Archeological mysteries of the Southwest
Exploring the ruins of the Ancestral Puebloans
GRAND GULCH, UTAH— As the setting sun turned the red rock of southern Utah to a deepening shade of pink, I set up camp below an ancient ruin tucked high into a cliff. My tent raised, I enjoyed a hot pasta dinner while contemplating what looked like a house 21 metres above from where I sat.
Questions came to mind about the people who lived up there roughly 1,000 years ago: Why did they live up on a cliff? How did they get up and down? What drove them away?
During a 10-day road trip in October, I visited three of the country’s best-known ancient archeological sites at Chaco Culture National Historical Park in northwest New Mexico, Mesa Verde National Park in southwest Colorado and Utah’s Grand Gulch, a federally managed wilderness area.
Perhaps because the ruins are located in this country, I found them as compelling as better-known archeological sites such as the Roman Forum in Italy or Chichen Itza, the ancient Mayan city in Yucatan, Mexico. The ruins provide clues about the Ancestral Puebloans, who preceded the Pueblo, Hopi and other Southwestern U.S. tribes, and who built towns with elaborate architecture, farms and places of worship.
Or so the experts say. The Ancestral Puebloans — also known as the Anasazi — had no written language, leaving anthropologists and archeologists to pore over the ruins and relics, and make educated guesses about their lives. Some facts are fairly well established, such as the abandonment of Chaco and Mesa Verde about 800 years ago. Others are contested, such as how many people lived there and what their lives were like.
The lack of solid answers adds to the mystery of these lost communities, encouraging visitors to explore and ponder the possibilities.
I followed the path of Richard Wetherill, a rancher from Mancos, Colo., whose family became intrigued with ruins in the late 19th century when he saw the cliff dwellings in nearby Mesa Verde.
The ruins were largely unknown to white Americans when the Wetherill family began exploring them, said Fred Blackburn, a former Grand Gulch ranger who has written books about the family and Southwest archeology. Wetherill’s father tried to persuade the Smithsonian to send experts to inspect the sites, to no avail.
“They lacked a prejudice toward Indians because of their Quaker beliefs,” Blackburn said of the Wetherills in an interview. “Because they could better relate to the Indians, they were brought to the ruins.”
Richard Wetherill sought assistance elsewhere on how to handle the pots, baskets and other items he found lying in the dirt. He persuaded people with money, interest and experience to participate in the first major excavations of Mesa Verde, Grand Gulch and Chaco Canyon. A director of Harvard University’s natural history museum once hailed Wetherill’s work as “the most farreaching single event in Southwestern archeology.”
But because he sold artifacts and wasn’t a scientist, Wetherill was derided as a “pot hunter” who was only in it for the money, Blackburn said. Such claims led the federal govern- ment to halt his excavation at Chaco Canyon and to pass the American Antiquities Act in 1906. The law governed excavations and made it a crime to take relics from archeological sites.
Blackburn said the negative characterizations of Wetherill were inaccurate, but persist despite efforts by Blackburn and other writers to set the record straight. He said Wetherill sold relics to museums for public benefit, in keeping with his traditions as a Quaker.
“Richard was an adventurer, a thinker, and he was trying to understand this culture,” Blackburn said.
Of the three archeological sites I visited, Mesa Verde is the most restricted, owing to the large number of visitors, the fragile condition of the structures, and their importance to American archeology. Two of the best-known ruins in Mesa Verde, Balcony House and Cliff Palace, can be seen only on ranger-guided tours and are closed several months a year.
The cliff dwellings are arguably the most striking ruins in the Southwest. They resemble small villages, but what really makes them remarkable is their location, tucked into large crevices on valley walls hundreds of feet above the canyon floor.
While it appears that some of the dwellings were accessed from hand and footholds carved into the cliff walls, just how people got up and down the cliffs — by rope, ladder or other means — remains an open question, like so much else about them.
Perhaps the essential question: Why did they live in the cliffs? Protection from the weather? From ene- mies?
On my tour of Cliff Palace, a ranger explained that the Ancestral Puebloans likely sought to insulate themselves from the extremes of summer and winter weather. He cautioned, however, that this was only an interpretation and explanations about the Anasazi have changed over the years. He said the dwellings went beyond mere shelter, pointing to the plaster and decorative designs on the wall of one room.
The ruins at Chaco Canyon are open to the public, but the ranger tours provide useful context about what makes them unique.
What is most compelling about the Chaco ruins is their size. The bestknown sites, Pueblo Bonito and Chetro Ketl, are each about the length of a city block. Each one is a collection of rooms and courtyards that still inspire awe, despite hundreds of years of decay. Pueblo Bonito is the largest of Chaco’s 13 ruins and once stood four stories high. Looking down at Pueblo Bonito from a canyon ridge, it looks like a giant “D.”
The buildings, which include more than 350 ground-floor rooms, are distinguished by fine masonry: tiny pieces of rock were mortared with larger ones, making the walls strong enough to stand for hundreds of years. Other architectural touches include wood beams to support floors and window openings.
Perhaps the most distinctive feature of Pueblo Bonito specifically and Ancestral Puebloan architecture in general is the kiva, a circular room that some experts say served as ceremonial gathering places, although this interpretation has been disputed. Kivas had a hole in the roof, through which people entered, and a hole in the ground called a sipapu, the place from where their mythical ancestors appeared, according to the Hopi Indians who use kivas today.
In a book on Chaco, Edgar Hewett, the archeologist who excavated Chetro Ketl in the 1920s, said its great kiva was “one of the most remarkable structures known in the Southwest.”