now performing the tricky work of mapping how the people of a lost civilization might have once seen their universe, the concrete layout of their capital.
Staring at these computerized maps, Stein said, “Chaco is the center of a web, a half-created and half-natural landscape where everything seems to line up. You have strands radiating out from Chaco all over. And there are nodes, various outlying centers that are focuses within the web, and I think they’re all intentionally interlaced with each other. There are certain places where at times of the day when the light is right, you can go out and see the landscape is literally made of lines radiating everywhere.”
Friedman said over his shoulder, “It’s a ritual landscape.”
What Friedman meant was that people had tied themselves to points on the horizon and points in the sky. They incorporated their lives into the entire surrounding landscape in an institutional fashion—a ritual landscape. Seeing image after image of perfectly proportioned sites on the computer screens, symmetries stretched over miles, I envisioned a fundamentalist nation of Anasazi, a single ideology rising into a civilization of arid monuments.
“Could it be possible that you’re just making all this up, seeing things that aren’t there?” I asked.
Stein shook his head quickly. “I’m confident we’re not doing that. We have enough empirical pieces to the puzzle to know this is real. It’s not like an artifact you can pick up and take back to the lab, but it’s there. It’s real.”
Friedman made a couple of keystrokes and called up dissected images of one of the maps to show how he had constructed each layer of data. He had made sure to cover his tracks with abundant research. There was no lack of data to support his conclusions.
I handed Jasper over to Regan, who soothed him into a trance.
Stein said to Friedman, “Play that sunrise video.”
While Friedman worked the keyboard, Stein looked at my family and me and said, “This will blow your minds.”
While his program loaded, Friedman explained that Navajo students had filmed the sunrise on the winter solstice, looking straight along a processional, a road carved into the ground about a thousand years ago, barely visible anymore. At first I could not see anything on the screen. Then I saw a few streaks of light and recognized the dark silhouette of a landmark, a square-faced butte. It was beginning to show in the dawn light, the movie playing several times faster than the customary length of a sunrise. It was a live filming, unlike the digital imagery Friedman had shown until now. We all stared as if commanded, unable to withdraw. Even Jasper stared unmoving at this accelerated dawn.
As the sun came up over the horizon, it lifted at a steep angle toward the butte, and then the light spread. Seeing the sun roll up the butte at such a speed was oddly nauseating, the world spinning too fast for my eyes. It finally mounted the butte, its bright circle cut right in half. At that moment the shadow of the butte fired across the land, falling straight along the prehistoric causeway as if the sun’s path and that of the causeway had become a single entity. There could be little doubt that this was intentionally orchestrated, an event to be seen only on December 21, when the sun reaches its southernmost point on the horizon.
As the movie ended, Stein and Friedman both simply shrugged.
I thought that the average person living around Chaco in the eleventh century might have been unaware of the cultural significance attached to such an alignment, leaving that to the masons and priests. Like those of us with cosmologically oriented sidewalks and backyards, our capitol buildings aimed in the cardinal directions, some people might notice the strict arrays spreading all around, but only in passing. The alignments sink into our subconscious, a knowledge of arrangement quietly cradling us at every moment, speaking to a deeper, almost religious order underlying our own civilization.
Stein said, “I think Chaco itself is a mnemonic for the Anasazi cosmos, an extension of it.”
When it was time for us to leave, the sheriff and his deputies had already gone home for the day. The hallways were silent. With handshakes and waves, and a stolen pinch of Jasper’s cheek, Stein and Friedman shuffled me and my family out a back door and into the parking lot near the Dumpsters. The two of them stayed inside, heading back down the hallway as the unmarked door closed behind them, and prepared for another evening of work, eureka flashes arcing out their windows.
As Adam and I waited in the line of cars, Fajada Butte glowed brighter by the moment. A Park Service vehicle made its way to the front, an official white pickup. A Navajo woman got out, fully dressed in forest green Park Service attire—the new ceremonial dress at Chaco. Her black hair, braided down her back, was streaked with silver. She unlocked the gate. The line of cars began to move, a procession of coal-fire taillights. Like proud baton twirlers, Adam and I led the thirty-mile-per-hour parade along a brightening road, where rubble mounds and walls of great houses rose around us.
The parking lot at the other end was a madhouse—no possible way to get that many vehicles in there. The Park Service had rangers and volunteers out waving their arms as if directing airplanes to their terminals, sending all the vehicles—RVs, a school bus, unmarked government cars, and numerous private cars and trucks—into long lines along the road.
We had come from around the world to an oversize kiva called Casa Rinconada. Here, at sunrise, the first light to enter a certain window in a masonry sidewall would cast an orange rectangle onto the opposite wall. This rectangle of light would sit perfectly inside a rectangular niche, then drift slowly, changing shape slightly over several minutes, until it fit exactly into another nearby niche. Everyone’s calendars and watches could be synchronized.
Casa Rinconada is larger than most kivas. In the nomenclature of Southwest archaeology, it is called a great kiva, a perfect circle sixty feet across. Regardless of its size, it has the same features as nearly all kivas on the Colorado Plateau from New Mexico to Nevada, the geographic extent of the Anasazi. In addition to size, there are a few regional variations on the theme of the circular kiva, such as those with floor plans shaped like a D and a rectangular form that became popular in later years. But apart from their different shapes and sizes, all prehistoric kivas share distinct characteristics. They are generally subterranean (or at least blocked deeply into a masonry superstructure)
, have encircling interior benches, and have uniformly articulated ventilation systems. The one thing found in every kiva floor—uniformly just off the center—is a sipapu, a small hole said to be a passage from the underworld to this world.
View into an excavated great kiva directly across the wash from Casa Rinconada. REGAN CHOI
Standing inside Casa Rinconada a thousand years ago would have been like being in a dark, underground sphere, an echo chamber sealed with smoothly plastered walls. Its ceiling would have consisted of timbers corbeled into each other to form a dome held up by four pillars, each a massive pine tree weighing a ton. The only light inside would have been from a fire, or from shafts of sunlight coming through narrow apertures set high along the walls.
Now this kiva was open to the sky, its roof having long ago collapsed and been cleared away by twentieth-century excavators. About sixty of us moved slowly up the trail toward the kiva, a human-made hill lifted high enough to catch first light. The sun was still half an hour from coming up. Adam and I reached the top of the site and looked over a chest-high wall. Below we could plainly see the round floor that had once been kept in darkness. Now it was filling with blond morning light. The floor contained an orderly puzzle of cleanly cut stone furnishings: platforms, boxes, and solid, round pieces of masonry standing like altars, all of which had been unearthed by excavators and reinforced by modern masons. No one was allowed in there: park rules.
What once occurred in such a place is unknown, but there is speculation. Artifacts found in great kivas are mostly ritual in nature, floors bristling with beads and shells with very little sign of domestic activity. The original builders had drilled holes in the ends of certain load-bearing timbers, placed handfuls of polished turquoise inside, and capped the holes with a bit of putty. Caches of artifacts were hidden in the walls, including hundreds of bear paws and mountain lion claws. From all this, it is widely believed that great kivas were the ceremonial mainstays of the Anasazi. Perhaps dancers’ feet pounded the floor as priests descended in radiant macaw feather robes. Any story could be imagined this morning in the brightening desert.
