The Ancient Ones: Before Chaco
He said, “to find your home, you must find the center place.” Maasaw, (Masawu) Caretaker and Creator of the Earth to the Hopi… in the beginning.
The people’s stories all describe a world that has changed dramatically and each individual living can see and feel that it is still changing. The Ice Age is over and the megafauna mammals are gone and the full time sprinters, as archaeologist RL Burrillo sarcastically calls the Clovis people in his great book, behind the bears ears, have slowed down their sprinting and abandoned the tool that’s made them famous as their population increased and they began to become a little sedentary, although not completely. Actually, I’ll argue through this series that the people of the Southwest, or a portion of them at least, never stopped truly moving or sprinting or migrating… or following the spiral to their center place.
At this time, which is about 10,000 years ago and which is known as the beginning of the Archaic period in anthropological and archaeological parlance, there are ten distinct groups or cultures identifiable by their stone tools or weapons in North America. Archaeologist Stephen Plog, a giant in the world of southwestern archaeology, asks and answers the question regarding these groups when he says, quote, How can one account for this initial homogeneity and later diversity? The likely explanation is that the Clovis and Folsom peoples, primarily hunters - lived in highly mobile groups which maintained extensive social networks across large areas, whereas their successors - more dependent on a greater variety of foods, especially plants, in smaller areas, lived in less mobile groups. End quote.
Along with the identifiable cultures, plenty of diversity is occurring in the skeletal record as well. The seemingly monolithic culture days of Clovis and then Folsom had given way to a more fractured and unique landscape of people who would continue to move and travel… continue to find their center place. Just at a much smaller scale. Remember, in the previous episode, I suggested, based off of other smarter people’s works, that the Clovis would summer up North and winter in the South…
In the southwest, one stone tool tradition of these ten in particular has puzzled researchers since they’ve been discovered. The Lunate Crescent or the Western Stemmed Tradition or as Burrillo calls them, quote, mysterious little crescents that look like fake mustaches. End quote. Their use is as yet unknown but they have a peculiar attraction to the old lake country of the southwest. The place where water was almost a thousand feet deep in long lakes from New Mexico to Southern California to the Salt Lake Valley but are now empty dry white basins of salt, basalt, and other mined minerals. These places about 10,000 years ago weren’t yet dried up like they are now but instead would have been teaming with wildlife and birds. Lots and lots of birds. Millions of them would have used the area as a watering hole on their journeys between their northern and southern migration stops. These lunate crescents seem to follow the migration of the birds. The tools themselves were probably a kind of weapon or a scraper, or a cutting tool and Childs, yes our friend Craig Childs from the previous episode will continue to feature heavily in this and the coming episodes as well. But Childs describes the mysterious little crescents like this in Atlas of a Lost World, quote,
Based on where it's found around water, the artifact is believed to have been associated with bird hunting or skinning, though one crescent tool produced signs of pronghorn blood, and I've thought it could have as easily been used on fish. These stone crescents are typically thin, flat, and the length of your finger, as symmetrical as a boomerang. They often have grinding around the midline to facilitate hafting onto a wooden shaft. It may be coincidental, but their distribution follows airways for tundra swan, greater white-fronted goose, snow goose, and Ross's goose, lending credence to the crescent being an implement designed for hunting birds. Whatever they were used for, they were unique to this part of the world, possibly a regional clan of bird hunters strung along lakes at the end of the Ice Age in the American West.
Since reading Atlas of a Lost World and the many other amazing works and since releasing the last episode about the Ice Age and the Mammoth Eaters I’ve done some traveling. My wife and I journeyed through the searing hot Mojave on our way to the Sierra Nevadas and the Sequoias and as I sat in the passenger seat while my wife drove, a position I am not familiar with, the passenger seat that is, but as she drove I was thankful at the opportunity to stare out the window and be submerged in my imagination. I was nostalgic for a place I’ve never seen and never would. I noticed the lines on the landscape where water once was as the road slowly rose and fell in and out of what used to be massive bodies of fresh cold water once teaming with fish, birds, bison and columbian mammoths on the shore, and the people hunting them all. I transformed the over 100° landscape into blindingly bright blue playas. I held my breath as the Joshua Trees disappeared at the edge of the water and as we dipped beneath the small waves lapping at the shore. I imagined the extreme martian looking mountains all around us as islands sticking up out of the bountiful water. A month after that we drove to Las Vegas and then from Las Vegas to Joshua Tree through the Kelso Dunes, formed during the last ice age, and even more landscapes that the fake mustache looking Lunate Crescents would have been used extensively in.
By about 8,000 years ago, when the lakes finally dried up and the Holocene got into full swing, The Holocene is the geologic epoch after the Pleistocene, the one we’re in now technically… well, after the Holocene began and the birds stopped landing in great numbers at the now gone lakes, the lunate crescent seems to have disappeared. Dried up with the water. But the people didn’t…
A site in New Mexico, the mockingbird gap site has layers of occupation over thousands of years. Another very important site in Texas, the Buttermilk Creek Complex mirrors that story. At Buttermilk Creek, the archaeological evidence points to 15,000 years of continual usage. A site on the Colorado Wyoming border that lets one seemingly view the entirety of the eastern half of north America as it lays out in front of the rising sun is another place where people gathered from all across the land in this new form of congregation. This seems to be the first time in the record that people were gathering together in large numbers in the north American continent. Maybe the growing population made it unavoidable. There were so many people in the land now that one had to get to know their neighbors. To stay peaceful. To hear about your old stomping grounds. The name of the camp on the Colorado border is called the Lindenmeier site and for thousands of years, people came from all over to attend the bright fires that burned there. Obsidian from Yellowstone, 400 miles away, has been found at Lindenmeier. Another form of obsidian from the valles caldera in New Mexico was unearthed. Chert from the Dakotas and a different chert from Texas too. Chert would have been used to knap tools out of and they were making a lot of tools at the site. But the tools, over the thousands of years after the ice age, would get smaller and smaller as the game got smaller and smaller too.
Although meeting sites are being attended with greater and greater numbers of people from all across the land, curiously as archaeologist Stephen Plog points out, the southwest is actually becoming less inhabited at this time. Which, I mean, it makes sense if the water’s drying up and the land’s becoming more harsh. Plog has this to say in his Ancient Peoples of the American Southwest, a book I read in college and still own, and is still mostly relevant… quote, From the Folsom era to the end of the Paleo-Indian period (which is about 8,000BC), the frequency of known sites decreases in the west and parts of the south, a trend probably due to the drier climatic conditions which caused a deterioration in large animals' habitats, and a reduction in the number of permanent watering holes where such animals could be successfully discovered and hunted. In short, the Southwest was rapidly becoming less and less suitable for the way of life pursued by the first Native Americans who entered the region. End quote. He means the Clovis when he says the first Native Americans who entered the region. As we discussed in the previous episode, they may not have been the first, but for this story, that isn’t too important. What’s important is that the Clovis culture and the people that practiced it are far removed from the people of the Archaic.
The climatic change that occurred a couple thousand years into the Holocene that dried out the Southwest that Plog mentions, is known to us as the Altithermal period. The Altithermal climatic period is another very curious time period for the earth, especially the American Southwest because for 4,000 years it was CONSIDERABLY warmer than it is today… You know what weren’t around for almost 4,000 years to heat the earth and dry the lakes and to change the southwest forever around 8,000 years ago? Hm… As I just mentioned, the altithermal was a hot and a dry period for the American west and southwest especially and it dried up all those amazing lakes that people were camped on the shores of as they hunted the birds and fished and lived probably pretty well.
I’ll quote Plog for the hotly debated but current running theory of what caused the Altithermal: hint, it isn’t the burning of fossil fuels:
At about 5,500 bc, there appears to have been a change in patterns of storm movement associated with the reduction in the glacial shield covering the northeastern United States. Circulation patterns that had previously brought cool, dry air masses during the summer were replaced by a more westerly flow in the summer, and a south-to-north circulation in the winter that carried generally drier air from the Pacific Ocean. Associated with this change - for reasons that are still being debated - was the initiation of a process of soil erosion (arroyo cutting) producing narrow and deeper valleys rather than shallow, broad alluvial floodplains.
The area was starting to resemble more of the dramatic landscape that we’re used to seeing. Because of this further change to the Southwest that was naturally occurring, like most processes that change the earth’s environment, the people dispersed and the population densities became much lower and Plog suggests that social networks over far flung areas were created and used and occasionally celebrated and checked in on during those gatherings mentioned earlier like at Lindenmeier or Mockingbird in New Mexico. The people that did live in the southwest were, much like their already by this point ancient ancestors… which is crazy to think about but by now, the Clovis culture started 10,000 years before the time period I’m describing now, which is the time around 5,000 BC right after the lakes dried up. It’s crazy how much change has already happened. But change will always be happening in the southwest. It’s the nature of the environment. Time and the people and the landscape are like the spiral: Always looking for that center place.
Back to the people of the early archaic though. They were mobile hunters and gatherers and they occupied a much wider range than their recent ancestors the Lunate Crescent peoples did. And they also probably exploited neighboring areas outside the immediate southwest for their resources in order to live.
But let’s now fast-forward to the late Archaic and early Basketmaker II, closer to our time period but still in the BC area. If you’re wondering, the time period is called Basketmaker because the people of the Southwest made baskets… apparently the baskets were woven so tightly that they could hold water. And what happened to Basketmaker 1 you may ask? Well, early archaeologists didn’t have proof of an earlier period but they assumed that there would have been a time period before the basketmaker 2 with the incredible baskets, like a group of people who made less intricate and more primitive baskets. But those people do not and did not exist so it goes from the Archaic to the Basketmaker 2. They’re most likely the same people, just their technology changed. Archaeology’s like that sometimes. So during this time period the Altithermal relaxes and the Southwest gets cooler and more hospitable than it had been and than it is today. This in turn brings back the large mammal populations which… includes people. Archaeologists know that the animals return because they begin again to appear in archaeological assemblages from this time which are mostly in the form of remains in caves.
The people that have returned are doing things a little differently now though. They’re collecting plants and becoming more dependent on domesticated plants in their diet. The people are also building more rock shelters and easier to identify structures as opposed to their more mobile ancestors. And thanks to the dry climate of these rock shelters, more artifacts have been found from this late Archaic period including woven mats, baskets, and sandals. The people also seem to be engaged in some hardcore long distance trade in items like obsidian, turquoise, marine shells, and even plants. But truthfully, as Burrillo puts it, quote, archaeological evidence indicates that nearly every available resource in nearly every available place was in use. End quote. Settlements are also being situated in areas and settings of greater diversity as every available piece of land is also in use. Plog says, quote, such settings range from the sides of canyons to the margins of small lakes (the playas), to boundary zones where plants characteristic of better-watered habitats, as well as those present in drier upland regions, were available within short distances. Thus, while most Paleo-Indian sites appear to be located near areas that were optimal for the hunting of large animals, Archaic sites were chosen to take advantage of a more diverse set of foods. End quote. By now, rabbits, being caught by way of traps and snares, were in heavy eating rotation. Oh how the mighty Mammoth Eaters had changed… but by now, it's been over 10,000 years. A lot can and will change in that amount of time. Plog also says because of the way the climate had changed over the past millennia, the people of the Southwest could use a quote, wide range of foods simply by moving up or down in the landscape over relatively short distances. End quote. If you’ve ever been to the southwest, you know that a 20 minute drive will drastically change the scenery, elevation, weather, and environment. It’s a magical place like that.
In these rock shelters the people of the Archaic period were building, they were also burying their dead. Plog has this to say, quote, a departure from earlier sites is the occurrence of burials in many of these caves and rockshelters, often placed in pits previously used for storage and occasionally preserved so well as to provide vivid insights into clothes and physical appearance. These discoveries indicate that feather- and fur-cloth blankets served as common winter garments, fitted clothing was made from cotton cloth and deerskin, and sandals woven from yucca leaves were the standard footgear. Even variations in hairdressing are known, including partial head shaving and long, braided locks. End quote.
It’s amazing what secrets the desert can hold and preserve. Not only rock shelters were being built though. Child’s says, quote, In the late centuries B.C, and the early centuries A.D., the Anasazi lived in small villages of semi-subterranean pit-houses made of earth and wood, clusters of tiny domes the color of local soils. They occupied any one settlement for no more than ten to twenty years before moving on. Rarely would a person have been born, grown old, and died in the same place. End quote. Always finding their center place.
In each of these pit houses hundreds of hours would have ben needed to construct such a structure. But they were a smart and innovative way to live in the southwest. They would have been used in the winter to minimize heat loss and conversely to keep the house cool in the hot summers of the American Southwestern deserts. It was a little cooler around 2,000 years ago than it is now but by 1,000 AD, the climate of the region was about the same as it is today. But more on that time period in the next episode. The pit houses were also a great way to store food which would have allowed people to leave the area during the winter and hunt and gather and return in the spring.
But the biggest difference with the people is their new adoption of agriculture. Most importantly: corn. Here’s a great quote from Burrillo about the new to the southwest plant:
Throughout much of the Colorado Plateau the archaeology dating to the tail end of the Late Archaic is one of increasing sedentism, as people started settling down for a bit of farming. The question of whether Late Archaic foragers learned and adopted farming in situ or were replaced by incoming farmers from elsewhere-ie., whether it was cultural transmission of knowledge or migration of actual people--is ongoing…
He has more to say about the Bears Ears area but for us what’s important is that the earliest evidence of maize on the Colorado plateau is from around 2,000 BC with squash coming in around 500 years later and both appear to come up from central Mexico with migrating farmers. But there’s a good chance the people already knew how to plant corn and squash but they were just growing them on the periphery or in their personal gardens. For this time period of archaic southwesterners, agriculture was more of a supplement to the hunter gatherer lifestyle than the means to an end it would become for later peoples in the region. As Plog puts it, it was more of an enhancement than an alternative to hunting and gathering.
In its ancestral form, Maize is a tough grass called teosinte with as Burrillo puts it, quote, ears of hard little kernels that are effectively inedible. End quote. Eventually it would evolve with human’s help to be the delicious staple it is now and would become 2,000 years ago for the Archaic people of the southwest. Maize provided more calories for the people of the southwest than the plants they were foraging for at the time. I’ll let Burrillo tell you more about corn. I’ll actually talk even more about corn in the next episode. You’re going to hear a lot about corn but that’s okay because the people we’ll be covering, the Anasazi, will eventually become obsessed with it. Here’s Burrillo:
Maize offers a lot more than just calories. Although famously deficient in lysine and tryptophan, both of which can be found in beans but can also just as easily be found in wild items like amaranth, maize is remarkably nutritious. And it can be dried to rock-hard and then stored almost indefinitely. And you can ferment it into maize beer (called chicha in Peru and other far-south places). And you can roast fish and tamale fixings wrapped inside its husks. And you can make it into bread. And it comes in variety of pretty colors, or anyway it used to. And you can pop it And you can get sugar from its stalks, like you can with its near relative sugarcane. And tea brewed from its silk has medicinal properties. And you can make pipes out of the cobs.
By 400 BC, 1,600 years after its introduction, corn made up 78 percent of the people on Cedar Mesa’s diet. Cedar Mesa is one of my favorite places in the world, although it’s a special and spooky place. There are more ruins and canyons and beautiful areas than you can shake a stick at up on cedar mesa which overlooks monument valley and valley of the gods and sits below the bears ears and canyon country. You can see Navajo Mountain, the Abajo Mountains, and sleeping Ute Mountain from its height. You can see Comb Ridge and into Arizona and Colorado. It’s a fantastic and wild place that I will talk a lot about in the next episode as well. I’ve got a short story on the website about the awesome place you can check out if you’d like. But by 400 BC, the people of the four corners were fully dependent on the corn.
To achieve their dependence, the people had to be adept at the practice of dry farming, which it seems like they mastered by 100 BC. What is dry farming? Here’s Burrillo again:
Briefly: they planted in deep, sandy soils with good moisture retention, and relied on water from melted snow in the soil to germinate the maize and sustain it until (hopefully, in a good year) late-summer rainwater during the annual monsoon, or rainy season, allowed it to fill out its ears. Timing was crucial. It takes a lot of water to fill maize kernels, and the plant's water demand therefore skyrockets at that stage of its development, so the crop has to be hitting that stage just as the rains start to fall (usually on the Fourth of July, just in time to ruin picnics throughout the Four Corners). If the maize seed went into the ground too early, the plant would hit the tassel/kernel stage too early and die of dehydration. If it went in too late, the plant would still have high water demands after the rains had stopped and you'd end up with the same problem. Figuring out how and when to plant in order to hit that bull's-eye would be hard enough with a climatic database and a calculator, and the Ancestral Pueblo of Bears Ears had neither. But figure it out they did.
Not just the people on Cedar Mesa, but the Anasazi people of the four corners in general figured out how to plant corn and make it work.
So, not so brief aside, let’s talk about the terms Anasazi and Ancestral Puebloan as they will eventually be the highlight of this series. I use both but neither are really correct. The word Anasazi has famously been used as the official term to describe those mysterious peoples who quote unquote disappeared from the Southwest and left all of the ruins that fascinate me and countless others since well before the 1930s. The word itself, Anasazi, as the story goes, means quote unquote, ancient enemy or ancestors of our enemy in Navajo. The Navajo would move into the area that the Anasazi had once occupied a couple hundred years later so the term enemy seems strange as they would not have ever fought with or against them. They did fight against modern pueblo people’s though so enemy ancestors works…
Another interpretation is that the Navajo workers who were hired to excavate by a famous archaeologist were referring to that particular archaeologist as old enemy. Apparently he sucked. Although… Anasazi can also be interpreted as Ancient Ones so… I’m not actually sure how there’s confusion since I don’t speak Navajo… but, whatever the case, some native American groups and people in academia thought it was… inappropriate and insensitive to current Pueblo peoples to continue to use that term so in 1991, they, they being academics at the annual meeting of Santa Fe’s Museum of Indian Arts and Culture, decided to change it. They changed the term to Ancestral Puebloans since modern day pueblo people’s descended form these Anasazi… except, this would imply that all of the people of the southwest who built structures that are now ruins are descended from them, which is not the case. And also, as I will eventually exhaustively describe, the modern day pueblo people ABANDONED the Anasazi’s way of doing things in favor of starting over on their own terms, essentially rejecting the Ancestral Puebloans form of life for a new and better one as they searched for their center place. So… more so than the Navajo, the modern day Pueblo people can accurately call the ancestral puebloan’s ancient enemy. They essentially were… but again, more on that later.
I also think since the term can mean Ancient Ones and not just ancient enemy, it is the perfect term to be used despite it being a Navajo word. This is because many of the modern day pueblo people that descended from the ancestral puebloans speak a multitude of languages. The Hopi use their own term, Hisatsinom, but the Zuni don’t appreciate that and they have their own term. The people of the Acoma pueblo have their own term. Therefore, I use both Ancestral Puebloans and Anasazi as they’re both somewhat accurate. Although, I have been referring to these people as the ancient ones recently. I’m sure someone will have a problem with that term as well.
Lastly, David Roberts who wrote in Search of the old Ones, a sort of precursor to Child’s House of Rain talks about the term and mentions how he is still going to use it, as do many other archaeologists I read. He also mentions that many Native Americans in the US still call themselves Indians. That word obviously isn’t accurate and it is what the kids call these days, problematic but it’s still in use by the very people it’s supposed to be problematic towards. I used it in many of my previous episodes about the pioneers, fur trappers, explorers, cowboys, and Buffalo Soldiers. Some people… all of them white, and all of them college educated, suggested I not use the term at all. Every term that we use in these kinds of situations can and in the current climate probably will become problematic one day until it circles around to the original usage as these things often do. So again, I use both Anasazi and Ancestral Puebloan as well as Ancient Ones because they all work and since there is not one word to describe all of them that can be agreed upon.
There’s also a deeper problem with something that archaeologist Dr. Stephen Lekson calls Pueblo Space or Pueblo Mystique that has to do with how the Pueblos and people within them are seen and understood by outsiders today. It plays a huge roll in how we’ve interpreted data, made conjectures of the past, and how we see the southwest in general… I’ll get into that more in the next episode… but it involves the railroad company, our war with Mexico, and some rather colonial views about the Indians.
Speaking of the Hopi and Zuni and Acoma languages, by this point in the archaic people’s timeline, they are speaking a multitude of languages, many of the languages having been separated into distinct ones thousands of years before during the prehistoric times. Others more recently… for them. Some of these language groups are Uto-Aztecan, spoken by modern Hopis, some other people from the Great Basin region, and even the people of Central Mexico and central America! The Aztecs speak a dialect of Uto-Aztecan as the name suggests. The modern day Zuni are speaking Zuni… and the Rio Grande Pueblo people are speaking languages from the Keresan Language family. All of these people claim they are descendants of the Ancestral Puebloan and they all would have been neighbors during the hey-day of the Anasazi who would have interacted with one another as their distinct cultures formed. They were probably all mixing families and trading goods and ideas. Movement was key to the people of the southwest just as it had been for their ancestors.
Plog says, quote, The rapid changes in elevation in many parts of the Southwest make it possible to travel only 20 or 30 miles and move from the heat and aridity of the desert to the cooler, more luxuriant mountains. For thousands of years, therefore, people have been able to exploit a wide variety of environments with minimal movement. Many groups, both historic and prehistoric, took advantage of that opportunity. End quote.
20 or 30 miles wasn’t the extent of the Ancient One’s movement. In Childs incredible book, House of Rain, he discusses sandals he’d seen that were preserved with patterns on the bottom of them that would have left imprints in the desert floor for those who came after to be able to identify the wearer. Maybe the pattern was unique to a person, a family, or an entire clan or unit. Quote, when I saw the stamp of these sandals, I immediately knew they had been leaving premeditated communiqués all across the desert, messages trailing out wherever they went. End quote. Childs shaped my view of the people of the Americas being movers and travelers in Atlas of a Lost World but he reinforced that idea in my mind after I more recently read his even earlier work, House of Rain which tracks the Anasazi throughout the Southwest. Movement was essential for the people who etched and painted spirals on everything and everywhere throughout the region from Utah to Northern Mexico. Looking for that center place.
Here’s another quote from House of Rain that precedes the earlier sandal quote:
Walking people, travelers, those who lived on the Colorado Plateau in the early centuries A.D. are well known for their sandals. You find pieces of discarded sandals chewed and gathered in wood rat nests. Many rock art panels have images of sandal prints walking straight up the cliffs. There are sandals made of disks that cover just the balls of the feet for running, and more traditional sandals with which to walk cross-country. End quote. He would later say, quote, These people were travelers from the start. Well before Chaco they had a history of burning their pit-houses in rituals of departure, then moving en masse to some other place. They were road builders, itinerants in a home landscape. End quote. We’ll talk about Chaco and roads and monumental architecture next time. This episode is really laying the foundation for that era of the Southwest.
Wether it’s to find the right stone for tools, hunt for food or wood, to visit religious shrines, or to visit with friends and relatives who have joined other pit houses or clans, the people of the Southwest are traveling on foot to pretty great distances. They travel the land and peck into the rock of high walled canyons, floating figures of the not dead and not alive spiritual raw beings only they knew the meaning of. There are tall figures that would have taken thousands of bone hammer pecks to complete that seem ghostly to us. They were probably ghostly to them too. I’ve seen some of these figures in Utah and Arizona at hard to find places that are high up. They seem to overlook the area they rise and float above. The longer you look at them, the more you see and the less they make sense… and the more eerie a few can become. Some have no feet and some have six toes which is apparently a purely American hemisphere theme. From south America to Canada six toes are caved or painted throughout the land. I read in a different book by Child’s called Tracing Time which talks about the Rock Art of the Southwest that he’s seen, that six toes can signify someone with a great deal of knowledge. Maybe power. But who knows. What is known is that feet were important enough to spend a lot of time to hammer a representation of into stone. That makes sense though when it comes from a people of migration and of movement.
Plog says, the people of the southwest, quote, share many ideas about the nature of the cosmos, including the belief that their people first emerged from an opening in the underworld and then, over the years, migrated to their current villages. End quote. They’re a people always searching for their home, the center of their spiral.
Another common idea about the cosmos is their need to understand the weather in order to be able to survive. As Plog puts it, quote, dependence on agriculture brought with it an increased need to understand and predict seasonal and longer-term environmental fluctuations in order to farm successfully. Archaeological evidence from the southwest shows that humans spent increasing amounts of time trying to direct and placate the forces and spirits that they believed controlled their environment. End quote.
Plog then goes on to discuss how important exact ceremonies and strict rituals are to a modern day puebloan. Which is true, but I am going to avoid extrapolating backwards onto the people from two thousand or even in the next episode, one thousand years ago, because that’s not how culture works. I have been guilty of falling for this and mentioned it in the little short episode before this one. Stephen Lekson talks a lot about this and how it has caused many of our problems with how we see the Anasazi and I will get into that in the next episode, but it’s a little technical for this humble little historical podcast. It does make a lot of sense to have ceremonies and dances and beliefs that are highly exact and that have letter perfect attention to detail that exhibit control over the environment in one where a few days off on planting can mean the difference between starving, surviving, and / or abundance.
Modern day pueblos do have an obsessive focus on calendrical rituals and these may have begun before Chaco, before the Basketmaker 2 period in the archaic. Other rituals may have begun to illicit control not only over the cosmos but other groups, families, and individuals. As the population increased during the early ADs, it may have been necessary to keep the peace or redistribute food to those whose crops did not yield. Plog says, quote, Communal rituals may have been necessary to create and reinforce the sense of identity and community that had been weakened by placing family welfare ahead of the well being of the entire village. End quote. As the village becomes larger, it becomes easier to focus on the individual family instead of the group.
It’s easy to see in the archaeological record that both settlements and the fertility rate were increasing in size as three new cultural adaptations arrive to the area, most likely from the south down in Mexico. These three new imports are pretty important. Well, the first, beans, definitely arrives from Mexico between 2 and 500 AD. This completes the trifecta of the protein and nutrient rich food source that is corn, beans, and squash that was so beloved by the people in the Southwest.
At the same time that beans were spreading into the area, ceramics were replacing woven baskets. The fact that they arrive at the same time as beans also suggests that it made its way up north from Mexico. Ceramic vessels allow for the easier storage and preparation of foods which is essential in a harsh environment where not every year crops are going to yield enough to sustain the pit house, or family.
The final new cultural trend was the replacement of the spear throwing atlatls with the bow and arrow. This allowed for more individual hunts before and after agricultural work, like planting and cultivating the new beans with the corn and squash.
The only problem with the new bow and arrow, well not problem, but one major difference between the new bow and arrow and the atlatl is… I’ll just let Burrillo tell you:
The biggest disadvantage of bows versus atlatls, however, is one that surprises most people when they first encounter it: bows, at least the early ones, are far less powerful. The explosive thrust that a strong and seasoned atlatl user can transfer into the projectile is just ungodly, and the weight of the projectile itself-tens of times larger than an arrow--contributed greatly to its force. Until you get those high-tech modern compound things, there wasn’t a bow in North America that could beat an atlatl for oomph. I’ve seen modern enthusiasts propel atlatl darts deep into tree trunks. On the other hand: while someone who's practiced with an atlatl for thousands of hours can practically use one to thread a needle, the learning curve is imposingly steep compared with that of a bow. Being an expert at anything always requires a lot of time and practice, but the distance between Dreadful and Good Enough is much shorter with a bow than with an atlatl. And, again, you can fire one of them from a narrow space. All you need is enough room to draw your arm back to full draw, or about one full arm's length in front of you, which means you can even do it while leaning over a wall. It's not so easy to spring from cover and fire an atlatl, let alone do it while running.
With this new technology of bow and arrow there is an increase, if not flat out invention of warfare in the southwest. Lekson, in a paper he wrote titled War in the Southwest, War in the World reviews and expands upon another paper written by Steven A Leblanc titled Prehistoric Warfare in the American Southwest. In Lekson’s paper he says the warfare for the periods we’re talking about, the basketmaker 2 and 3 periods, or from about 1 AD to 750 AD, is more akin to quote, a lower level of raiding and feuding, comprising sporadic, situational tit for tat conflicts on a family or small group scale. End quote. The evidence for this small scale raiding and feuding abound in the archaeological record with quote, the construction of stockades around habitation sites, the tendency for sites to be located on hilltop locations, the presence of Trincheras (hillsides with a series of low walls) in some areas, a high frequency of burning and unburied bodies, and increasing aggregation through time. End quote. That was Leblanc.
Unburied bodies and quote unquote extreme processing events are clear signs of trouble that begin to creep into the record around this time. I’ll go into extreme processing events in the next two episodes but it involves processing the bodies of the ones you’ve just killed over many hours of intricate work to prove a point to those left alive or those who will stumble upon the scene later. Think… taking apart every bone in the body and scattering the remains over an area like say… the floor of a pit house before burning said pit house down… that will happen… not infrequently, much later on. Eventually, this low level of raiding and feuding will increase systematically until it abruptly stops. Why it stops is for the next episode but it has to do with that Chaco I have referenced a few times.
So the three new cultural infusions from the south of Beans, ceramic vessels, and the bow and arrow coincides with an increase in violence… but also, on the opposite side of that, an increase in population and interestingly, in fertility rates. Two reasons fertility rates increase… have been witnessed by anthropologists in more modern hunter gatherer societies that switched to agriculture. Once a society, or group, or more specifically a mother, is no longer forced to hold their child while gathering, that mother is more quickly able to be ready to have another child. And also, as every farm family would tell you, it’s easier to cultivate and complete agricultural tasks with little children workers to help with said daily tasks.
Another way archaeologists know that agriculture exploded in this era around 1,500 years ago, is the dramatic increase in manos and metates which appear much more frequently. Manos and metates are the key to grinding corn which can create the cornflour that will make tortillas and breads. The manos are the cylindrical grinding stones that the woman would roll along the basin of the metate, which was the surface to grind the corn down into a flour. You could then store this for long periods of time, which the Anasazi did… in ceramic vessels… or you could immediately make all sorts of those already talked about goodies like tortillas. The only problem with this method of creating flour is that the stones would chip and break into tiny almost sandlike pieces that would be baked into whatever was being made and would, over time, break and grind down and destroy the teeth of the native American people. From central to north America, the evidence of the grinding down of teeth is clearly evident in the record. The Maya would inlay stones and turquoise into the rotting teeth, which I recently read actually stopped some infections. But regardless, that kind of tooth decay causes all sorts of problems and as I’ll get into in the next episode, the ancestral puebloan peoples really didn’t live all that long.
At this time there’s also the definitive first appearance of public architecture and an apparent increase in the group ownership of land. At one site in Northern Mexico, over a thousand years worth of burials were placed in a single pit. That site is known as Cienega Creek and there have been found 36 individuals who were cremated, placed into baskets, and laid into the same pit with other souls being buried nearby. Plog says, quote, Cross cultural studies of hunting and gathering and agricultural groups reveal that burials are usually associated with more formalized ties between specific social groups and particular geographic areas, and that burials validate and reinforce rights of ownership and inheritance. End quote.
This importance of ownership would increase as the area’s population continued to boom which led to the four corners being filled with what Burrillo calls, quote, groups of homesteaders moving into previously unoccupied frontier or borderland areas. End quote.
By AD 800, just after the Basketmaker III period and into the Pueblo I period, there’s evidence that throughout the region, most families, groups, or clans were residing in individual villages throughout the year and these individual villages had both large communal and private structures. Plazas begin to appear along with pit houses that have changed in appearance to be substantially bigger and that now contain ladders, tall walls, and shelves on the back walls within the structures.
This is also when great kivas first appear. Kivas are incredibly important to the southwestern peoples and to me. Not religiously or anything, I just find them fascinating and awesome and beautiful. I have fallen for the Pueblo mystique, 100%. Again, I will visit this important facet of puebloan archaeology and ethnology and understanding in the next episode but a nice way to quickly sum it up would be to quote Audrey Goodman in their 2002 piece titled, Translating Southwestern Landscapes, where they say, quote, The American Southwest has functioned as an Anglo cultural fantasy for more than a century. End quote. That sure is true for me. Unashamedly. But, the more I’ve read about kivas recently, the more I think I may have been wrong all this time about their religious and ceremonial importance to the Anasazi… but more research is needed, along with a time machine… and also, I’ll go more into them in the next episode as they are vital to Chaco as kivas explode in number and size. Just know that Kivas are still used in pueblo society now… but as Lekson suggests, it is probably in a very different way than they were used by the people the modern Puebloans actively rejected, the ancient ones. The ones who were still searching for their center place.
But great kivas first appear in the late basketmaker period and… well, here’s Burrillo to explain them a little until the next episode:
These take some unpacking, but the short version is that while the pit house of the Early Basketmaker period never fell out of use until very late in the Pueblo era, a communal version started to appear throughout the Mesa Verde region in the 700s. The earliest of these were circular pit structures about twenty to thirty feet in diameter, relatively shallow, without an antechamber. You could fit a fair number of people around the inside of a structure like that, and researchers think that's exactly what they were intended for. End quote. He goes on to say, quote, they’re houses. They were often the primary domestic household for a single family, and continued to be so well into the Pueblo II or Chaco period. End quote.
Again, I will talk at length about them in the next episode but to briefly reinforce the idea that kivas are a domestic structure, Lekson adds that, quote, The round rooms reverently presented to the public as kivas at chaco and mesa verde were not the ceremonial structures we see today in pueblos, they were gussied up pit houses. End quote.
I’ll use that exact quote in the next episode which covers that Chaco I keep mentioning. Think of Chaco as the center of the Anasazi world that arose at the end of Basketmaker III around 750 AD. The violence, which had increased along with the population during this period of Basketmaker III, with a good bit of evidence for increased raiding and feuding, will cease when Chaco and its elite rise up and unify the area under elaborate noble rulers who seem to gather food, wealth, and exotic goods from near and far flung places like the Gulf of Mexico, Cahokia in Illinois, which was the capital of the Mississippian culture, and the people of Central Mexico, the Maya.
I know I just covered about 11,000 years or so from the end of the Paleoindian period which coincides with the end of the Ice Age, all the way up to the end of the Basketmaker III period and the beginning of the Pueblo I period which is 750 AD, and it was a lot of information. But to me, what matters the most is that the people, after many natural fluctuations of the environment over thousands of years, are still highly mobile but are beginning to settle down, build pit houses, practice more intense agriculture, and do a little bit of raiding and feuding as the population continues to increase. Corn, beans, squash, ceramic vessels, the bow and arrow, and probably some ideas about the cosmos and the world around them are brought up from Mexico and central America and infused into the people and the landscape. Throughout it all though, the people of the Southwest and the four corners region, the people that will become known to us as the Anasazi are always searching for their center place like tracing the line of a tight spiral that’s been etched with bone and a river rock into the side of a grey boulder, black desert varnish streaked red wall, or mustard colored cliffside.
When we return to the southwest, the mustard colored landscape of Chaco will be the focus as the region dramatically changes with Chaco’s rise and eventual movement. It’s this movement of Chaco throughout the Four Corners region and beyond that ends in instability, violence, and more spiral migration that leaves the land filled with abandoned ruins that have captured our imaginations and left places the Navajo call… demonic. Stay tuned… but in the meantime, make sure you’re always searching for that center place.
War in the Southwest, War in the World by Stephen Lekson
Prehistoric Warfare in the American Southwest by Steven A Leblanc
Man Corn: Cannibalism and Violence in the Prehistoric American Southwest Hardcover by Christy G. Turner II
In Search of the Old Ones: Exploring the Anasazi World of the Southwest by David Roberts
Behind the Bears Ears: Exploring the Cultural and Natural Histories of a Sacred Landscape
Ancient Peoples of the American Southwest by Stephen Plog
A Study of Southwestern Archaeology by Stephen Lekson
Tracing Time: Seasons of Rock Art on the Colorado Plateau by Craig Childs
House of Rain: Tracing a Vanished Civilization Across the American Southwest by Craig Childs
Atlas of a Lost World: Travels in Ice Age America by Craig Childs
In Search of the Old Ones: Exploring the Anasazi World of the Southwest by David Roberts
The Lost World of the Old Ones: Discoveries in the Ancient Southwest by David Roberts
Ancient Peoples of the American Southwest by Stephen Plog
A Study of Southwestern Archaeology by Stephen Lekson
House of Rain: Tracing a Vanished Civilization Across the American Southwest by Craig Childs
Secrets of the Tarahumara by Christopher McDougall
https://indigenousmexico.org/sinaloa/the-original-indigenous-people-of-sinaloa/
https://www.centerforconsciouseldering.com/2015/05/04/art-pilgrimage-meeting-ancient-wisdom-copper-canyon/
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/spiral-mass-grave-mesoamerican-mexico-city.amp
http://westerndigs.org/new-evidence-reveals-violent-final-days-at-arizonas-montezuma-castle/
https://www.crowcanyon.org/educationproducts/peoples_mesa_verde/post_pueblo_navajo_name.asp
https://www.desertusa.com/desert-people/paquime.html
Winds from the North, Tewa Origins and Historical Anthropology by Scott Ortman
The Lost World of the Old Ones by David Roberts
The Pueblo Revolt by David Roberts
In Search of the Old Ones by David Roberts
House of Rain by Craig Childs
Atlas of a Lost World by Craig Childs
Ancient Peoples of the American Southwest by Steven Plog
A Study of Southwestern Archaeology by Stephen Lekson
Behind the Bears Ears by RL Burrillo
A Note on a Rare Cranial Vault Modification Shared by Ancestral Puebloans in the American Southwest, Mesoamericans on Mexico’s Gulf coast, and Peruvians from Norte Chico in the Context of Twisted Gourd Symbolism; the Gallina case by Kathryn Devereaux, PhD
Pope, Pose-yemu, and Naranjo: A New Look at Leadership in the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 by Stefanie Beninato
Ordinary, yet Distinct: The Allure of Gallina by J. Michael Bremer
Sandals as Icons: Representations in Ancestral Pueblo Rock Art and Effigies in Stone and Wood by Polly Schaafsma
The Abandonment of Chaco Canyon, the Mesa Verde Migrations, and the Reorganization of the Pueblo World by Stephen H Lekson and Catherine M Cameron
Authoritative Control and the Society System in Jemez Pueblo by Florence Hawley Ellis
The Zuni Scalp Ceremonial by Mrs. Matilda Coxe Stevenson
The 1992 Turtle Dance (Oekuu Shadeh) of San Juan Pueblo: Lessons with the Composer, Peter Garcia by Hao Huang
https://www.archaeologybulletin.org/articles/10.5334/bha.2123/print/
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/08/190805143527.htm
http://www.passportintime.com/gallina-site.html
Cannibals of the Canyon by Douglas Preston, The New Yorker, November 30, 1998
Prehistoric Warfare in the American Southwest by Steven A Leblanc
Atlas of a Lost World: Travels in Ice Age America by Craig Childs
The Rise & Reign of the Mammals by Steve Brusatte
Ice Age Mammals of North America: A Guide to the Big, the Hairy, and the Bizarre; Second Edition by Ian M Lange
Rancho La Brea: A Record of Pleistocene Life in California by Chester Stock
First Peoples in a New World: Colonizing Ice Age America by David J. Meltzer
The Trees that Miss the Mammoths By Whit Bronaugh
The Snowmastodon Project: Mammoths and mastodons lived the high life in Colorado by Mary Caperton Morton
University of Michigan: Underwater storage techniques used by early North American hunters preserve meat for at least six months; May 3, 1995
Ancient human-sloth hunt hinted at in 15,000-year-old footprints by Sid Perkins for Science Magazine
Denver Museum of Nature & Science
Los Angeles Museum of Natural History
La Brea Tar Pits & Museum
Western Science Center of Hemet, California