House of Rain

by Craig Childs

  Some time ago I learned to use Lekson’s name with care when speaking among archaeologists. For the most part others squirm at his theories. Why, exactly, I have trouble seeing. I do not wholly agree with Lekson, but his ideas seem to be pointing in the right direction. It is true, Paquimé and Chaco are a spectacular two-of-a-kind among the thousands of lesser archaeological sites identified across the Southwest. They certainly have their differences, with their own regional influences and varied scales of production. The mention of their similarities, however, causes many archaeologists to squirm. There is somehow a need for Chaco to be its own isolated entity in the southwest United States and for Paquimé to be its own entity in northwest Mexico. The Chaco Meridian threatens that need, challenging something at the core of Southwest archaeology.

  On the surface Lekson’s theory of the Chaco Meridian is not mild-mannered enough for traditional Southwest archaeology. This has long been a gentlemen’s science. The late and eminently respected Emil Haury, who worked some hellishly hot digs in Arizona, was said never to have cursed, even after taking strong plugs of whiskey at the end of a field season. The Chaco Meridian is too boisterous for this institution, leaping onto the stage without remorse or apology, claiming a much more spectacular and calculating civilization in the American Southwest than most had imagined.

  If, indeed, an organized group of Chacoans walked a straight line for four hundred miles carrying their whole civilization to Mexico without missing a beat, then erected an incomparable urban monument once they got there, these ancient people were not the small-town folk—the rural weavers and potters—they are so often portrayed to be. Reframing them as a vastly complex amalgam of cultures that had the sky and earth accurately mapped, moving political forces across great distances, changes the whole picture.

  What I hear in the most guttural responses from Lekson’s opponents is a defensive fear that goes beyond mere archaeology. I believe that his theory threatens our very identity as a modern civilization. We are accustomed to thinking of these ancient people as different, as old, while we are new, improved. We have forms of mobility and wide-scale cultural sophistication truly unique in history, right? This is why the period in the Americas before 1492 is generally called prehistory, a time before time, before history began. Stone Age people were nothing like what we are today in our global village. Right?

  The ceramicist balanced on one knee in the dust was being cautious, wishing to move ahead in measured, quantifiable steps. He thought Lekson’s flight of archaeological fancy a fine enough idea, but Lekson should be careful flaunting it as a sound academic theory.

  The naysaying gentlemen and the ceramicist eventually walked back across the parking lot, and we sat alone. Left in their own company, Lekson and his colleagues sat looking into the heat outside their awning.

  “Got out of that relatively unscathed,” Lekson said with a smile, sweat beading on his forehead.

  I walked away from Paquimé’s ruins into a field beyond the cap of a flat-topped earthen pyramid, beyond the edges of Di Peso’s excavation, where a dry breeze skimmed across hard-packed dirt. I stopped and looked back at a roofless, manicured city where people, including children, had once been buried seated upright; where an effigy mound had been constructed in the shape of a horned serpent, its eye marked with a white stone engraved with the serpent’s likeness. If this site had been in Arizona or Utah, anywhere in the United States, it would have been an archaeological trophy far greater than Chaco, and legions of researchers would be poring over it. Instead, it has taken a cultural backseat to the likes of the Anasazi because it is in Mexico. Indeed, the prehistoric Four Corners may have been only the northern periphery of the cultural Southwest, while Paquimé, which reached its peak between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries, acted more as a true geographic, political center.

  Smaller settlements existed in this location long before Paquimé itself. Excavations from eleventh-century villages buried under Paquimé have unearthed pottery imported from the Little Colorado River region of northeast Arizona, nearly four hundred miles away. Researchers found wares from both the Four Corners area and from the west coast of Mexico. From the beginning, this place was a cultural repository for a much more extensive region, connected to far provinces like the Colorado Plateau well before Lekson’s Chaco Meridian came into play. The common archaeological view of Paquimé as existing on the periphery is false. This ancient city, or the communities surrounding it, may have been where many migrants from the north were heading. It is probably no coincidence that Paquimé rose to power while Chaco was disbanding, and reached its apex in the time that nearly all of the Southwest was in motion. Lekson may be right: all roads that once led to Chaco now lead straight to Paquimé.

  But Paquimé is not Chaco. I spoke with archaeologists Chris and Todd VanPool, who were excavating a settlement just south of here. Chris told me she believed that this region was much more politically and religiously tied to Mesoamerica than to the Puebloan Southwest. She recognized combined elements, similar motifs between north and south, but overall Paquimé, with its giant ball courts, highly centralized power structure, and plethora of horned-serpent imagery, clearly reminded her of Mesoamerica. Her husband, Todd, listed a litany of artistic, iconographic, architectural, and ceramic boundaries that were never crossed between Salado and Paquimé. He named numerous small but obvious differences in the way people from Salado and Paquimé painted the same icons, differences that told him there may have been a schism between north and south. In a gentle, articulate voice, Todd explained, “The Paquimé region’s horned serpents are either painted white, filled with negative space, or they’re filled in with red. They’re never black.”

  Chris echoed, “Never.”

  Todd continued, “The Salado region, despite the fact that they have white paint and red paint, always paint theirs black.”

  Chris said, “The symmetry of these painted serpents in these two cultural regions is very different; everything is a hundred and eighty degrees apart.” Without pause, Todd added, “In every way that they could differ, they did.”

  The VanPools were saying Lekson was incorrect, that the Puebloan north did not move down and erect Paquimé, that in fact substantial differences existed between the north and the south. I mentioned that regardless of coloration or symmetry, the same horned-serpent icon was being used in the two places, making them culturally similar.

  Chris replied, “I would argue that a really powerful deity bridges two worlds, and that’s what makes it powerful.”

  In southeast Arizona and the boot heel of New Mexico, not far north of Paquimé, purely Salado communities existed contemporaneously within a few miles of solely Paquimé-related communities, and there is little sign of integration between the two. Salado sites have pottery from the north. Paquimé sites have pottery from the south.

  Only a few settlements include large amounts of both kinds of pottery, and in these cases northern and southern styles are segregated within the communities. Different kinds of pottery had very specific connotations and uses. For example, Salado wares were used for daily living, and around ball courts only pottery from Paquimé is found—spectacularly decorated Ramos Polychrome with red, black, and even yellow designs on a white background. Salado wares were not to be used at ball courts, which were in themselves features of a more southerly culture.

  “These are different intellectual traditions, different religious traditions,” Todd explained. “Both these groups have horned-serpent concepts, but they work hard to maintain their distinctiveness.”

  Chris said, “It may be like some Christians making a cross one way and others making it another way: you’re very similar, you have basic tenets, but you keep separate. Like Eastern Orthodox versus Roman Catholic. I believe the Americas share many central religious tenets. The horned-serpent images that are pan-American all have to do with sky and underworld, water and earth. They’re prevalent in every single group, and in many groups they are paramount. We see i
t with the Aztecs and Olmecs. We see it in the eastern woodlands of North America, where there are feathered-rattlesnake images. We see it at Paquimé. There are horned, feathered serpents at Chaco in petroglyphs. These are icons tied to traditions that had to do with the propagation of rain and water, traditions that lie at the root of these cultures.”

  For its distinctive forged metals and Mesoamerican-style ball courts, Paquimé was still a fundamental part of the rest of the Southwest, a key to this complex, prehistoric lock. Mixed in with unique Mexican images on Paquimé pottery are the same designs I saw etched into a floor stone at Mesa Verde in Colorado, the same geometric icons painted on cliffs around Hovenweep in Utah, and inscribed into the caprock of Antelope Mesa in northern Arizona. The Southwest, including northern Mexico, appears to have once contained a single cultural identity marked with regional variations that were in turn connected to Mesoamerica along the chain of the Sierra Madre. There was a continuous line of people whose most powerful gods dwelled in springs, clouds, and water-filled mountains.

  If Pueblo migrants were here, signs of them are hidden by the intense hierarchy and wealth of Paquimé. No doubt, they are somewhere in these ruins. If bright lights and big city drew migrants from the Four Corners to the Little Colorado River and the Mogollon Highlands, certainly the glare of Paquimé must have had a tremendous grip on them. Not far from Paquimé are the ruins of a ninety-room masonry pueblo built in a northern style that actually outlived Paquimé, signs of northerners in Mexico.

  In the end Paquimé was destroyed, its ruins strewn with unburied corpses. You would expect such a thing in the Southwest; it had happened before. Parts of Chaco were marked the same way, as well as many settlements around the base of Mesa Verde and Sleeping Ute Mountain in southwest Colorado, and on down through the Mogollon Highlands. It looks like full-scale warfare hit Paquimé sometime around A.D. 1450, when each house was strategically sacked. For months afterward the area must have reeked of death, corpses blackening in the sun. Who knows the reason for this destruction: failed alliances, internal disputes, or merely time to move on?

  The fall of Paquimé occurred just as major settlements were abandoned across most of the Southwest and the intricate cultural systems of Salado and Hohokam fell apart. This did not happen all at once. Migrants traveling south in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries had brought a boom to the lower Southwest. Too many people moved too quickly into what was once a landscape of dispersed settlements, turning them into urban centers as people massed around pueblos and large villages wherever there was water. Then came a century of complex demographic upheaval between 1350 and 1450. Resources diminished, and the health of the people deteriorated. Populations declined and retreated to a few core areas, and soon many of those areas were empty. At least forty thousand people living in parts of southern New Mexico and southern Arizona simply vanished from the archaeological record.

  Paquimé, a bastion of growth and art at its height, died in the face of this dramatically unsettled environment. It was the last great collapse in the prehistoric Southwest. After many centuries of occupation, the city was soon buried by wind and dust. Only a small portion of its fifteenth-century climax was now exposed, beige geometric walls crossing in and out of one another in warm spring sunlight. I looked across the ruins toward the Sierra Madre in the distance, thinking, When the cities burn, you go to the mountains. You climb back into the earth, into places dark with water.

  COMING INTO THE MOUNTAINS

  SLOPE OF THE SIERRA MADRE

  The bar had a single, clear lightbulb suspended over its door. It hung by a kinked pair of wires. A red, hand-painted advertisement for Tecate beer was peeling off the outside wall. The bar was small and smelled of cigarette smoke. A few men played a slow pool game in the back. They weren’t comfortable with Regan being here, a woman sitting in a men’s bar. They might have thought she was a whore, even in this little logging town, but they said nothing to us. They just watched her subtly as they moved around their pool table.

  I heard the grumbling downshift of a logging truck outside. The trucks were coming every ten, fifteen minutes on this night, hauling huge rounds of trees out of the Sierra Madre, the Mother Mountains, and parading them like chained beasts along the main street.

  We had driven out of the desert and up the pine-bristled slope of the sierra. The bartender standing across the bar from us was gregarious, sixty or so years old, his thinning black-and-gray hair slicked back, barbershop clean. He didn’t care if a woman was in here or not. We had been talking with him for half an hour, drinking beer and exchanging news. We told him where we had been, a couple of weeks in the mountains camping out beyond the roads and some time at Paquimé.

  With both hands spread on the bar, Gilberto the bartender asked what we were looking for out there in the barrancas.

  I told him we were travelers interested in the wilderness.

  “La tierra salvaje,” I said. The wildland.

  Gilberto tilted his head when I said this, unsure what I meant. My Spanish was not the finest. How to explain? El campo might have served me better, but that is a place for vacations, a bucolic countryside of picnic blankets and Sunday fishing. We were looking for the fray in the land, some hidden, interior place, wild country. I told him we walk in the deep land, en tierra adentro. In Spanish there is no word for the wilderness I was trying to describe. There is not one in English either.

  Gilberto nodded and asked if we were looking for treasure, for Sierra Madre gold.

  We all laughed, a little uneasy.

  Darin, sitting on the stool to my left, put a cigarette in his mouth and leaned forward to meet Gilberto’s outstretched lighter.

  Darin said, “Estamos buscando a muertos.”

  “¿Los muertos?” Gilberto asked, his face suddenly reserved.

  “Estamos interesados en ruinas, la prehistoria,” Darin said, taking an appreciative drag off his cigarette. “Somos estudiantes de la arqueología.”

  Gilberto studied us for a moment. He seemed unsure of us all of a sudden, knowing that we were students of archaeology, that we were looking for the dead. He slipped the lighter back under the bar. He had a large brass belt buckle emblazoned with a leaping buck. He was a hunter. He would have known about the countryside, the farther places.

  “La gente se ponen nerviosa cuando se trata de arqueólogos,” Gilberto said. “Piensan que el gobierno podriá confiscar su tierra.”

  People are nervous about archaeology here, fearing the government might confiscate their land for its pre-Columbian value.

  I nodded. Land ownership can be tenuous in Mexico.

  Eugene, brooding to my right, laughed darkly as he swiveled his beer bottle between his fingers.

  “No somos arqueólogos,” Eugene said. We are not archaeologists.

  Eugene looked down the line of us and asked, “How do you say in Spanish that we’re just glorified vagabonds?”

  Regan explained that these two were students and she and I were their instructors for a semester of field studies. But more so we were friends, traveling companions.

  “Somos personas cuidadosas,” Regan said, telling Gilberto that we were careful people. Her voice was calm, a tone asking him please not to judge us for our boldness, or for the broken, inarticulate nature of our Spanish.

  She said, “Entendemos que estos lugares son muy delicados, muy personales. Cómo se dice, sensitive?”

  She was telling him we understand the fragility of these archaeological sites, that we are as careful as we can be.

  Gilberto nodded slowly. “Frágil,” he said.

  “Sí, frágil,” Regan said.

  The bar was quiet for a moment.

  Gilberto smiled and said, “La gente de aquí los llama Anasazi.”

  I sat forward over my beer. “Anasazi?” I asked. People here call them Anasazi?

  Gilberto laughed. “La palabra es incorrecta, por supuesto. La gente aquí es ignorante de arqueología.”

  I was impressed tha
t he knew enough about archaeology to know that Anasazi is a displaced word down here—as he said, used out of ignorance. I figured the locals must have picked up the word from the north, maybe from other travelers looking for cliff dwellings. All the same, it startled me to hear Anasazi used this far south.

  Gilberto explained that someone in town kept a so-called Anasazi mummy in a glass case and other artifacts from the mountains, ceramic vessels and woven textiles. He tipped his head in the direction, down the road. He said the idea offended him, stealing this mummy from the mountains and then charging people to see it.

  “Disgustante,” he said. “Pero usted puede pagar para verlos.”

  Regan told Gilberto that we might be interested in seeing these remains, just for a sense of what had been found in the area, but that we were mainly interested in sites farther back in the sierra.

  Regan spoke with certainty and with delicate words, no bragging or exaggeration. She told Gilberto that we had no illusions about our travels. We were setting a path into delicate places, leaving boot prints. But we were careful, our camps subtle.

  “Nos movemos con cuidado,” she allowed. We move with care.

  Gilberto considered us for a moment and then said he wanted to show us something. He excused himself and slipped out from behind the bar. He called back to one of the men at the pool table. Gilberto’s nephew-in-law came to take over bar duty while Gilberto left through the front door.

  “Maybe we shouldn’t have told him all that,” Eugene said down into his beer. “Now we’re going to have Federales in here asking for papers.”

  “I think he has something to show us,” Regan said optimistically.

  The nephew-in-law stood back from the bar. He had heard everything that was said.

  Ten minutes later Gilberto returned. He carried a worn manila envelope. He lit a cigarette, then pulled out a stack of photographs and laid them in front of us. The photo on top, the size of an index card, was of Gilberto with a dead white-tailed deer. It was a buck, three points to each antler, and in the photo Gilberto held the head upright, the animal’s eyes glazed without focus. We all nodded approvingly. A good kill.