Yesterday, on his initial visit to the cavern, Chuck had wriggled inside on his back and stared upward, overwhelmed by what he was seeing. Today, the sight of what he beheld as he lay beside Janelle astounded him all over again.
“Unbelievable is right,” he said to her. “Even with everything Sanford told me, this is way beyond what I imagined.”
Painted in thin black lines on a light gray background over every square inch of the cavern’s ceiling and sloping walls was, in simplest terms, a map—though the painting was, in fact, a thousand times more than that. Rendered on the interior ceiling and walls were clear depictions of specific places and peoples across the Four Corners region, encompassing southern Utah and Colorado, and northern Arizona and New Mexico. The depictions provided a mapped representation of the area and its ancestral peoples so detailed and extensive as to be hardly fathomable.
The courses of the Green and Colorado rivers formed a large Y across the cavern ceiling, from their mountainous sources in the north, to their confluence in southern Utah, and on into Arizona as the continuing Colorado River. The courses of the two primary waterways through the Four Corners region served as the pictographic map’s framing device, running diagonally from the floor of the cavern up and over the ceiling to the opposite side, with the confluence of the two rivers directly overhead. According to a compass reading Chuck had taken yesterday, the rivers were painted on the cavern interior in perfect relation to their actual courses.
Upstream from the Green River’s confluence with the Colorado, famed Bowknot Bend—where the Green curled back to within a hundred yards of itself over the course of seven torturous miles—was painted on the ceiling of the grotto in precise relation to where the river actually corkscrewed back on itself east of Moab. Also depicted in its correct location on the cavern ceiling map was the abrupt change in the course of the Colorado River as the river struck Vishnu schist, the oldest exposed rock on the planet, at the bottom of the Grand Canyon and was forced west for dozens of miles before turning south once more on its long journey to the Gulf of California. The San Juan River was painted in true correlation with its westward journey to its junction with the Colorado River, with each of the San Juan’s seven source tributaries extending correctly northward into the rugged San Juan Mountains.
In addition to the rivers, dozens of clearly recognizable geologic and cultural sites throughout the region were depicted on the cavern ceiling. Upheaval Dome, a massive stone uplift encircled by a deep syncline north of Bowknot Bend, was painted in intricate detail. Petrified Forest, a sprawling expanse of high desert dotted with tens of thousands of fossilized logs, was correctly placed near the Mogollon Rim in present-day northern Arizona. The famed Mesa Verde cliff dwellings, stone-and-mortar apartment complexes protected beneath overhanging cliffs, were depicted at the foot of the San Juan Mountains. The dwellings were painted in such exquisite detail that individual Mesa Verde complexes were easily identifiable, including Cliff Palace, Balcony House, and Spruce Tree House.
Hundreds of paintings of people and animals covered the ceiling and walls of the cave as well. Each figure was barely an inch high and rendered in meticulous detail. Hunters brandished spears, bows and arrows, and dart-hurtling atlatls. Gatherers bore maize-filled baskets from fields. Animals were discernible by type—desert bighorns high on cliffs, mule deer with branched antlers along creeks, ravens wheeling in flight, and caged turkeys among the human figures. Some game animals were shown as slain, their carcasses slung from poles carried by hunters across flatlands of sage and bunch grass and through stands of juniper and piñon.
“To me,” Chuck said, gazing at the cavern ceiling with Janelle, “more than anything else I can think of, the work in here resembles the ancient paintings in underground tombs along the Nile River in Egypt. But the Egyptian paintings were dedicated almost entirely to battles and conflict, while these show only peaceful interactions between members of the various ancient Southwest cultures—the Ancestral Puebloans, or Anasazi, the Fremont to the north, and the Mogollon to the south.”
“Isn’t the term ‘Anasazi’ going out of use?”
“They’re almost entirely known as Ancestral Puebloans these days. They were an ancient people—ancestral—who built and lived in permanent homes—pueblos.”
“The term ‘Anasazi’ has some negative connotation to it, doesn’t it?”
Chuck nodded, causing sand from the floor of the cavern to work its way into his hair at the back of his head. “You know almost as much about my work as I do these days. And yes, you’re right. In the Navajo language, Anasazi means ‘ancient enemies,’ which is why the Navajo people don’t like the term. But they don’t necessarily like the ‘Puebloan’ part of Ancestral Puebloan either, because the word is Spanish—from the language of the Spaniards who subjugated the Navajo people in the 1500s and 1600s. Even so, ‘Ancestral Puebloan’ is widely used nowadays for the Anasazi culture.”
Chuck allowed his eyes to roam across the cavern ceiling, lit by his headlamp, as he continued.
“The ancient Southwest cultures were similar in lots of ways. Over several centuries, they progressed from semi-nomadic hunting and gathering to sedentary lifestyles, with communal homes and irrigated farm plots. Their housing structures improved over the same time period from simple pit houses to large stone-and-mortar structures. Then, a decades-long drought hit the Southwest in the early 1200s that led—almost everyone agrees these days—to the dispersal of the cultures. We can’t know for sure exactly when the painting in here was done, but I can pretty well guarantee it was painted at the height of the ancient cultures, in the late 1100s or early 1200s, just before the drought years.”
“How can you tell?”
“By how the cultures are depicted on the map, as distinct entities from one another, each in their own style.”
“What do you mean, their own style?”
“The ancient cultures had particular forms of ceramic decoration and, at the height of their societies, particular writing styles, too.”
“I thought they didn’t leave behind any sort of written history.”
“In the way you and I think of writing today, they didn’t. But don’t try to tell that to the descendants of the ancient cultures, like today’s Navajo and Hopi people. Modern indigenous people believe their ancestors were just as much storytellers—that is, writers—as we are today with our words and letters. It’s just that the ancient peoples used pictures to tell their stories—pictographs painted on stone, like we’re looking at here, or petroglyphs chipped into rock.”
“You mean, the rock art that’s found all over the Southwest?”
“That’s right. Modern indigenous people call what their ancestors did rock writing—essentially, storytelling. The ancient cultures of the Southwest might not have developed a written alphabet, but their pictographs and petroglyphs tell distinct stories of their lives—the animals they hunted, the crops they grew, the kinds of clothing and personal ornamentation they wore. There’s even a big slab of stone south of here known as Newspaper Rock. Dozens of picture messages were chipped into it over the course of centuries. For all its pictures, though, Newspaper Rock is nothing compared to what we’re looking at in here. This pictograph is far and away the most detailed example ever discovered—and the story it tells is beyond incredible.”