Foreword

At a 6,000-foot elevation in northwestern New Mexico lies a high desert valley—a gash worn through the enduring sandstone by eons of sun, wind, and water. Only about ten miles long, defined by majestic sheer-walled sandstone cliffs, Chaco Canyon is characterized as Upper Sonoran desert. When the rain does fall, it cascades violently off the slick rock, and powerful torrents scour the washes. Temperatures soar to over one hundred degrees Fahrenheit during summer, and plunge to twenty degrees below zero in the winter. Periods of drought are common and severe. At the best of times, it is an inhospitable, if hauntingly beautiful, place.

Yet during the eleventh century this canyon became a cultural center for a people we call the Anasazi. The Chaco culture encompassed over 115,000 square miles and included approximately 100,000 people.

There are many reasons for what is called the “Chaco Phenomenon.” By about A.D. 1050 Chaco Canyon had become the focal point for the manufacture of turquoise goods. Beads, figurines, and jewelry were produced in large quantities and traded to outlying communities. Archaeologists have traced the turquoise to mines over one hundred miles away, near the present-day town of Cerrillos, New Mexico. Those mines seem to have been under the direct control of the Chacoan elite. But finished turquoise goods were more than “money.” They amounted to a ceremonial industry which maintained links between the Chacoan elite and the leaders in outlying communities.

During this period the Chacoans began construction of an elaborate road system that would be unequaled in North America for another seven hundred years. These were by no means “dirt trails,” but carefully engineered roads. Thirty feet wide in places, the roadbeds were generally excavated into the ground and bordered by earthen berms or low masonry walls. Many of them appear to have been surfaced with crushed potsherds. In one location north of Chaco Canyon, the road becomes a four-lane “highway,” where four parallel routes head north. When the desired routes encountered cliffs or steep hills, the engineers built wood scaffolding or earthen ramps, or carved stairs into solid rock. They are lined with signal towers, “way-stations,” and shrines. The latter seem to have functioned as places of prayer and ritual reflection similar to the stations of the cross in the Christian tradition.

Chacoan architecture is stunning. The Chaco Anasazi constructed multistoried Great Houses: walled towns that would have awed Europeans of the same period. D-shaped, rectangular, or circular, the Great Houses contained hundreds of rooms—most of which were never lived in. The population of these enormous Great Houses probably hovered at between one hundred and two hundred people. The extra rooms were used for storage and may have acted as guest quarters when the canyon population expanded during major ceremonials. To support the weight of the upper stories, the lower walls were built three to four feet thick, and each story was set back at regular intervals to create a “stairlike” appearance. Such daunting edifices required the builders to quarry and dress tons of stone, haul it for miles to reach the building site, and carry enough sand, clay, and water to make the mortar. Interior and exterior walls were then plastered with bright clays and painted with colorful artwork.

Chacoans were also extraordinary astronomers. The elegant motions of the sun, moon, and stars were the very heart of their Great Houses.

Pueblo Bonito (called Talon Town in People of the Silence) demonstrates alignments with the cardinal directions and several solstice-monitoring stations. The axis of the large kiva—a subterranean ceremonial chamber—is on a true north-south line, as is the internal line of rooms that divides the pueblo in half. The long straight wall forming the front of the west half of Pueblo Bonito runs true east-west.

Pueblo Bonito also contains curious “corner windows.” One of these windows, Room 228, begins charting the coming winter solstice forty-nine days in advance of the event. A thin beam of light strikes the room’s back wall. This beam gradually widens as the winter solstice approaches, moving northward an inch a day across the wall. At dawn on the solstice, a full rectangle of light shines on the north wall.

Despite the grandeur of their culture, Chaco Canyon was a place of marginal resources. Water, wood, and productive soils were very precious. By the time the canyon reached its peak, at the beginning of the twelfth century, those resources were being strained to the limit. The Chacoans constructed dams and ditches to divert rainwater to their fields, and cultivated special gardens in the side canyons and on the mesa tops. But when the population reached around 2,000 people, the fragile desert ecosystems failed. The canyon could no longer feed its inhabitants.

The outlying communities—linked by the roads—brought a wide variety of goods to Chaco Canyon, in addition to food, timber, turquoise, and other rare minerals. The Chacoan elite also managed a trade network that brought seashells from as far away as the Pacific Ocean, and copper bells and macaws from central Mexico.

Even many utilitarian goods were imported. Up to one-third of the stone tools and half of the pottery cooking vessels found at Pueblo Alto (called Center Place in this book) were made from special stones and clays found in the Chuska Mountains fifty miles west of Chaco Canyon. Much of the finished pottery came from the Mesa Verde region in southern Colorado.

We know from tree-ring data that precipitation between A.D. 900–1150 was extremely variable around the San Juan Basin. One village might have received unusual rainfall and produced a food surplus, while another village, a few miles away, might have suffered both drought and famine. Many archaeologists have theorized that Chaco Canyon served as a central storage and redistribution center. Surplus food would have been hauled in from prosperous villages, then shipped out to needy outlying communities. This theory is not unreasonable, given that modern Puebloan peoples, such as the Hopi, still maintain a three-year food supply.

Around A.D. 1130, a new drought began. In a high desert environment even a short drought can be disastrous, but this one lasted twenty-five years. The springs and seeps dried up. Growing traditional crops of corns, beans, and squash became precarious. After decades of exploitation, every stick of wood had been collected, every clump of brush twisted out of the ground. When the scant rainfall did come, the exposed topsoil was vulnerable. Floods surged down the drainages, stripping the exhausted earth and uprooting the frail crops. Chaco Wash, the primary source of water for the canyon, reached its deepest point around A.D. 1150, cutting to a depth of thirteen feet and lowering the water table.

From skeletal material we know the people suffered increasing malnutrition. A bone disease called porotic hyperostosis—lesions in the skull—afflicted 65% of the adults, and 75% of the children. The disorder is caused by profound iron deficiency, among a lack of other nutrients.

These two events, the drought and the ensuing malnutrition, would have been enough to turn Chaco Canyon into a frightening place to live—but there’s more.

It required approximately 250,000 trees to build the Great Houses in Chaco Canyon. Pueblo Bonito alone, the oldest and largest of the Great Houses, constructed approximately A.D. 920–1120, stood five stories tall and contained around eight hundred rooms. Analyses of pollen and seed records tell us that the Chacoans quickly consumed the building materials in and near the canyon. The count of tree pollens drops dramatically during the last one hundred years of habitation—meaning they cut down every tree they could find within walking distance. And remember, for two hundred years, the resident population had had to cook, fire pottery, light their kivas, and keep warm during the bitter winters.

Why, then, would an ailing people continue to congregate in such large numbers in an area of vanishing resources? The architecture tells us a great deal.

In the last years, the Chacoans began sealing exterior windows and doorways—actually walling them up with stone and mortar. They even plugged small vents designed to aid the circulation of air through the pueblo. Pueblo Bonito had originally been open in front, so that people could come and go as they wished, but during the eleventh century a string of rooms closed off that opening. They left only two entryways. Then one of those was walled up so that only a gate in the southeast corner of the western plaza remained. That single gate was then narrowed to the width of a door and finally walled off altogether. Just before the end, they sealed the town completely. The only way in or out of Pueblo Bonito was by ladder over the walls. The difficulties this would create, especially for the elderly members of the community, are obvious. But the Chacoans clearly believed they had to strengthen their defenses.

The evidence for warfare is overwhelming. Modern-day Pueblo peoples, such as the Hopi, Keres, Zuni, Tewa, and Tanoans—the most likely descendants of the Anasazi—tell of ancient and fierce wars fought by their ancestors. Some involve the destruction of entire towns. The archaeological evidence is also powerful: burned buildings, battered bodies, and crushed skulls.

Prior to the 1960s, archaeologists believed that the warfare arose from the influx of the nomadic Navajo, Apaches, and other “Athabaskan” peoples into the peaceful Pueblo sphere, but further research has severely weakened this theory. The best evidence now suggests that the Athabaskan peoples arrived in the Southwest in the sixteenth century—and then in such small numbers that they could not have been a significant threat to fortified pueblos.

The “enemy” may have been other Southwestern cultures: the Hohokam, the Fremont, or the Mogollon. It may even have been other groups of Anasazi. As the religious, economic, and social systems disintegrated, village may have turned upon village, clan upon clan.

By 1150 Chaco Canyon had been abandoned, and many Anasazi began building their houses on highly defensible hilltops, on pillars of rock separated from canyon walls, in hollows in sheer cliffs—all far removed from sources of drinking water and their fields, but sites where they must have felt a small measure of safety.

Yet for more than two centuries Chacoan culture had thrived. They built stunning edifices, engineered hundreds of miles of roads, established an elaborate ceremonial system, created magnificent art, charted the courses of the sun, moon, and stars. The abandonment of the great pueblos was a slow process, occurring over decades. But make no mistake, those grand prehistoric peoples did not “vanish,” as some books and television shows would have you believe. Their descendants, the modern Pueblo tribes, continue to live and flourish in the American Southwest. Indeed, much of what we theorize about prehistoric peoples is based upon Puebloan oral tradition.

The myths, legends, and concepts of the sacred that you will discover in this novel come from those oral traditions. Spider Woman, the Great Warriors, and the Katchinas (whom we call thlatsinas) are still worshiped today. It is difficult to know from the archaeological record when the Katchinas first came into existence, but they probably originated during the latter half of the twelfth or early thirteenth centuries. The Humpbacked Flute Player—the subject of much Southwestern art, modern and ancient—is even older. Depictions of male and female flute players were etched into rocks, painted on bowls, even carved into kiva floors. The humpbacked flute player symbolized fertility, which means much more than human sexuality; it means that he or she embodied the creative power of the universe.

We encourage you to visit the prehistoric sites—Hovenweep in Utah; Chaco Canyon and Aztec ruins in New Mexico; Mesa Verde and the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center in Colorado; and Wupatki and Casa Malpais in Arizona, to name just a few—as well as the modern Southwestern pueblos, such as Acoma and Oraibi.

To really understand the majestic history of the North American continent, one must look for the point where the past meets the present.