by Craig Childs
As I felt the plug that Dean had placed in the kiva timber, I thought of Anasazi women talking around their mealing bins. I imagined their eyes cast toward the ground, hand-polished manos resting in their laps as they agreed they could hold on no longer. They were the last surviving people in these mesas. Everyone else had fled south already. It was time to go. After that, all these cliff dwellings stood empty.
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. These people would be casually armed with rifles to keep out wanderers such as myself, and they would be carefully tending their plots of corn in the canyons through the spring, summer, and fall. In the 1930s a small faction of Hopi were politically driven out of a pueblo south of here and contemplated moving into one of the great abandoned cliff dwellings of Kayenta. The faction did not make it that far. Instead they settled only a few miles from where they were banished. But the fact lingers that they did discuss moving into a cliff dwelling that had not been occupied for eight hundred years, an implication of cultural continuity, of connection to a place. The notion will probably be spoken of again. 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 matter of months.
For now Colin and I saw no one as we continued through the canyons. People had not lived here for a very long time. One morning we climbed out, finding our way into the open sky above. We reached rolls of bedrock on the mesa top and groves of winter-bare aspens. On a high knob of rock we paused over the next canyon that cut across our path, its cliffs furrowed with alcoves. Inside one of these alcoves stood bright faces of masonry buildings, a cliff dwelling bearing well over a hundred rooms. I pulled out a pair of binoculars and peered down into what seemed to be alleys and streets where a courtyard was built nearly two hundred feet along a masonry retaining wall. No smoke came out of the hatchways, no signs of life.
Eight hundred years ago large portions of the Kayenta population had already launched into long-distance migrations. Only a skeletal society of cliff dwellers lived here, and perhaps those who remained until the last moment actually vanished in the fabled way, stepping out of their doors and never walking back in. By A.D. 1290 everyone had moved on to catch up with the others, and these canyons were vacant, places of stories and shrines left behind.
I handed the binoculars to Colin. As he studied the cliff dwelling, I looked out to a ramp of descending mesas heading south toward lower, more arid country. That is where they went. South. Looking for rain and better days.
THE GREAT PUEBLOS
ANTELOPE MESA
Antelope Mesa is the last high edge above the Painted Desert of northern Arizona, the final place of reasonable water before bolts of black buttes, before a bleak, rippled basin that goes on for a hundred miles. I was escorted across the mesa, some seventy miles south of Kayenta, in a large government truck with a V-8 engine. Tires gobbled at paprika-colored sand as we gunned our way toward a far corner of the Hopi reservation, the plant life far less lucrative than back at Kayenta. Dusty green tufts of junipers blocked our view of the horizon, so that I could not quite see where we were. I had never been here before, but I knew Antelope Mesa from glimpsing it at a distance—a long, pale block of land rising from a seemingly endless desert.
Antelope Mesa belongs to a configuration of four principal mesas spread over some thirty miles. The Hopi people dwell on the other three mesas north and west of here, which are home to many clans and several thousand residents. Meanwhile, only a handful of isolated families live on Antelope Mesa, where there are no phones, no addresses. It has not always been this way. In the fourteenth century, Antelope Mesa was a cultural center, a bastion of great pueblos bustling with trade, manufacture, and incoming migrants. By far the largest pueblos in the Southwest were once built here—up to three or four thousand rooms each, more than four times the size of Pueblo Bonito at Chaco.
We were driving out to one of these abandoned pueblos buried along the mesa’s edge. The driver, Mike Yeatts, an archaeologist for the Hopi tribe, was telling me that Antelope Mesa had once been a major trade center famous for cotton textiles and multicolored pottery. Yeatts said that in a way this single mesa had been a city in itself.
“I think this was the hub,” Yeatts explained as he drove. “You see a lot of prehistoric pottery from this region traded throughout the Southwest, and the sourcing indicates it was coming from here. I believe these people were involved in a major trade network getting their pottery down to the Phoenix basin and over in the White Mountains, and west into the Grand Canyon. It seems like a regional market society where they specialized in pottery and cotton textiles, and a population grew up around it.”
Yeatts turned left onto an unmarked road, then right onto another inconspicuous two-track of sand. The roads came and went, yet I saw no sign of anyone living here.
“What are all these roads for?” I asked.
Yeatts shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said. “Cutting juniper wood maybe. Looking for cattle.”
Yeatts took a sharp left onto a track of blown sand. The truck sank into the ground, the sheer weight of the vehicle pressing the sand down as Yeatts punched the accelerator to get us through. At the next fork he turned left, and then right after that between plumes of stunted juniper trees. There was no use in trying to memorize the route. Maybe this was Yeatts’s way of blindfolding me so that I would not be able to find my way back on my own. This is sensitive territory. There were massacres here long ago, and the Hopi have left this place quiet.
We drove through groundswells of dunes tied down at their edges by rabbitbrush and ricegrass. In a tuck between two large billows of sand, Yeatts stopped the truck. He shut off the engine and opened his door with an easy manner that suggested it did not matter if we were blocking the road. No one else would be coming by.
We were about half a mile inland from the mesa’s edge, where the wind bustled up through juniper trees. It was a warm spring wind. As we walked, approaching the open sky beyond the mesa, the dunes shrank. Bedrock appeared from under the sand, whales of reddish stone barely breaching the surface.
Yeatts stopped on a long, exposed floor of bedrock. Incised straight across it was an inch-deep groove running out to where blown sand had recently covered it. The groove looked like the trail of a finger through soft butter, something that had been neatly chiseled into the rock. I knelt and ran a finger along it.
“You’ve seen these before?” Yeatts asked.
“Yes. In Chaco Canyon and in Utah, usually associated with prehistoric roads. Do you know what they are?”
Yeatts shook his head no. “Just something I noticed. There are a number of these grooves around here.”
Chaff from dried, wind-tumbled oak leaves had collected along the groove’s slender course. Blue-green juniper berries had fallen in, all of them lined up in a row. Obviously, this served some Anasazi function, manifesting a connection between one place and another, setting a line to walk or run along, although no one seems to know exactly what these grooves were.
“I don’t think they’re well known,” Yeatts said.
“I think of them more as a Chacoan phenomenon, not something you see over here,” I replied.
“Maybe this is the boundary,” Yeatts said. “Maybe this is where Chaco met the west.”
The larger route I was taking across the Southwest had brought me back near Zedeño’s line, the division where Kayenta in the west once rubbed shoulders with Mesa Verde and Chaco in the east. If these enigmatic grooves were going to appear anywhere else in my travels, it would be here.
“There is plenty of Kayenta pottery found here, so you know there was a str
ong western influence,” Yeatts said. “Then you get iconography showing up that really stands out—images from New Mexico, from the Rio Grande. The ceramic designs painted here are radically different from what precedes them. There is something new going on in the fourteenth century, and I think it’s a result of migrants.”
In the early fourteenth century, populations around Antelope Mesa exploded as people swarmed in from the surrounding country. Kayenta migrants were coming from the north and west, while those from Mesa Verde and whatever was left of Chaco arrived from the north and east.
Yeatts and I followed bedrock grooves along the edge of the mesa, the desert extending pallid and almost featureless beyond. I began noticing potsherds on the ground—luminous yellow-orange pieces, a color I had not encountered at any previous site. They looked like little suns rising out of the ground. I reached down and picked up one of the larger sherds, a piece of a bowl. Its warm, egg yolk hue was completely unlike the cherry-colored red of the pottery I knew from north of here, and a far cry from the sharp black-on-white pottery that dominated the whole Colorado Plateau for seven hundred years. This pottery marked the arrival of the fourteenth century.*
As I studied the sherd, I commented to Yeatts on its luster, its solidness.
“You find prehistoric coal mines below most of the sites out here,” Yeatts said. “They were using coal to fire their pottery. It was a technological shift that took them from red wares and black-on-whites to these yellow wares.”
“The coal affected oxidization during firing?” I asked.
“Both oxidization and how long a high temperature was maintained,” Yeatts replied. “Wood burning reaches the peak just as it is about to collapse and after you’ve lost your main flame. Coal holds its shape, so you can get that heat and keep air going into it for a much longer period of time. That is what gives you this wonderful color. Potters were probably using the same clay as that used for white wares, but it’s the technique that is different.”
This new coal technology created an exquisite style of pottery, a hardness never before seen in Southwest ceramics. Yeatts picked up two pieces and clinked them together, producing a melodious chime.
“Nearly porcelain,” he said.
It is no surprise that a new style of pottery appeared on the border between east and west at the moment that late-thirteenth--century settlements disbanded north of here. Mesa Verde had come apart at the seams and was left empty. Kayenta, which had earlier witnessed a mass retreat to its core, also had been vacated. Heading south, the people of Mesa Verde and Kayenta no doubt mixed in their exodus. Antelope Mesa would have been hard for these travelers to resist, its edges studded with huge, highly visible pueblos. Even today the Hopi remember the place for once having high-quality textiles, beautiful ceramics, and busy ceremonies. As much as drought was a push factor urging people out of Kayenta and the Four Corners, the lure of growing civilization here in the south served as a strong pull factor.* Migrants were in motion like never before, carrying with them objects and ideas. Where travelers mingle and cultures touch one other, imagination and invention flourish. For instance, the katsina religion, which would eventually come to dominate the western Pueblo cultures, got a foothold around Antelope Mesa in the fourteenth century. At the same time, new images of water serpents, stars, clouds, and animals began to appear on pottery and in rock art here. This area became the nexus of the times, analogous to similar centers that were at the same moment being established in the Rio Grande area of northern New Mexico.
From the eleventh to the fourteenth centuries, the Anasazi rode an escalating course of history, each gathering larger than the last, each new center containing more people, bigger cross sections of ethnicities and distant societies. Antelope Mesa was the ultimate unification of the Colorado Plateau, the two Anasazi halves of east and west coming together.
As Yeatts and I walked, the pottery at our feet increased exponentially, not just exposed from the ground but actually becoming the ground, more sherds than I had ever seen before. Pieces of broken pots showed like teeth. Our pace slowed substantially, every step delicately negotiated. The terrain rose into a hill at the edge of the mesa. The hill was a fallen pueblo, and Yeatts moved onto it ahead of me, drawn by his own enthusiasm as he kept turning around to point out walls and rooms and plazas that I could hardly see. The pueblo was buried, only bare shapes showing on the surface.
Yeatts and his colleagues had been working for years putting together a map of the site, recording evidence of thousands of rooms contained within a series of perimeter walls. Even so, this was not the largest pueblo on Antelope Mesa. It was simply the one he had come to know the best.
The hill rose to a single, artificial peak, a high ring of rooms where I stepped over at least a hundred broken ceramic ladles, passing by rims and basins of bowls painted with ornate black images unlike any I had seen before—wildly involuted designs full of arcs and geometry, and broken images of animals that looked to be influenced by prehistoric groups living in New Mexico at the time. Yeatts reached the high point first. He turned to face me coming up behind him. “I think it looks kind of like a great house,” Yeatts commented.
I stopped and peered at the rise ahead of me. It was built like a huge throne. Yeatts was right, although I had not noticed this until he mentioned it. The site looked like archaeological mounds from the eleventh and twelfth centuries found all across the desert in northwest New Mexico, in the core territory of Chaco.
“I have nothing to back it up,” Yeatts said. “It just strikes me as a great house.”
Whatever it was, this pueblo was a major site. The first wide-scale construction appears to have taken place in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, as evidenced by the abundance of black-on-white pottery from that age cropping up between the yellow ware sherds. The pueblo later blossomed into a center for trade, textile work, and coal-fired ceramic production. The exchange routes to and from here were obviously expansive, with locally fired yellow wares showing up all around the Southwest.
I walked to the top of the ruined pueblo, enthralled by the possibility that an ancient and far-flung great house had become the nucleus of a village and then a massive pueblo into the fourteenth century that continued to prosper until as late as the eighteenth century before it was finally abandoned.
Unlike most Anasazi settlements that have been empty for many centuries, pueblos on Antelope Mesa and the Hopi mesas have been occupied well into historic times. In fact, Hopi pueblos that have been around since ancient times—Walpi, Oraibi, and Shongopovi—are still lived in today. That is, the Anasazi never left them.
The Hopi are direct descendants of ancient pueblo dwellers. They have old names for the places I had been traveling, Hopi names: Kawestima (Kayenta), Pokanghoyat (Comb Ridge region), Waakiki (Hovenweep), Tawtoykya (Mesa Verde), Hoo’ ovi (Aztec), and Yupkoyvi (Chaco). The famous question of what happened to the Anasazi is partly answered here. They are now called Hopi, living on an island of a reservation, a cluster of mesas settled long ago. They are the ones who did not leave.
Antelope Mesa and its sister mesas of Hopi stand like castles in a moat of desert. Approaches from the south, east, and west are guarded by barren, difficult ground as far as the eye can see—formidable land for any army to cross, with little protective cover. In the seventeenth century, during the Pueblo Revolt, a number of native pueblos in New Mexico were briefly abandoned as residents fled to the Hopi mesas, escaping the wrath of well-armed Spanish troops. Though they had dissimilar customs and spoke languages far different from Hopi, they were given refuge here, offering their ceremonial, agricultural, or military services in exchange. This region has long been used as a stronghold when people were in motion, slipping out from under drought or war, looking for sanctuary or a prophesied center place.
The clans that now live on the Hopi mesas near Antelope Mesa each came to this part of Arizona along its own migratory path, arriving any time over the past thousand years; clans named Flute, Sand, Co
rn, et cetera. Some came from Anasazi heritage on the Colorado Plateau, and others arrived from as far away as the Phoenix basin or even Mexico. Some tell of tribulations in southwest Colorado, where they barely survived an onslaught of thirteenth-century butchery and warfare before making it to Hopi. Others remember walking from New Mexico with their families centuries ago, carrying what pottery and blankets they could, bringing their own ceremonial inventory to add to these isolated pueblos.
The ancient Hopi symbol for migration is a spiral or a swastika, an icon seen in rock art and pottery all over the Southwest: arms turning round and round leading toward a focal point, scattered clans finding their way to a foretold center. After years of searching, after Chaco, Mesa Verde, Kayenta, and regions far beyond, the Hopi say they finally found the center of the universe here in northern Arizona, which explains why they have not left.
I once met with a council of elders at the Hopi town of Kykotsmovi, not far west of Antelope Mesa. A well-spoken middle-aged Hopi man translated for me, passing my words into the staccato consonants of the Hopi language. Everyone understood English. They used a translator to give them time to think and discuss how they wanted to respond—or not. I was here to let them know that a white man, a pahana, was passing through their reservation, traveling along their ancestral routes. Coming to tell them this seemed the proper thing to do.
Old men looked on, most regarding me as if I were a passing cloud. Unfolding the origami of my words at a wooden table, I explained that I had spent my life traveling through the far reaches of the Southwest, where I inevitably found the remains of a buried civilization—ancient roads and villages, burned ceremonial centers. I said that I disturbed these sites as little as possible, but I had questions, needling curiosities. I did not avoid these places. I walked straight to them.
