The Ancient Puebloan civilization
On a cool spring day, in the crystalline light for which New Mexico is famous, I stood in the middle of the Acoma Sky City and looked out into the ocean of desert at an island of pale red and duncolored rock called Enchanted Mesa.
My tour guide, Marissa Chino, a young Acoma woman, said it isn’t known if her people once lived there. There are tales, though, that they did. One story holds they descended to the valley to tend their squash and corn. and while they were farming, a violent storm washed away a stone ladder that was their only access. With no way back up the monolith, they abandoned their home and moved to the 357-foot-tall mesa where the village sits now.
This is only one of the many mysteries about the ancient Puebloan civilization that once flourished across the desert landscape of the American Southwest and, for a long time, was believed to have vanished. Its fate has become clearer in recent years, as researchers have peered into where this civilization went on its “final migration” and listened more closely to the descendants of those once called the Anasazi — Navajo for Enemy Ancestors — who are now known as Ancestral Puebloans.
I traveled to the red rock desert of the Southwest to better understand this “lost” civilization. I chose to focus on several major sites in northern New Mexico and southwestern Colorado.
From Albuquerque I drove an hour to Sky City and stopped at the impressive visitor center, which includes the Haak’u museum with its collection of Acoma pottery. Two buses carried me and a group of Norwegian motorcyclists to the collection of houses at the top of the giant mesa. This low-slung, earth-colored village, with its rough and uneven stone streets, is one of the four communities that make up the Acoma Pueblo, one of the state’s 19 modern-day pueblos. Sitting in an immense landscape, with its palette of dusky reds and browns beneath a vast sky, it is one of the most sublime settings for a town in North America.
Acoma means “people of the white rock,” and Sky City is one of the longest inhabited settlements in North America, tracing its founding to around A.D. 1100. Between 10 and 13 families live here in small and neatly kept adobe homes. Water must be hauled in, and there is no electricity. Beehive-shaped clay pottery kilns, fired with wood or cow dung, sit behind the homes, with piles of firewood stacked alongside. The inimitable southwest fragrance of sweet burning pinyon pine wafted in the air.
We walked toward the towering adobe, dirt-floor church. A graveyard surrounded by a crude adobe wall sits in the front of the church where Acoma people are buried several layers deep. The top is studded with white wooden crosses, stone tablets and plastic flowers.
Spanish conquistadores came to this region in the 16th century seeking the fabled Seven Cities of Gold. As we stood inside the church, our guide related some of the grim history of Acoma. After a small battle with soldiers sent to negotiate, the conquistador Don Juan Oñate attacked the mesa and killed hundreds of men, women and children. He took 500 prisoners and sentenced those older than 25 to 20 years of servitude. He ordered the right feet and hands of
two dozen captives amputated.
The Acoma people returned here after their servitude, and in 1628, the Catholic Church forced them to build this structure, the San Esteban del Rey Mission church — an unusual blend of Spanish colonial and Puebloan architecture. All the materials, including the logs and dirt for the walls, had to be found elsewhere and carried up from the valley floor. It took 12 years to build.
Just as I began to walk back to the visitor center, down the narrow and precipitous stone path that the Acoma used before the road was built in 1929 by a film company, our guide pointed out a small, opaque mica window in one of the homes. The window glints in the sun like gold, she said, and when the Spanish saw it they thought they’d found one of the legendary Seven Cities of Gold. It is the only original mica window that remains here.
The Pueblo culture goes back centuries before the time of Christ. Pueblos evolved from pit houses — holes in the ground covered with a raised wooden roof — to labyrinthine dwellings with hundreds of rooms built with sophisticated masonry techniques that peaked in the 10th and 11th centuries.
What’s been recognized in recent years is that the Ancestral Puebloans didn’t vanish. Whether because of a withering drought, deforestation and soil erosion, or attacks from other tribes, or a combination, their vast empire shrank and became the pueblos of New Mexico.
I drove north from Acoma, seeking more backstory. Two hours on — the last half of it on a rutted dirt road — I spied Fajada Butte, the towering landform at the head of a long, shallow sandstone canyon called Chaco, now the Chaco Culture National Historical Park.
First occupied in 800, Chaco was where the Pueblo culture reached its greatest heights until, tree rings tell us, it was abandoned in the mid-13th century. The park contains the largest collection of preColumbian ruins in the United States and is a UNESCO World Heritage site.
While most American Indians were hunters and gatherers, the Puebloans were also accomplished tillers of the soil, irrigating the desert in this canyon with captured rainwater. Staying in one place for long periods is a large part of what allowed this civilization to evolve to such a magnificent apogee in a harsh desert landscape.
I toured Pueblo Bonito with Clif Taylor, a Park Service volunteer. He, too, is taken with the mystery of this place. For centuries it was home to thousands of people and “over a few decades it virtually emptied out,” he said.
Pueblo Bonito is the largest and grandest of the 12 “great houses” at Chaco, with some 600 rooms and 40 kivas, large, round ceremonial rooms dug into the earth and lined with stone masonry.
The evolution of the Ancestral Puebloans is mirrored in the evolution of their masonry, from pithouses where the foundation was made of rocks roughly stacked atop each other, to the structures at Chaco, where millions of pieces of stone are fitted precisely together up to five stories high. More than 240,000 trees, cut in distant mountains, were used in construction of the great houses of Chaco.
The remains of the massive D-shaped structure of Pueblo Bonito, which covered 2 ½ acres, has been a treasure trove for archaeologists since the late 19th century. The artifacts uncovered here boggle the mind: hundreds of gorgeous ollas or large round pots, clay ladles, bowls, animal effigy pots and other vessels covered with black geometric designs over a white slip. There are the sumptuous burials of 37 sacred macaws, brought here from southern climes and likely bred for their rainbow of resplendent sacred feathers.
Many of the walls and windows at Chaco are aligned with cardinal points, the sun and other stars, and the buildings functioned as an observatory and calendar. Then there’s the famous sun dagger. On the summer solstice a sharp beam of light shines through slabs of fallen rock and pierces the exact center of a spiral petroglyph.
“It was built to be impressive,” said Taylor. “A big beautiful city like Manhattan. It may well have been an area of transcendental significance like Mecca. The canyon itself could have been a sipapu,” a sacred opening in the earth represented in kivas around the Southwest.
After a day of hiking around Chaco I tooled north a few hours, heading for the ruins of another great Puebloan civilization, at Mesa Verde National Park.
Chaco’s structures were built in the open canyon bottoms, but the people of Mesa Verde were largely cliff dwellers, likely as a way to fend off Apache and other raiders. Toe and hand holds that allowed access to the precipitous dwellings remain carved in the sandstone cliffs. The people farmed on the top of the mesa and lived in the dwellings.
From the visitor center I drove 15 miles to the top of Chapin Mesa to tour a series of sites that track the evolution of ancient home building. As I drove the vistas became more incredible.
A series of stops on the 6-mile loop provides a look at how the houses evolved over nearly seven centuries, from the seventh century to the 13th century, from pit houses to the sophisticated adobe and stone block buildings wedged into cliff alcoves, such as Oak Tree House, that reminded me for all the world of mud swallow nests.
My last stop was the Zia Pueblo, a half-hour from Albuquerque, to see Peter Pino, a former war chief and cultural leader.
Pino graciously invited me into his home. I spied some Zia pottery, which famously features a bird motif. “Birds occupy a region that we humans don’t — the heavens,” he said. “The world they see is a lot bigger than ours. To native people that is supernatural.”
The pueblos at Chaco and elsewhere are not cold and sterile piles of rock, he said, but are alive with the spirit of the pueblo people’s ancestors.
“All those sites are sacred,” Pino said. “Our people aren’t there anymore, but the spirits of our people are still there.”