by Craig Childs
Now we were in northwest Mexico based on rumors. Asking around, we had heard from a Mexican rancher that he had found a cave up in this canyon. Inside this cave, half-buried in dust, he had found a pouch of beans. In isolated, homegrown Spanish this rancher had described a small, finely woven sack tied closed, beans hard as pebbles inside. The pouch was faded, but he could see that it was decorated, probably woven on a loom with dyed strands of cotton. I had handed the man a pen and my open journal, where he had drawn what he remembered of the design, geometry similar to images I had seen on ceramic vessels and carved into rock in the prehistoric Southwest. This was the same kind of image I had once seen woven into the soles of an exquisite pair of white sandals on the Colorado Plateau and cut into a threshold stone in Spruce Tree House at Mesa Verde.
We had not asked the rancher where exactly this cave was; he had given us enough information. We had simply followed the nearest road marked on a map, an eastbound line through the Sierra San Luís, looking for whatever else these ancient weavers might have left behind. Having tracked the movement of prehistoric populations, I believed that evidence of their passage should appear just south of the border in places where water runs.
This area has long been considered a pre-Columbian no-man’s-land. Archaeologists in the United States have largely ignored northwest Mexico. Yes, there are a handful of impressive sites in the area, but overall the Mexican border is believed to have been a sort of cultural void between the Southwest proper and Mesoamerica. This bias has lived on even as research has begun to uncover signs of substantial civilization along key waterways coming off the Sierra Madre just south of the United States. We were here to see for ourselves, following a hunch into the Sierra San Luís, which I believed was a stepping-stone between the Sierra Madre and the Sky Island mountains of southern Arizona, a route that eventually led over the Pinaleno Mountains, up Bonita Creek, into the highlands, and onto the distant deck of the Colorado Plateau.
At half a mile an hour we drove along the tapering bottom of the deep canyon. Stones clattered under our trucks. Just ahead the mass of a flood-driven tree blocked the creek; burled roots hung in the air. We got out and considered our options, standing mid-calf in cool water. Desert vegetation grew above us. Fierce rays of agaves protruded from ledges. It was a long way to the pines, up into the heart of the mountains where we were heading. The fallen tree needed to go.
I could see a few bends ahead, groves of cottonwoods, alders, and walnut trees crowding along the creek. I reached my cupped hands into the water and washed my face as if trying to cleanse myself of these metal containers we had driven so far into the wilderness.
Eugene came marching up on foot, the slab of a backpack hanging from his shoulders. When he saw our predicament, he stopped and scowled at us from a distance. He knew what we were going to have to do. We got out a tow strap and tied one end around the tree, knotting it into a Medusa’s head of a root burl. I hooked the other end onto the front of my truck and tried rocking the obstacle free. Regan directed outside, keeping me from lurching back into a hole, while I bucked back and forth, moving between the accelerator and the clutch. All I did was muddy the water and fill the air with the acrid smell of a burning clutch. The tree would not budge.
I looked out the window, back downstream. Along the inside bend of the canyon was a minor high spot we had passed, a logjammed sandbar. Maybe we could make a ten-point turn there—hoping not to get stuck sideways.
“Let’s get this tow strap off,” I said. “We’ll get the trucks turned around back there. We can leave them stashed. I don’t think a flood’s coming anytime soon.”
Darin took a deep breath, and I saw his body letting go of his attachment to his vehicle. He knew as well as I that one cannot predict floods with much accuracy. We backed down the creek, tailpipes gasping steam. Eugene stood in the creek and watched.
Crunching up onto hulls of bone-dry driftwood, we managed to get both trucks turned around. I pulled the emergency brake and shut off the engine under the narrow shade of alder trees, their trunks lavished with flood debris.
We took what we needed—several days’ worth of gear and food stuffed into backpacks—and left the trucks there. Eugene led the way. Where the canyon widened, our sandals slapped wet across floors of curled, crackling leaves, half cups of native walnut shells littered about. Floods had not cleaned this place out since at least five months earlier. We let go of our trucks for now and slipped up through the canyon.
We set our first camp in the timber kill of an old flood, big trunks of cottonwoods held in each other’s arms. We slept without tents, smoothing beds of leaves and sand beside the water.
The next morning we moved on, dropping our packs every half hour, every ten minutes, to scramble up and explore high caves, their deeply sheltered floors dusty and covered with broken rock. Bighorn sheep had been wintering in them, leaving behind gray clods of droppings and scuffed sleeping beds. None of these caves showed any signs of human occupation. We found not even a scrap of pottery or a sliver of glassy jasper or chalcedony brought in to make tools.
In the pleasant heat of the afternoon we came upon a deep pool along the creek, sunlight sinking into its bottle-glass depths. We stripped off our clothes and dove in, stung by the cold of the water below. I swam across and climbed out, dripping on the warm cliff stones, then continued hand over foot up to a craggy ledge, where I sat. My three companions glided underwater, rising for breaths in flurries of bubbles, laughter, and splashes, hair thrown back. There was no way we would have gotten the trucks this far, and I was relieved by this fact: no sign of a road, no way a machine could reach into this canyon.
I looked high, seeing caves arcing up the walls and black crevices that I thought might hold cliff dwellings. But I could see no dwellings, no ruined footers.
The next day was the same, and the day after that, the canyon branching into long, slender arms of tributaries. As we traveled, I began to wonder whether I had been mistaken believing I would find archaeological remains here. I thought this place would be rife with signs of prehistoric culture, at least a bit of black soot on the cave ceilings, flecks of charcoal on the floor. But I was going on just a tad of evidence, a bag of beans in a cave, an insignia woven into the bag’s fabric.
A library of study materials had come along in our packs, and we sat in the evening reading, our camp nested into gray boulders toppled one upon the next. The boulders were round and smooth, polished by water into glossy eggs. We had a fire down between them, flickering light sending monstrous shadows up the canyon walls. We read by this shifting light, each of us reclining on a boulder, packs used to soften our backs. This was an after-dinner ritual, taking an hour or two to flip silently through diagrams and pages printed darkly with words. A human skeleton has been documented at a burial site south of here, nearly all of its bones, including the face of the skull, painted red. Not far from these human remains, ancient water diversions have been recorded along mountainsides, holding back soil for farming plots. Explorers who came through in the nineteenth century told of spectacular ruins in remote canyons, sites that have been all but forgotten.
Overall, little data was available on northwest Mexico. We had a few reports with us that dated back to the 1800s and some from the 1950s. More recent work from the ’80s, ’90s, and 2000s came from the archaeologists María Elisa Villalpando and Beatriz Braniff, who consider this region not so much part of the American Southwest, but the northwesternmost reaches of Mesoamerica. They both refer to this part of the world as the Northwest rather than the Southwest. It is telling that neither of these researchers lives in the United States, their frame of geography coming from the south rather than the north.
Over the years research in Mexico has steadily extended Mesoamerican civilization northward, from the Toltec and Aztec regions up toward the northwest Mexican states of Jalisco, Nayarit, Durango, and Sinaloa. Places once seen as cultural gaps are now recognized as centers of highly complex prehistoric societies
rich with their own vastly engineered settlements. Hillsides in these northern states have been found leveled off and topped with houses, ball courts, and even minor pyramids.
Meanwhile, archaeologists in the United States have been bearing southward, dissolving previous cultural boundaries as they discover chains of continuity between once distant geographic realms. Pueblo sites have been discovered outside Safford and along the San Pedro River in southeast Arizona, looking as though they were taken directly off the Colorado Plateau. Mesoamerica and the Southwest are being brought ever closer together, and we had come to the Sierra San Luís to see if they actually might touch.
The word Anasazi had grown fainter with every mile I had traveled south, silenced under the Hopis’ Hisatsinom and Ancestral Puebloan, muffled through the thick pines of the Mogollon Highlands, taken in by Salado. It was lost to prehistoric marriage among the many different peoples inhabiting southeast Arizona, but still it existed, visible in pottery designs, in kivas, in mobile pueblos.
Pages were turned slowly around the fire, notes scribbled in the margins. Our light dimmed until we were reading near the tips of our noses. Someone got up and broke some driftwood, stirred up sparks, and gave us another ten minutes of good light.
When the fire again dwindled, I set down the paper I’d been reading and leaned back onto the boulder. A path of stars swayed over the canyon. Our fire fell to coals. No one got up for more wood.
Following the creek together in the middle of the day, we found a place for lunch under a stone ledge overhang. Darin hunted into the shade and found a hole hand-ground out of the bedrock. It was a smooth cylinder worn straight down like a posthole, used to crush grains and seeds. Nearby was another and another. We gathered around with serious grins of discovery. We had been looking for anything, a simple sign of humans. This was our first find. We abandoned lunch and began creeping through this shelter eroded from the canyon wall, scrabbling our fingers in fallen bedrock and black wood rat droppings. We came up with numerous thumbs of corncobs and several knots and loops made of plant fibers.
Grinding hole and grinding stone found in the Sierra San Luís protected by an overhanging cliff wall. REGAN CHOI
Curved flakes of gourd skins appeared from the dust, and several wooden topknots from squash. Each item was announced, and we gathered around it, passing a flake of worked stone from one set of hands to the next, turning seed husks and corncobs in our fingers. The amount of corn was impressive. We counted the rows on each cob we found, coming up with different numbers, inferring that each was its own genetic strain. I knew of a site not far south of here where pre-Columbian corn had been analyzed, revealing its age to be around four thousand years old, some of the first domesticated corn to come up from the south.
Corn—the rudiment of Southwest culture—was first cultivated in the Tehuacán Valley of Mexico about five thousand years ago. Derived from a tropical grass that still grows in Central America and southern Mexico, the domestic version known as Zea mays reached the Southwest around the fourth millennium B.C. (although the date keeps getting pushed back by new discoveries). It followed a route up from the Sierra Madre across the stepping-stones of the Sky Islands. A corn sample thirty-seven hundred years old was found at the head of Bonita Creek between the town of Safford and Point of Pines. Farther north along this passage of corn is a stash on the Colorado Plateau, immediately north of Antelope Mesa, dating to nearly four thousand years old, defining a clear walkway of ancient agricultural motion.
Most early crops of corn, beans, and squash came into these northern regions from southern Mexico, appearing in a slow fashion that suggests seeds were being passed along by groups of mobile hunter-gatherers rather than by any concerted cultural effort. Then, around A.D. 400, there came a sudden rush of new crops into the Southwest. Cotton, jack beans, green-striped cushaw squash, and warty squash appeared in one fell swoop as if an arrow had shot up from the south, a firm route established between Mesoamerica and the Southwest. Along with this push came kiva-style pit-houses on the Colorado Plateau and the first noteworthy gatherings of people and architecture at Chaco Canyon. People who had been relatively isolated in the Southwest were suddenly connected with a much larger civilization far to the south.
Just as suddenly and at the same time, amaranth, a grain native to the Southwest, first appeared in the Tehuacán Valley of southern Mexico. Turquoise mined in New Mexico showed up in Guatemala. A reciprocal flow had begun.
We noticed that this cave had no potsherds whatsoever. Ceramics did not show up in this region until the earliest centuries A.D. I wondered if this was one of the old sites, a stopover for corn four thousand years ago. Even without cliff dwellings or kivas, we knew we were on a route of some sort, perhaps the very bridge between Mesoamerica and the Southwest we had been searching for. Instead of finding a sign of northern people on their way south, we seem to have found southern corn on its way north. Turning corncobs in my fingers, I sensed lines of travel pushing and pulling across the Americas.
After an hour of animated searching—crawling on the ground, laying aside spiderwebs with our fingers—we returned to our lunches. Dusting off our hands on our pants, we sat in the shade and the dirt. Regan pulled a knife from her pack and slivered open an apple, cut it into fourths, and distributed the pieces. I broke a hard block of sweaty cheese and shared it. A can of tuna fish was passed around, the tuna scraped out with a hunting knife, with an index finger, with a stick.
I balanced a cracker loaded with tuna on my knee and leaned back against a rock that had fallen from the shelter’s ceiling. There was no sign of architecture, and nothing leading me to believe that anyone had poked into this cave more recently than a few thousand years ago. This cave was meager compared to the others we had seen, just an arc of shade in the rock, a place for simple convenience rather than a place to live for a long time. But it had been used.
“We should go south,” I said, looking out where the creek ran thin over white cobbles. “Get deeper into the mountains. What do you think?”
Eugene said, “We’ll get lazy, all this water. I’m up for going deeper.”
Regan looked at the wink of sky visible through the canyon outside the cave. She was heartened to be here, to find this site of corncobs, this place of seclusion and running water. She would have been content exploring the Sierra San Luís for another couple of weeks. But she, too, was thinking about the south.
Darin concurred.
Beautiful as this place was, we needed to get back to our trucks and keep moving.
THE CITY
PAQUIMÉ
There are not many lights between far mountain ranges in the lower Chihuahuan Desert. Llanterías, tar-paper tire vendors with no electricity, sit like washed-up bones along the side of the highway at night. On this arid, subtropical plain flanking the Sierra Madre in northwest Mexico, the highway is mostly empty, oncoming headlights rare. AM radio stations fade in and out, picking up in sequence a symphony from Tucson, an avid polka from somewhere in Mexico, and then a theatrical preacher broadcasting out of El Paso through a bath of static.
The passing desert is nothing but darkness. If you are familiar with the land, you know that out there stands a conspicuous hill. The hill is old, its top built up many centuries ago. It is a high lookout with a gently graded ramp spiraling up to its peak, a ceremonial procession worn now into ruins. Atop this hill is a stack of rubble left from a round tower that once had four symmetrical rooms built within. In daylight, standing upon this load of fallen stones, you can see roads in the surrounding country—not just Mexican two-tracks but ancient roads as broad and faded as those of Chaco. Not much relation to Chaco, some scholars will quickly suggest, as if the Colorado Plateau and northern Mexico should not be discussed in the same sentence.
From atop this impressive hill in northwest Mexico, you can also see numerous high points in the distance, and from each of these you can see many more. Within the local area, about fifty miles in all directions, twenty-four s
pecific mounds are in direct view of one another. If you were to walk to the tops of these mounds, you would find human-made platforms, small pyramids, or stone circles, the stones having been split by intense heat. Fires were once lit on these points, lights that would have been visible like sudden starbursts from miles away, messages crossing great distances in a flicker. At the hub of this faraway signal network is this single, round tower.
In turn, this masonry tower can be seen by a crucial site, a prehistoric city larger and more tightly packed than anything preceding it in the Southwest. It is the fallen center of Paquimé, and among its eroded quarters stands a high room with a narrow window conspicuously installed in its corner. If you were to look through this window from a seat worn by centuries of sitting, you would see the tower in the dry distance. Certainly, the landscape around Paquimé was orchestrated so that the tower could be seen, the hub of a signal relay.
Back in the 1970s an American researcher named Charles Di Peso ambitiously excavated 317 of Paquimé’s 2,000 central rooms, and one night he lit on fire a dead-dry yucca to see how far its light might carry. Word came back that it could be seen clearly across twenty-five miles, and Di Peso figured that if it had been more than just a yucca, it would have been visible from much farther away. He believed, like researchers who came after him, that these high points represent a complex signaling system, an assertion borne out by more recent satellite-based geographic analysis. Line-of-sight connections around Paquimé appear to have been intentionally arranged with repeating patterns so that if one relay went down, a message could still be transmitted by others. Whatever message this might have been, these researchers say, whether military or ceremonial or both, it must have been very important.
