The Ancient Ones: Chaco & the Anasazi

Describing the Southwestern Anasazi without talking about Chaco Canyon would be like describing a spiral without using your hands to do the motion. It’s near impossible. I dare you to try. Ask a friend or a family member to describe a spiral like you’ve never seen one and they will eventually resort to creating a spiral with their finger in the air as if tracing along the etched line of one that’s been resting on a rock for a thousand years in the mustard colored desert of New Mexico.

In AD 750, the Southwest is about to kick off a spiral that won’t end, won’t find its center place until almost 700 years later in northern Mexico, right before the Old World collision. Mexico is actually a good place to start. We know that the bow and arrow and the three staples of squash, beans, and the almighty corn came up from Mesoamerica’s various city state cultures over the past few millennia but what else may have come up with them? The Term Mesoamerica, is an archaeological one that is used to describe the cultures that flourished in the area of Mexico down to the southern tip of Central America during the Pre-Columbian or before Christopher Columbus era. Although, I believe it should probably also include a lot more of North America as well… Maybe you’ll agree with me when all is said and done.

In 750AD, the Maya civilization was at its height and travelers of the empire, if you can call it that, were spreading ideas and goods as far North as southern Illinois to a regional capital on the Mississippi River across from Saint Louis called Cahokia, which was inhabited by a people called the Mississippian Culture. That culture spread from Wisconsin, to be precise, from a place in Wisconsin on the shores of Lake Michigan called Aztalan, which is only worth mentioning because it was named after the Aztecs supposed homeland, Aztalan, you know… the Aztecs in Tenochtitlan that Cortez and the Conquistadors overthrew. While the Aztecs did wander down from up north until, as legend says, they saw an eagle eating a snake on a cactus in what is now Mexico City, the north in question was not in Wisconsin. Probably. So, the Mississippian Culture spread from Wisconsin down the Mississippi through its many tributaries to Oklahoma and all the way over to Georgia. Which are, curiously, the three places I was born, grew up, and lived in before I moved to Southern California in 2022… so the Mississippian will come up again as they rise up, flourish, and then quote unquote vanish just like the Anasazi. Anyways, Maya emissaries, or ambassadors, or priests, or nobles, whomever it was, the Maya were spreading up north, northeast, and… northwest. To what degree? No one knows for sure, but it did happen.

Meanwhile, in the Phoenix Area of Arizona, plazas, canals, and mesoamerican style ball courts are being erected and used in a culture called the Hohokam. The Hohokam will also be important to the story. Turquoise from New Mexico is making its way down to the elites of the Yucatan Peninsula. The Mogollon of the Mimbres Valley in southern New Mexico, another important group to our story, are adopting ritualistic artistic expressions on their ceramics that mirror ones from Mexico. And Chaco Canyon is beginning to build the Great House Pueblos it would become famous for. Later excavations would even find in a place called Pueblo Bonito in Chaco Canyon, the same ceremonial knife that was used at the top of Maya Temples to carve the hearts out of prisoners while they were still alive before their bodies, soon to be separated from their heads, were thrown down the temple steps. There is no evidence for the sacrificial removal of hearts in northwestern New Mexico… yet… but there will be in the next episode, plenty of gory goings-on in the Pueblos of the Four Corners region and its hinterlands. Think back to the extreme processing events I hinted at in the last episode.

Neither heart carvings nor Temples are actually found in Chaco Canyon though. Instead of Temples, the people built what are called Great Houses which were an entirely novel feature of the American Southwest. As Stephen Lekson puts it, there was nothing like them before, during, or after Chaco except at Chaco and its outliers.

But actually, we shouldn’t start at Chaco Canyon. Chaco Canyon isn’t even where Chaco started. Always looking for that center place.

Between 750 and 900 AD, or to be an archaeologist about it, which I am not, the years 750 to 900 AD encompass the Pueblo I period. So, during the Pueblo I period, the people of the Four Corners area, aka the ancestral puebloans, or the Anasazi, starting even before Pueblo I, the Anasazi region began to change.

First, they started moving from scattered sunken pit houses to, above ground houses called unit pueblos and actual villages. They also begin practicing cranial deformation… think elongating the skull upwards like that weird crystal skull thing in that weird Indiana Jones movie that shall not be acknowledged henceforth or forevermore… except peoples all over the americas actually performed this elongation of the skulls and the Four Corners area was a bit late to the party. Also, despite building villages, the Anasazi were still on the move, just like their ancestors had been. R L Burrillo, in his book Behind the Bears Ears says of the villages, quote, former Colorado state archaeologist Richard Wilshusen often characterizes them as more akin to modern trailer parks than to apartment complexes- aggregations of little homes with maybe a communal architectural center, but otherwise not exactly built to last… End quote. He talks about the boom and bust aspect of the region’s many villages before everyone, quote, packed up and headed to northern New Mexico. End quote. If you were wondering what’s in Northern New Mexico… it’s Chaco.

Besides the question of what is Chaco, which we will answer throughout this episode, I’m sure you’re wondering, where is Chaco? Well, it’s in the northwest corner of that land of enchantment that is New Mexico, and it’s not far from the Geographical Four Corners Marker that shows the meeting of Utah, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico. Chaco’s just east of the badlands and desert, south of Farmington, north of Gallup, Grants, and I-40, and it’s quite a good distance from anything down a few Navajo Nation bumpy dirt roads. Once you’ve found it, you’ll be in one of the most culturally significant areas in the American Southwest and probably the United States in general and probably the world as well, which would explain why it’s a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Today, you can visit it at a place cleverly called Chaco Culture National Historic Park and it is absolutely worth visiting. The NPS website has this to say of Chaco, quote, Pueblo descendants say that Chaco was a special gathering place where many peoples and clans converged to share their ceremonies, traditions, and knowledge. Chaco is central to the origins of several Navajo clans and ceremonies. Chaco is also an enduring enigma for researchers. End quote. As we will talk extensively about, what Pueblo descendants say of Chaco may not be as important as researchers have claimed, not to disparage the Modern Puebloan people. But it is indeed true that it was a special gathering place where many people and clans converged. And yes, it is an important place for Navajo as well, even though, the going theory is that they had no hand in building it, but only inherited it later. And not to completely discredit the NPS, even though I have my problems with the bloated and bureaucratic institution, if you’re listening to and reading what extremely knowledgeable researchers, historians, anthropologists, and archaeologists are saying, the overall truth of Chaco is no longer an enigma… by the end of this series, I know it won’t be an enigma to you dear listener, either.

So by AD 1,000, the people north of Chaco, in northern New Mexico, Southwestern Colorado, Southeastern Utah, and Northeastern Arizona, all converged into the harsh environment of the Canyon. Not just from the north, though, but also from the South. The archaeology and dendrochronology of the Canyon and surrounding area supports this. The dendron what was that? The Dendrochronology! That’s the study of trees in the archaeological record. More specifically it’s the study of tree rings.

For archaeologists, one of the most easily and accurately dated areas of the world, is the southwestern united states. And that’s completely due to Tree Rings. Here’s Stephen Plog in his work Ancient Peoples of the American Southwest. I used it last episode and I will use it in this and the next one as well. I wish I had a more up to date version of the book as mine is the second edition from 2008 back when I was at the university of Oklahoma studying to become the next Indiana Jones… thank goodness they never made a fourth movie. Anyways, here’s Plog:

In the southwest, however, the dry environment has furnished archaeologists with one exceptionally accurate dating method: dendrochronology, or tree ring dating.

He goes on to give the history of it before saying, quote, each year trees such as the Douglas fir and piñon pine produce an outer ring or layer of new wood, which builds up into a sequence of rings over the lifetime of the individual tree. Crucially the rings vary in thickness from year to year, largely because of annual fluctuations in climate. By matching and overlapping ring sequences in living trees with those in old wood, Douglass (the man who pioneered the technique not the tree) and his successors built up a master chronology for the southwest over the last 2,000 years! Beams recovered from archaeological sites are dated by matching the beams’ ring sequences with those of the master chronology. End quote.

This method of dating produced the first true date of any site anywhere in the whole world and I just think that’s neat. So researchers know the exact date of the sites in the southwest and crucially, Chaco Canyon by the roof beams that are still at the site and still in spectacular condition.

I’ve done some serious exploring and visiting of a great many sites and there is nothing like getting up close to a cylinder of wood still sticking out of the side of an Anasazi masonry structure and knowing it’s the same one that was cut down and taken to that spot where it still stands and knowing that if I measured its tree rings I could find out exactly what date the log was felled. Not used in construction mind you, but cut down. In Chaco, most of the wood used in the construction of the great houses, kivas, and pueblos were carefully brought in from, and importantly not dragged, but carefully carried from anywhere from 40 to 65 miles away in the various mountain ranges that surround the San Juan Basin like the Chuska or even further Zuni Mountains. Also from the Zuni mountains, tools from the area have been found in Chaco and those mountains are 80 miles straight south across Route 66. Although, obviously, the mother road didn’t exist back then. But what did exist were countless miles of what’s called Chacoan roads that stretched throughout the desert in all directions from Chaco Canyon like the spokes of a wheel reaching even as far off a place as the Bears Ears… more on those Roads later though.

Chaco Canyon isn’t an easy place to live in, yet people were flocking into the area in very large numbers. By not easy to live in, I mean there can be 40 degree Fahrenheit temperature changes within a single day, and that ain’t uncommon.

If you haven’t experienced a 40 degree temperature change, it’s wild. I was once climbing on the side of Mount Scott in the Wichita Mountains of Oklahoma on a Saturday in December. It was 70 degrees and sunny and beautiful but before long, a cloud gathered on the northwestern horizon which we slowly realized was not a cloud in the sky but rather a cloud of dust and debris that started in the sky and reached the ground. In the Sahara they happen in the summer and they’re called Haboobs, which… it’s a funny name… Haboob… anyways, we suspected that ground cloud was nothing good so we came down off the wall and were packing up our ropes and gear when it hit us… the temperature dropped over 50 degrees into the 20s, snow and sand and dust pelted our faces as we ran to the Subaru and began our trek back to Norman where that storm would knock out power for almost a week.

So, Chaco has those crazy temperature changes. Not to mention long cold winters, it’s super hot in the summer, the lack of rainfall, the poor soil, the near constant wind once out of the canyon, and the utter and almost complete lack of trees to construct things with or use as fuel for fires with which to cook and stay warm. Hauling timbers from 40 to 90 miles away isn’t anyone’s idea of a fun task, yet the Anasazi did it… although there may have been some persuasion in that department.

The Ancient Ones moved into the mustard colored dry and difficult to live in Chaco area in incredibly large numbers from all over and began making villages all around the area of the Canyon, also known as, the San Juan Basin, named after the San Juan River. The villages have multiple different families living in aboveground living rooms with storage areas, what’s known as a great kiva, rock art panels, shrines, and as Burillo puts it, plaza areas where the landscape allowed them. He also says the villages were, quote, vibrant and dynamic civic centers where people congregated from across and outside of a given region, and development of these villages probably has much to do with how they were better than scattered hamlets for bringing diverse and disparate groups into a single community. End quote. Bringing scattered groups together helped the people mitigate loss of crops if someone’s didn’t take that year as discussed in the last episode. Even though they now lived together, they still farmed their individual plots on the periphery of the village. But coming together helped insure everyone was fed.

Burrillo then delves into the diverse and disparate groups of people part by explaining to us that at around the beginning of the Pueblo I period, around 750AD, the area of Bears Ears and the four corners saw some pretty quote, nasty climatic downturns and subsequent aggregation of dispersed populations into relatively smaller pieces of high-elevation landscape where crops could still grow, and that meant rubbing elbows with folks you may not like who used to live a comfortable distance away. So, at least in part, one reason these villages emerged might not be the PROactive one of bringing people together in harmony so much as the REactive one of creating a space where people who'd been smooshed together by default had to learn how to get along. In any case, the result was the same: blending of traits, practices, and families from different corners of the realm. End quote.

So during this time period of Pueblo I, population exploded at the same time that people came together to live in closer proximity both in the San Juan Basin, and in the Bears Ears Region, and truthfully all surrounding regions including the Hohokam and Mogollon, whom we will discuss later but the Hohokam are where Phoenix and its suburbs are now all the way to the Colorado River on the California Border. Literally underneath the buildings and roadways of that big hot Sun-belt city, which has no doubt produced some Poltergeist situations. Meanwhile the Mogollon are in southern New Mexico, Eastern Arizona, and south of the Tortilla Curtain slash Southern Border in northern Mexico… in states like Chihuahua and Sonora. Tortilla Curtain? That’s a great term which I believe was coined by novelist TC Boyle but mentioned by Burrillo in reference to the current Mexican American border and fake boundary that modern archaeologists, historians, anthropologists, and ethnographers have created to differentiate the American Southwest, the United States, and Canada from Mexico and Central America… or more precisely, to say that native Americans and mesoamericans are completely separate and should not be regarded as having had influenced each other in any way. It’s a false and unnecessary boundary. These people, the Anasazi, knew nothing of our modern borders and moved throughout the area rather fluidly for thousands of years and would continue to do so right up until very recently. You’ll see by the end of this series how the people influenced and relied and traded and met up with each other… remember… the Clovis sprinters, the Ancient Ones, Anasazis, and Ancestral Puebloans ancestors, ran the span of entire nations without hesitation as they hunted their giants.

Anyways, part of this closer proximity of families and clans and groups coalescing into villages included the building and using of Great Houses. And by Great Houses, I mean the HUGE, usually D shaped buildings with hundreds of rooms with one in particular having around 700! And they’re 3 to 5 stories tall! I mean, sure, the Anasazi were small people but that’s still big and tall for a thousand years ago, especially in the American Southwest when most construction was small and haphazard at best. Great Houses are the shining glory of so many archaeological sites that are still standing in the region. It’s why people visit Chaco Canyon and many other places. Yes, archaeologists have rebuilt some of these great houses but many are still standing all by themselves and they are glorious now just as they would have been then… well, no they would have been so much grander back then. So much… greater. I think right now you should go check out what they would have looked like on the website or google Chaco Great Houses and see what I mean….

One of the books I read for this series is one I’ve mention by Stephen Lekson titled, A study of southwestern archaeology and it was extremely good and helpful. It’s heavy on scholastic themes and is the opposite kind of read from Craig Childs’ books, I mean, obviously.. they are friends… I wish I could be their friend too… But although the two are very different kinds of reads, both are equally as engaging. But in Lekson’s southwestern archaeology, he lays out a list of what he calls, take em to the bank fun and indisputable facts about Chaco. He lists them with a certain enjoyable irreverence for disagreement since he claims the facts are so obvious it’s a wonder we’re still discussing them at all. Kind of like how the founding fathers chose to say we hold these truths to be self evident meaning, duh… we don’t need to cite sources like other philosophers, statesmen, or even God because these are natural facts. Like the second amendment. Or first. Or that all men are created equal. I like the way Lekson has a no BS presentation of the fun and indisputable facts about Chaco. I won’t be running down the list verbatim but I will be incorporating them throughout the episode.

One of Lekson’s self evidents is that quote, Great houses were houses, but not many people lived in them. The initial design of early great houses is clearly based on the common unit pueblos, scaled up. Unit pueblos were family houses. Great houses were, literally great HOUSES. And that residential function continued throughout their careers, although most of the architectural mass of later great houses was NOT residential, it was storage: House plus warehouses, if you will. End quote.

We will get into the warehouse aspect in a bit. But great houses were not temples as earlier and even some current archaeologists suggest. Even a great source of mine suggested that Great Houses may have been used as both ritual places and residential palaces at various times and at various locations… and maybe the author was on to something with the various locations thing… but at Chaco, Great Houses were Houses and palaces. Not Temples. There may have been some ritual rooms but overall, they were not religious structures. They were not apartments or hotels for traveling great men or shamans or religious leaders to stay in when in town to perform rituals, although they may have stayed in small, what’s called “unit Pueblos” that were located just off the premises near the kiva… Great Houses were not empty monuments to some great leader, but they did house leaders. Living and dead. Lekson says three independent, one being his own of course, but three independent studies have came to this conclusion that Great Houses were houses. And the rest of the facts surrounding them seem to back it up. They definitely evolved from traditional pit houses that had little storehouses next to them, which then became small little above ground masonry unit pueblos like in the villages, but by the time Chaco came about, they were a much different and larger beast and I encourage everyone to look them up or even better, head to the website and on this episode page I have tons of pictures.

More Lekson… quote, Great Houses were palaces, monumental residences for elite, presumably ruling classes, which incorporated a great deal of non domestic storage space, specialized ceremonial structures, and probably “offices” for an evolving pro bureaucracy. End quote. The mention of a bureaucracy and classes in regards to Chaco must mean it was a state or state like polity right? More on that soon.

The other major key to Great Houses is that they usually surrounded a great many KIvas, including a GREAT Kiva. I know I briefly touched on kivas in the last episode but let’s really dive into ‘em now. 

Just like Great Houses but even more so, Kivas evolved from subterranean pit houses. This is important because again, Great Houses are Houses but Kivas are NOT houses. Although they evolved from them…

Let’s start over. Kivas are generally subterranean structures with ventilation systems, an encircling interior bench that goes around the entire kiva… hence, encircling… they have very little signs of domestic activity like cooking and sleeping, and they always have a small hole in the ground, later called a sipapu and later believed to be a passage to the underworld although… maybe not yet. And knowing that would actually require a time machine so for now it’s just conjecture.

But Kivas, once a residential function, became relegated to a ceremonial one… not religious… I don't think. Not yet. I say not yet because by the time the modern pueblo societies exist, it is religious, but they may not be that way yet in our story which to remind you, we’re at around 950AD. So the Kivas are now a ceremonial sort of meeting house, or a place where families and extended families can meet in peace and private in a building that once represented where they lived but now was a remembrance of a past time.

While their function may not be 100% known to those who study the southwest right now, it is known that they were important enough to rebuild and keep around and over a thousand years later, they’re still in use at the Modern Pueblos of the Four Corners Region. Here’s a quote from Childs amazing book, House of Rain, which he wrote to explain the disappearance of the Anasazi as he chased something known as the T Shaped doors we’ll talk about later and of which I used heavily for this series. Quote:

Excavators working on kivas repeatedly find the remains of previous masons and kivas directly below. These older kivas were often purposely destroyed--roofs burned, walls pulled down-~-and then new kivas were built on top, as if in a ritual act, or at least to signify a changing of the guard. Of the thirty-seven kivas excavated at Pueblo Bonito, at least twenty-two had received substantial renovations. Several were razed to their benches before being rebuilt. A kiva at the Chetro Ketl great house next to Pueblo Bonito drops down three stories through eight cycles of reconstruction, each kiva sitting slightly askew on top of the last. The original ceiling atop Aztec’s great kiva was once supported by four massive timbers, and at some point the timbers were burned along with the entire ceiling, all of which was replaced by a new twelfth-century ceiling held up by four stone pillars, a feat of tremendous human and natural resources.

Pueblo Bonito, the Great House just mentioned that had 37 kivas is the largest and most impressive and probably most famous Great House in Chaco Canyon. Chetro Ketl is another beautiful spot in the canyon that you can visit that is very near to Pueblo Bonito. There will be images up on the page of the Chaco Culture National Historic Site that you should absolutely view if you haven’t been there. I’ve been twice now, I know, not enough times. The first time I went was in 2014 and I had a very high fever and it was in June and I really don’t remember much from it. I’m not sure if I had a bug or my malaria was flaring up again, I am clueless in that regard. And it’s unimportant. The second time I went was during the last few days of 2020 in December. It was frigid with a terrible wind but the place was dang near empty and I passed not a soul, well maybe one, on a hike I did that overlooked the canyon called the pueblo Alto trail. You can see both Pueblo Bonito and Chetro Ketl, and a lot more from this trail. Which is now one of my favorite hikes of all time. Again, I encourage you to check out the website, the American southwest dot com, before you go check out the Park for yourself. Which you must. I know when Burrillo wrote his book Behind the Bears Ears he admits to only going to Chaco once… ONCE! And he calls himself a southwestern archaeologist! Disgraceful… I’m kidding, Burrillo, your book rocked.

So the kivas are built and burnt and built again over hundreds of years. But also, plaster walls of excavated kivas tend to be ten or twenty layers thick! Many of these earliest layers of kivas are dated to the 600s, which could mean a group of people lived in a circular pit house, left, moved around in search of their center place, only to return again and rebuild right on top of the old home… over and over again. Before Chaco exploded at the end of the Pueblo I period, people had been living in the canyon for a very long time. The first kiva in Chaco appears to have been built in the 500s, was abandoned, and then returned to a hundred years later where a larger kiva was built over top of it and abandoned until the 1100s when by that point a Great House was now surrounding the original ancient circular pit house. Remember, those quote unquote kivas from the 500s, may have just been houses that were rebuilt and later became the ceremonial meeting place kivas.

Some of these ceremonial meeting place kivas would have taken truly extensive work to build so they weren’t some throwaway architectural function. The Great Kiva at Chetro Ketl would have required a crew of 30 people working ten hours a day for over 100 days to complete. And remember, the many timbers that made up the roofs of the kivas were from 50 or more miles away in various mountain ranges like the Chuska and the Zuni. And if you’re wondering, the difference between a kiva and a great kiva is size. Great Kivas are considerably larger and can hold on its interior wall bench many more people than the smaller kivas can. The Great Kivas can hold many families or a clan perhaps while the smaller kivas can hold a family. Which was probably their exact function.

Here’s an extended quote from Childs that is important to understand the kivas of today but may be completely unnecessary when trying to understand the kivas from 1,000 years ago… Projecting backwards is not the way culture works and probably shouldn’t be as often used as it is in southwestern archaeology which is a theme I will talk about in a little bit. But the quote…

Some modern Pueblo people in the Southwest still use the kiva as their holy chamber, and among those who speak the language of Tewa, the kiva is called te'i, "the place of the cottonwood tree." The kiva is thought to be a bridge between the underworld and the world above, and the hole traditionally placed in the kiva floor, just beyond the deflector stone and in front of the ladder, represents a place of emergence. In Tewa this hole is called p'okwi koji, "the lake roof hole, » which leads up from a mysterious underground lake. The kiva is where a radiant green tree grows in the sparseness of the desert, as if it were a flag raised on barren ground announcing the presence of water below, a sign of hope and fertility.” End quote. I probably butchered the Hopi language there so my apologies to my native brothers and sisters.

Again, what was just described may not be relevant to the kivas of the Anasazi but it could hint at their emerging significance in Chaco Canyon.

The way you enter a kiva is the same way you entered a circular pit house, by a ladder in the ceiling. They’re still entered that way today for the most part. But that doesn’t mean the kiva was used in the same way back then as it is now… Here’s Lekson, 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. That was true of so called kivas at unit pueblos before, during, and after Chaco, right through pueblo III. End quote.

They were gussied up pit houses that were used to bring together the various clans, families, and groups that were congregating in towns like Chaco Canyon but had once been separated by vast distances. What better place to meet up than in a big cozy living room. Burrillo speaks to this gathering in kivas when he says, quote, In the Bears Ears area in particular, there's an enormous rock art panel that depicts extensive caravans of people converging in one of these structures. End quote.

I already briefly touched on why people were meeting together but it comes back to climate, a very important topic in this series ever since the glaciers began melting in the beginning of the Mammoth Eaters episode. The climate of the southwest is always changing, cycling through boom and bust of water and drought, heat and cool… and there’s nothing humans could do about it… then, or now… except migrate or adapt, of course. But in the early 900s, the climate of Mesa Verde and the Four Corners changed to slightly cooler conditions that made farming harder for those up in the higher elevations.

As we’ll soon discuss, Chaco Canyon was a capital for the anasazi but it wasn’t the first capital, that would have been in the Mesa Verde and northern San Juan Region about 100 miles north of Chaco in southern Colorado in between Durango and Cortez. There’s great evidence for the first attempt at a capital there until the aforementioned climate change occurred which forced the project down south on a straight line that I will also touch on later called by Lekson the Chaco Meridian.

At the start of Pueblo II in AD900, everything’s abandoned for Chaco which Burrillo calls the Alpha and Omega of the Pueblo II period. The north was emptied as the canyon filled with hundreds, or probably thousands, of scattered villages with 3 to 4 room pueblos with some having over 100. Not to mention the many amazing great houses. In all, there are about 2,000 Anasazi sites in the area of Chaco Canyon.

Then that cooling in the northern regions changed again to one of the most productive periods for agriculture in recent human history. From Burrillo:

Then came the roaring 1000s, and an era of environmental lushness and plenty not matched before or since in Southwest climate records. This is what's known to scientists and historians as the Medieval Warm Period, Medieval Climate Optimum, or Medieval Climatic Anomaly- it all depends on what sort of spin you're trying to put on your research narrative- and it spanned the North Atlantic region around the globe from about AD 950 to 1250. Scientists speculate that it was caused by a combination of increased solar radiation and decreased volcanic activity, although there is other evidence to suggest that ocean circulation patterns also shifted to bring warmer seawater to the North Atlantic. End quote. I love hearing how the earth just changes constantly all the time without a care in the world for what humans are doing or desire…

During this… I’ll adopt Medieval warm Period for what I hope by now to my listeners is an obvious reason… but during this warming period, wheat fields and vineyards appeared in northern England and in high elevation Switzerland where they cannot and will not survive today. The great seafaring Vikings do their most extensive adventuring including reaching North America hundreds of years before Columbus. And for us in the Southwest, the Anasazi build their empire… or kingdom… or secondary state… or whatever it was. They built a massive mesoamerican style city-state the size of Indiana in an incredibly diverse and difficult to traverse region of land on the Colorado Plateau and its borderlands that is my favorite places to visit and they did it in a surprisingly fast amount of time.

Their population wasn’t something to baulk at either. It was the most densely populated the region had ever been and would ever be again until the modern era. A good portion of Lekson’s A Study of Southwestern Archaeology is dedicated to contemplating the Anasazi population during this period. His number’s around 60,000 to 100,000 people with Chaco Canyon itself housing anywhere between 2,100 and 2,700. In the footnote for his number of 2,700 residents being the max amount at Chaco Canyon proper he cites himself, which I love. He has a lot of notes by the way… almost half of that book is just footnotes. He also cites himself a lot which is great. But in 1984, Lekson unbiasedly looked at the evidence and suggested this 2,700 number himself but it was dismissed and ridiculed… at least until more recently. He came up with this population by looking at the number and size of kivas in the canyon. He reckons one kiva equals one household and to him he calculated a household was roughly 6.4 people back then. He then multiplied the number of kivas by that theoretical family size of 6.4 and came up with his almost 3,000 permanent residents in Chaco… which he is now having doubts on. He actually thinks that 2,700 number is probably the MINimum. Remember, we, and by we I mean Lekson and other very smart archaeologists are convinced kivas were domestic and not ritual like they are today.

Why is population so important to Lekson and other researchers? Well, it can help determine what kind of society the Anasazi lived in. It can help build a case for what kind of government or ruling structure dominated the Canyon and the region. Which is a very hot debate. Actually, you should know almost everything I am talking about in this episode when it comes to Chaco and the Anasazi is hotly debated. From what a kiva is to what a great house is to what kind of rulers they had to the size of the population to where they disappeared to… everything, no joke. But you should also know that with the knowledge researchers have now, what I’m telling you is the absolute stone tablet correct version of history… aaaat least until new evidence emerges.

Before we get into what kind of government or society Chaco was, let’s answer the question of… why have a government at all?! No… dang, that’s mostly me. Uh, Let’s answer why a large group of people all huddled together would ever adopt a government in the first place… no… that’s still not right… let’s get more basic. How’d these possibly upwards of 100,000 people sitting in an occasionally arid and always harsh environment eat? That’s a better question and will help answer why they ever chose a ruing class.

In the Kiche Mayan creation story, the Popol Vuh, the creator deities from the sea (Plumed Serpent) and from the air (Heart of Sky) got together to create the world out of the void. They sought to introduce some race of beings into this world that could appreciate its beauty, worship and respect its creators, and, of utmost importance, keep track of time. Their first efforts were comprised of a mishmash of elements, but the resulting creatures couldn't form words and weren't quite smart enough to mark the passage of time or even remember their own names, so they were sent into the wild and became the non-primate animals.

The creators tried again, this time using mud, but the results looked ugly and soon crumbled into the water. A third effort followed extended consultation between Heart of Sky and diviners called The Grandparents, and they carefully carved figures out of wood. They could talk, in a sense, and they cared for and nurtured each other, but their minds weren't quite sharp enough to retain memory of the creators or appreciate their creations, so they were allowed to be killed off by flooding and other animals. The survivors, who are almost but not quite human, are the monkeys and other nonhuman primates.

Finally, Plumed Serpent and Heart of Sky succeeded at making human beings out of masa or cornmeal, underscoring the sacredness of maize in Mayan culture and implying that human beings are really just sentient tamales.

That was a fantastic retelling of the Maya creation story by Burrillo in Behind the Bears Ears which may help explain the importance of corn for the Anasazi. As I’ve already mentioned, the connection between the Anasazi and the Mesoamericans in central America and Mexico was strong. Cacao, which the elites drank in the Maya lands has been found in excavations at Chaco.

As we’ll get into later, the modern day Puebloans voted with their feet while probably in fear for their lives to abandon the Anasazi and their way of life as the spiral unraveled. On their way out of the Canyon and surrounding areas, some of the modern day Puebloans performed what’s been called a ceremony of forgetting to purge their memories of the horribleness that happened at Chaco. I’m teasing all of this future content to reinforce the idea that what modern day puebloans believe and how they interpret the world around them and the stories they tell are probably very different from the ones the Anasazi were telling. So with the bow and arrow, the ceramics, the similar hair patterns, the squash and beans, and the many other things we will soon talk about that came up from Mesoamerica, it is very probable that not only Corn, the almighty corn, but the belief and importance that surrounds corn and maize were also borrowed from down south.

To the Anasazi, Corn is King. It is one of the defining characteristics of Chaco and Anasazi society. It was the primary source of food and its absence probably helped undo the society. The entire governmental structure may have been focused around it. Corn was life for the Pueblo peoples. They didn’t live where they couldn’t grow it but they got very good at growing maize. In the Canyon itself, the Chacoans built an extensive system and massive amounts of infrastructure to collect and use water. They had to. While the soils in Chaco Canyon were better about a thousand years ago during the Pueblo II period than it is today, it still wasn’t great and while it would have been difficult, a chore even, as Lekson suggests, they may have grown enough for 2,700 people. But… probably not… Chaco really was not a great place to grow the staple of these people’s diet.

While the Canyon was better for farming than the surrounding 20 miles or so in all directions, Chaco still probably could not grow enough to feed its population. If you’ve been to the area, you’ll know what I mean. Again, look at pictures up on the website in the page for this episode and at the page for Chaco Canyon under New Mexico Places. When the Navajo moved into the canyon after the Anasazi abandoned it, they had very little luck growing and cultivating corn. It still ain’t easy to this day. Also, studies of corn cobs found at Chaco Canyon that date to the height of the Anasazi found that they weren’t grown in the canyon but instead far away in the Chuska Mountains or the outer edges of the San Juan Basin up north across the Colorado border where the land was far better suited for farming. And it isn’t like there are a lack of corn cobs to study. I have held in my hands corn cobs that are a thousand years old. I have found eaten corn cobs at every single archaeological Anasazi site that I’ve been to that isn’t overseen by the park service and I’ve been to a lot of sites. Again, check the page for pictures of the cobs and the ruins. At Chaco Canyon, maize has been found in every single room in all of its corn forms during every single excavation. You don’t even have to dig though, they literally litter the sand and rocks of every site, begging to be picked up and wondered over. If you go visit an off the map site that requires research you will find potsherds, manos & matates, and corn cobs, 100% every time. And it never gets old.

Just because it was difficult to grow corn in Chaco Canyon, didn’t mean the Anasazi didn’t try. Gwinn Vivian argues in her Puebloan Farmers of the Chaco World that small carefully constructed farm plots filled the gaps between all of Chaco’s many many buildings, Great Houses, unit peublos, and kivas, especially on the north side of the canyon. Quote, the north-side farmers were remarkably consistent in the ways they collected, diverted and spread the water that flowed [from rainfall] off the slickrock and into short side canyons. They constructed earthen or masonry diversion dams near the mouths of these drainages to channel the runoff into canals. At the ends of the canals they built headgates to further channel the floodwater onto fields. To ensure that all plants received equal water, the farmers gridded their fields into rectangular plots separated by low earth borders. End quote. Vivian also suggested that early in the occupation of the canyon there may have been a small lake that was formed by the creation of a sand dam at the west end. Initially it was probably natural but after noticing its potential, the residents may have built upon and improved it. Truthfully, the people of Chaco Canyon had been farming Corn there since at least the 500s, but probably before that. Chaco Canyon really was an important place to the Anasazi and it had been for a long time. Maybe it would have been again if not for the coming spiral of violence…

Speaking about the coming spiral of violence… I wasn’t sure where to put this because it touches on a lot of the themes and ideas in this and the next episode and finding it’s placement was tricky, but now’s a good a time as any, especially after talking so much about the almighty corn. It’s a discussion about that Anasazi staple that Childs has with another archaeologist about a study linking Corn to extreme violence. The conversation hints at the future unraveling… Here’s the extended quote…

This was the first time I had heard a Southwest archaeologist dare mention the study, which linked the eating of corn with chemical changes in the brain. The research was spearheaded by Michele Ernandes at the University of Palermo, in Italy. Ernandes, who had been looking at connections between neurobiology and sacrificial rites in cultures around the world, found that nutrition may play a considerable role in various religious and spiritual states. It has long been known that too much corn can alter brain chemistry and lead to a variety of malnutrition diseases, the likes of which have been revealed by many Anasazi skeletons. Corn lacks two key amino acids, lysine and tryptophan. Also, though it is high in many necessary proteins, minerals, and vitamins, corn's niacin is chemically unavailable to the human body. When corn is made into a sole staple, these deficiencies alter the body's makeup, dropping serotonin levels in the brain to a state similar to chronic sleep deprivation. At its extreme this is clinically linked to obsessive-compulsive disorder, aggression, and even mystical states of ecstasy. Ernandes's controversial research suggests that these symptoms might have played a role in mass human sacrifices and religious horrors that occurred among the Toltecs, the Mayans, and the Aztecs in late B.C. and early A.D. It was a time of unparalleled splendor in Mesoamerica, pyramids and ball courts spreading across two continents, when native corn reached its peak production. Meanwhile, tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of people were sacrificed every year on stone altars. High atop temples in cities that gleamed like pearl, fresh human hearts were cut out and placed in sacred vessels. This, the study suggested, might have been linked to an overindulgence in corn.

Ernandes did not leave the Southwest out of the study, mentioning a fervor that swept the Anasazi landscape. Terribly disfigured human skeletons have been found from that time, bones polished by cooking, heads severed. The authors of this study believe that corn could have been a factor, that dementia could have occurred on a cultural level… End quote.

But what about those vital other part of the southwestern food trifecta… beans and squash, I hear my audience asking… you’re right, and Childs addresses that as well when he says, quote, People living in the Southwest actually figured out how to deal with corn's nutritional deficiencies long ago by eating beans, amaranth, or meat with every traditional meal. This makes up for the missing amino acids. Fire ash, which consists mostly of calcium hydroxide, liberates corn's niacin and is a key ingredient in Hopi piki bread. In this way corn was made safe, perhaps rendering the madness theory obsolete. Still, one can easily imagine priests who did not eat amaranth, beans, meat, or piki bread; prophets religiously indulging in nothing but corn, stewing in smoky, dark kivas, wild with visions. When a drought came and corn no longer arrived, Chaco may have turned sour, the addiction unmet. End quote.

That reminds me of the line in Fury Road… Do not my friends become addicted to Corn… it will take hold of you and you will resent its absence!

Remember when I opened the episode with the fact that the ceremonial Maya heart extracting knife has been found at Chaco… I’ll talk about it in the next episode but a book I used as a source by Christy Turner titled Man Corn… which, I mean, what a great name… Man Corn… well, Man Corn talks about the extreme violence, homicide, and cannibalism in the Anasazi world. The people’s addiction to corn may have played a role indeed… although the violence at Chaco actually started before the drought even set in. Still, there’s something to be said about the Anasazi and their relationship to corn.   

Before this drought though, during this fantastical climatic time of the medieval warm period produced by mother earth naturally, there was an overabundance of corn. The people, due to the incredibly kind environment, an environment of warmth, which has been beneficial to humans and humankind ever since the end of the ice age, and which environment is made all the more easier with human technology, well the people were not short of their favorite staple, the almighty maize, which is, as I discussed in the previous episode, incredibly easy to store.

If you’ve travelled the southwest at all, and you’ve got sharp eyes, or have done your research, you’ll have seen small masonry structures known as granaries. They’re usually tiny buildings built with Colorado plateau red stones and plaster with a single window or doorway that would have been closed and sealed with a removable slender slab of sandstone. Inside, almost always, is corn. Sometimes these granaries are in high up places where animals or other humans couldn’t easily get to them. Sometimes, they’re right next door to the pueblo. Sometimes they’re in the bottom of canyons. Most of the time, they’re in alcoves. Granaries are everywhere in the four corners. I love seeing them and even if you’re just driving, like from Escalante to Bryce Canyon on Scenic Byway 12 in Utah there are places to pull over and check em out complete with little viewing cylinders that direct your gaze to 'em. Next time you’re in the area be on the lookout!

So when you’ve got that population of almost 100,000 people in the area of Chaco Canyon and you’re in a place that loves to throw droughts at you of varying durations from 7 to 70 years, it’s important to always have extra corn on hand. What happens when granaries don’t cut it though? What happens when you’ve got corn comin’ out your ears? Or out the wazoo even? Well you put it in warehouses, of course.

Here’s a quote from Burrillo:

What Chaco appears to have become in those early days was, in effect, a maize-based "food bank" according to an idea championed by Lekson (shoutout to our boy) and others. Even in good years, the farming could be very unpredictable in the more farmable rim provinces—like Bears Ears, where my own research on prehistoric farming techniques suggests that dry farming atop Cedar Mesa was successful one out of every three to five years. That sounds like a disastrously fatal success rate until you take into account the fact that storage structures, or granaries, make up a large portion of the architecture there, and a granary of average Cedar Mesa size filled with dried maize could sustain a small family for up to about half a decade. Thus: a drought lasting longer than about seven years would be the one that compelled folks to pack up and skedaddle, and reconstructions of drought severity and population movements seem to bear this out. Chaco, then, appears to have acted sort of like a gigantic granary complex or redistribution center. This goes a long way toward explaining why large portions of Chaco’s great houses look not so much like house houses as warehouses. Communities from all around this hub of the San Juan Basin could cache their surpluses of maize and other goods there for later use by either themselves or other communities during shortfalls. When weather conditions swung upward in the early to mid-1000s, surplus became opulence. This is probably how the Inca got their start as well, building and relying on local food banks to shore up shortfalls, until the climatic conditions of Chaco Canyon and the Andes effectively swapped places at about AD 1150-after which the Inca gradually rose to imperial dominance, while things up north took a decidedly more dismal turn.

During Lekson’s discussion on population he mentions something called the K Rule which he named after a bright archaeologist who passed away in the 90s but not before she came up with a great idea. The K Rule states that at 2,500 people, stay with me, at 2,500 people, a ruler is needed! And it works everywhere within AND without the Southwest. If there ain’t a ruler directly, then there’s a king over the hill… OR, if the area is larger than 2,500 people and no ruler is evident over the hill or within the group, then the group is always split into smaller polities, wards, neighborhoods, etc. Here’s Lekson, quote, if a permanent settlement or community reached or exceeded (approximately) 2,500 people, it almost always will have permanent, institutional, centralized, hierarchical governance: A chieftain, a mayor, a king, whatever. Even in the ancient Southwest. End quote. That line even in the ancient southwest is important because like I said earlier, everything about the southwest, Chaco, and the Anasazi is debated. ESPECIALLY, wether or not they had a ruler. Which yes… Chaco had a ruler and that ruler no doubt lived in one of the many Great Houses of Chaco Canyon. Those combination Great Houses / warehouses that are so exciting to visit today. And while living in those combination great houses warehouses they were no doubt the ones in charge of redistributing those stores of corn. As Lekson points out but many researchers, archaeologists, historians, and especially Modern Puebloans completely ignore: every agricultural society north of Panama had nobles and commoners. The Anasazi Chacoans of the American Southwest and Mexican Northwest were no different.

During excavations of Pueblo Bonito, archaeologists found something very curious, they discovered the most highly decorated burials in all of the Southwest. From Childs, quote, Two richly dressed skeletons were discovered lying on a bed of fifty six thousand pieces of turquoise, surrounded by fine ceramic vessels, and covered by a sheet of ivory-colored shells imported from the ocean six hundred miles away. End quote. Also curious is the fact that these two people were 2 inches taller on average than the other Chacoans who were buried at and around the site. The Anasazi normally stood shorter than 5 feet. Except these 2 and quite a few other richly adorned individuals that were found buried. Plog says, quote, the grave goods associated with these burials remind one of the 16th century Spanish descriptions of native American rulers in northern Mexico who wore a fine cotton cloak and a wristband of Martin fur or who were well dressed in cotton and adorned with turquoise necklaces. Other evidence suggests that these individuals had greater power and rights than typical chacoans. End quote.

Here’s a small list of other grave goods that have been found at Chaco Canyon: Ceramics from Arizona, Corn from the mountains, what may be prayer sticks, flutes, bird wings, lion claws, bear paws, and Copper Bells from Mexico. Actually, almost all, if not all, of the grave goods are from somewhere else… somewhere outside of Chaco. Analysis of the bones of those buried in seemingly elite burials show less disease, better diet, and possibly, like the many grave goods, they were from out of town. The two individuals buried at Bonito seem to be some of the earliest things in the Canyon. Pueblo Bonito appears to have been built AROUND them instead of them just being placed in its center later. Could it be these people were from Northern Mexico and had been carried around the Southwest, along the Spiral and the Chaco Meridian until their final resting place in the Canyon? Regardless of where they came from, looking at the burials in Chaco from an outsider perspective, most every archaeologist would consider it to have substantial social inequality.

Pueblo Mystique would have you believe otherwise but as Lekson puts it, quote, people living in Great Houses were… special. Great House people were bigger and healthier, and had a great many fancy things that other people did not have. The men were buff with big muscles, the women did not work: No squatting facets, no corn grinding. End quote. The women’s skeletons look much different than those that squat over a mano and matate all day and work with corn, beans, and squash. And actually, as Lekson and a few others have suggested, or maybe pointed out, Chaco was ruled by women… well, not ruled, the men still ruled but Chaco was a matrilineal society or as Burrillo puts it, quote, the golden age of Chaco was ruled over by a dynastic succession of individuals who passed the mantle from mother to daughter. End quote.

There was definitely still a king though, and the Navajo even say he lived at Pueblo Alto, which resides above the Canyon a short ways from the Rim overlooking the landscape. The hike to Pueblo Alto from inside the Canyon is one of my favorite hikes of all time and if you head to the park, it absolutely must be at the top of any list. It allows you to walk the rim and see down into the Pueblos, seeing their outlines and walls, letting you imagine what they must have looked like in their heyday, with people, pups, and turkeys running around. Fires billowing. Colors and goods flowing through… but back to the Navajo… I’m not actually sure how they know that the king lived at Pueblo Alto unless the Navajo were around a thousand years ago, which is a few hundred years before the consensus suggests which… sure, they may have begun to be trickling into the area from Canada. Some Navajo tradition suggests they’d been there a while. It’s also possible they knew about a King from later Ancestral Puebloans. Anyways, there may have probably been more than one king at Chaco, each one residing in a Great House which presided over their respective area outside of the Canyon. Remember, there’s 100,000 people or so in the San Juan Basin and the Four Corners area that would have actively called themselves whatever the Anasazi called themselves. But knowing what we know now, the only take away is that these burials show a clear example of hierarchy and social inequality like Plog points out in his 2010 work, Hierarchy and Social Inequality in the American Southwest.

If you’ve got hierarchy, you’ve got yourself a stratified class society. Lekson says with fun fact number four that, quote, the architecture is unambiguous: Great Houses versus Unit Pueblos. An upper class lived in great houses and a lower class lived in unit pueblos. Nobles and commoners. End quote. At Chaco there were elites and there were commoners. There were people in charge and there were people that followed. Wether they followed by carrot or by stick, well… we’ll get into that. This class distinction and rise of nobility may have been imported from Down South beyond the Tortilla Curtain but regardless, Chaco had Nobles and Commoners and at the same time, a similar thing was happening in the east at Cahokia, that place across the river from Saint Louis with the largest pyramid north of Teotehuacan, which is near Mexico City. There were nobles and commoners around the Gulf of Mexico in the southern US as well. There were even nobles and commoners in the Pacific Northwest. So why is it so hard for modern researchers to agree that they were at Chaco? Much later, after the French explorers and trappers arrived to north America, they would note that descendants of Cahokian Elites, which were members of the Natchez tribe to the French, called commoners: “stinkards.” An absence of this division in the American Southwest and at Chaco in particular would be… weird to say the least. And to ignore that fun fact is doing a disservice to the area, the people, and even their descendants who are the champions of this refusal to allow for the fact of rulers. I promise we’ll get there soon but that Pueblo Space or Pueblo Mystique is strong.

Eventually, the capital that is Chaco will move on that north south line called the Chaco Meridian up to a place mislabeled, at least to us, as Aztec National Monument in a city called Aztec, in even more northern New Mexico just below the Colorado border. That capital will then move further north again before going down into the spiral but still on that straight Chaco Meridian into Mexico proper to a place called Paquime or Casas Grandes. All along the way, people will leave the spiral, or even be flung off the spiral until the ancestors of modern pueblos overthrew the Chaco warlords and remade their own pueblos into something that looked and acted nothing like Chaco and the Anasazi… but for now, between the years 900 and 1150, all is well and booming in the Canyon. Even the violence that was steadily building up in the area that I mentioned in the last episode, the small scale raiding and murders disappear during the Golden Years of Chaco. Interpersonal Violence has seemingly vanished. Although… in 1100, there are nine females for every 2 males aged 15 to 25 at Chaco which many have suggested points to slavery… And then there’s the extreme processing events which may have been punishment brought down by the elites on those misbehaving… or practicing the wrong religion… or not paying their taxes. Sometimes the state’s got to dismember you and your family piece by piece before burning down your home… you know, to prove a point. No wonder the modern Puebloans like the Hopi have a ceremony of forgetting.

So there are nobles or elites and there are commoners at Chaco. There are rulers and the ruled over, which suggest there’s got to be some form of government, right? Thankfully, smarter people than I, like Lekson, have spent decades researching and answering that important question. He’s even found what government Chaco most likely resembled. And you don’t even have to go far to find it, just across the Tortilla Curtain where something called the Nahua Altepetl is alive and strong. Here’s an extended quote by Lekson on what a Nahua Altepetl is, quote, the altepetl encompassed a central capital and farming lands around both city and countryside. At the capital, a half-dozen noble extended families occupied separate palaces, amid public architecture and an urban population of commoners. Far more commoners lived in countryside farming villages, many with smaller palaces of secondary nobility, for a total population of 2,000 to 40,000 people. The king was first-among-equals, elected by the nobility from one of the half-dozen highest noble families. (The nature of the "election" was probably not what we'd envision.) The office was not strong nor did it descend in a kingly line. When the king died, another election named a king from a different princely house. This "rotating" or "shared" governance prevented any single princely family from ascending to a strong hereditary kingship. A hierarchical tributary system moved goods and services up through the secondary and higher nobles and king. Particular commoner families owed tribute to particular noble families, who then owed tribute to the royal nobility. Tribute or tax was not onerous: A few bushels of corn, a week's work, some other good or service. The central "city" had from fewer than 1,000 to perhaps 5,000 people in a settlement of about 100 ha; secondary centers were an order of magnitude smaller. "Cities" were defined by civic architecture and monuments, and most importantly by the clustered noble houses or palaces. End quote. Clustered noble houses or palaces… like a great house! And for quick clarification, the Nahua is a group of people who speak Nahuatl which is what the Aztec spoke and is in the Uto-Aztecan Language family I talked about last episode… which is one of the many language families spoken in the southwest but one of probably only three spoken in the southwest at the height of Chaco.

It’s hard to argue with Lekson, Chaco was an altepetl and his fun facts about Chaco work well. Each and every feature he describes, works in the Canyon. They’re similar in form and structure, population, and scale. The biggest difference is that most alteptls consisted of an area of about 75 square kilometers whereas Chaco is 100,000 square kilometers. But he argues that the landscape of Central Mexico, being a great and highly productive place to farm on relatively little land allowed for the small area. Still, 100,000 square kilometers or around 60,000 square miles, is significantly larger… but… the Anasazi overcame that with what we call Chacoan Roads and line-of-site fire towers that I’ll get into in just a little bit.

Another word for Altepetl that may be used but isn’t quite right is a city-state or even a secondary state if you’re looking for something that is more close to home and is easier to say. So Chaco Canyon is the capital city in an altepetl or secondary state the size of Indiana that’s ruled over by a half-dozen princely families in the Southwest. Lekson ponders how they came up with this system when he says, quote, Chaco's political structure may derive from a Postclassic Mesoamerican model; or Chaco may have coevolved with Mesoamerican developments; or Chaco itself may have developed key features later seen in the Nahua altepetl. End quote. It’s very interesting to wonder if maybe exiled prince rulers from Mexico went north to try again or if the Anasazi saw what was going on down south with the temples and pyramids and heart carvings slash body throwings and emulated it themselves. This is difficult for Americans but some people want kings, some people seek them out. Lekson puts it well and reflects my own bias when he says, quote, Americans cannot fathom that anyone, anywhere would suffer a king, much less want one. Whatever their social realities, most Americans are nominally egalitarian, populist, democratic. It's our bias by birthright… end quote. He goes on to say that this bias might be bad when thinking about the Anasazi of the Southwest because it blocks the possible fact that a king may have been desired. They could have seen the grand opulence of Mesoamerica and wanted it. Or one single person could have wanted it for themselves… Here’s Lekson again:

What about the actions and agency of nonstate groups, out on the edges of distant empires? It is quite possible for '"chiefs" or rulers or powerful persons on the periphery to reference and adopt the structures and trappings of established states and create a knock-off, starter-kit kingdom- that is, a secondary state. It's my impression that this was a common thing worldwide, and the origin of many secondary states.

Regardless of how it came to be, Chaco is the capital city that’s emulating a small Mesoamerican style city of this secondary state where rituals, ceremonies, and the people’s cosmology were celebrated. Chaco was planned and built for mass theater that may have even began as a ceremonial center before evolving into the capital. The canyon is really, as Lekson puts it, quote, the last in a string of theretofore unsuccessful attempts by Great House families to establish polities in the northern San Juan and perhaps elsewhere. End quote. He continues this matter of fact retelling by saying once the population overtook that 2,500 K Rule, the three noble families in the Canyon that presided at the Great Houses of Pueblo Bonito, Peñasco Blanco, and Una Vida were joined by more noble families from the surrounding region until the Government of rotating princely rulers took hold and quote, political life was then locked-in, fixed, and necessary. Governance was there stay. End quote… at least for a while.

Man, we have been talking A LOT about Chaco Canyon. I’ve said the word so many times it’s starting to sound strange. Which I guess it is strange. The NPS Website says that the term Chaco comes from the Spanish. They say this, quote, A map drawn in 1778 by Spanish cartographer Bernardo de Miera y Pacheco identified the Chaco Canyon area as “Chaca”; a Spanish colonial word commonly used during that era meaning “a large expanse of open and unexplored land, desert, plain, or prairie. End quote. They weren’t wrong, it really is a vast expanse of badlands, desert, and prairie. I wonder if they knew the ruins were there… It reminds me of the now deceased Chaco Taco or for some reason, super Mario World’s Chocolate Island.

In history, there are NO coincidences as Lekson says adamantly. The story of the Southwest up to this point, and of course going forward is standard history and the way humans act is the same as they do everywhere else. Except of course, so very differently. Never forget the native American ancestors travelled extensively to hunt mammoth and then bison as we talked about with the Clovis… they didn’t stop that traveling when larger governments began emerging. Even Lekson suggests that the paleoindians sprinted back and forth across the continent. People knew about the Maya, the Mississippians and cahokia, they knew about the pacific northwestern tribes and the Inuit. They knew about the Olmec heads and the temples of the jungle in Belize and the islands with their canoes and boats with sails. By the year of Christ’s birth, the people in the southwest would have known about the grand city of Teotihuacan and its vast influence. Maybe they admired what was going on.

Enter: Pueblo. Mystique.

Lekson talks extensively about the pueblo mystique and how it has obscured and tainted our view of all things southwestern archaeology ESPECIALLY Chaco Canyon and the Modern Pueblos that followed! Actually both he and Burrillo discuss this but it’s Lekson who really brings it home by saying everything we know and love about the southwest, like the architecture and history and even the native Americans themselves is ruined and obscured through this lens of quote unquote pueblo mystique. Santa Fe, and to a lesser extent Taos, is the definition and driving factor of this mystique. For goodness sake’s the railroad company half built this idea of the pueblos and the Indians in them in the 1800s to bring tourists to New Mexico. They argued and the Pueblos signed onto it that the region’s history was different than anywhere else on earth. And yes, of course it was, that’s why we all love it, but not in the way they were and is now still suggested. Pueblo Mystique has it that the Indians were peaceful, they had no war, they had no ruler, there was no man corn being eaten by crazed Anasazi. And the word Anasazi is bad. And the word abandoned shouldn’t be used because it’s insensitive to the people that… I honestly don’t get that one but it’s true. Abandoned isn’t used in published works anymore because it may hurt the people who descended from the ones who purposefully and happily abandoned the Anasazi and Chaco way of life. Then you’ve got the new age hippie stuff that you see all over Santa Fe to reinforce it.

Of course it’s tricky when you’re talking about a culture and a people that is not your own… you really don't want to offend anyone unnecessarily… but, talking about facts isn’t unnecessary, it’s… the opposite of that! Especially if we ever want to understand what happened in the region. And maybe to avoid doing it ourselves! Maybe? Look around and tell me we aren’t beginning to spiral out of control here and heck, everywhere! Soon, man corn’s gonna be on every menu as Mad Max tanker trucks filled with Mother’s Milk race down the landscape past hordes of barbed marauding vehicles sporting either pride Antifa flags or don’t tread on me bumper stickers. I’m being facetious but before long in our story, the Anasazi are cleaving faces off and eating cooked and pulverized human bone. Children’s skulls are stuffed into ritual areas of enemy clan’s kivas to block the fresh air from coming in. Yet, for a long while the land had never been so bountiful and peaceful. It seemingly didn’t take much to change.

Chaco was so very different from Modern Pueblos, that should be an established fact. Modern pueblos don’t have kings and very modern pueblos, because Pueblos after the Anasazi left for Northern Mexico, certainly did have warriors and extreme battles with other Pueblos, but modern pueblos don’t have standing armies that lead people to and over the edge of red walled mesas. And because they’re so different, researchers really need to stop projecting backwards with ethnology onto the Anasazi. The modern Puebloan people’s ancestors again, actively rejected them to specifically create a new society that was probably, in a whole lot of ways, opposite, or at least, drastically different from how the Anasazi and Chacoans were doing things. The Pueblo Communities of the Hopi, Zuni, and countless others, especially and even more so in the Rio Grande Area of Santa Fe were reacting to Chaco by creating their own places that never wanting to recreate it again. Entire practices and belief systems I don’t know about because I’m not privy to that king of specialized ritual knowledge as an outsider, are about forgetting and making sure to NOT repeat the past.

So by using ethnography, which is talking to modern peoples who are descended from the ones being studied and deducing that must be how the old ones did it, is not the way to go when wondering what on earth the Anasazi were doing. And it also ignores quite a bit of history of the Native American’s since the spiral unravelled in Chaco Canyon and later Aztec. First of all, there’s the whole violent, cannibalistic, fiery end of Chaco that sees the Anasazi roll southward as we’ll get into in the next episode. Then the Navajo and Apache move in from way up north. Then there’s that whole Spanish and Jesus and Christianity and plague thing. The Pueblo Revolt! The Horse and Guns. Then the Mexicans. Then the Americans. You’d have to ignore all of that and suggest even with those world shattering events, the modern pueblo people are doing things exactly like their hated and purposefully forgotten about ancestors. Hated may be too strong of a word… Using ethnography is helpful to explain the way people live now but it isn’t the correct way to go about explaining the past. Not always, at least.

And also, Pueblo Mystique turns the Anasazi and the Native Americans of the area into a caricature, in my opinion. Don’t forget that these people we’re talking about were people. They were just like us but in a much different environment. They felt and acted and thought much like we do now. They laughed and told jokes and stories just like we do. Maybe even better than we do. But they were people and they laughed, Indians laughed. Don’t let the noble savage trope fool you. When thinking about these people’s history and why they did the things they did and why they went certain places and created certain things, when thinking back onto them, it’s easy to lose sight that they were people, just like us and not stereotypes like that of a crying Italian men dressed as an Indian for a super bowl ad asking us not to litter.

When we speak of the modern pueblo people, we are speaking of a very diverse people that were grouped together not even by the Spanish but more by the Americans who for example, took the twenty plus Hopi speaking towns and made them one unified tribe or nation. Even though they didn’t always get along. Much like their ancestors hadn’t. Just ask those that were escorted to the nearly 1,000 foot edge of the mesa and carefully helped over said edge… oh wait, you can’t. Uncle Sam needed someone to talk to, just one person, so the government forced the Hopi and other tribes to have a leader even though they were actively avoiding that since, you know, they overthrew the Anasazi.

So this episode and the books I read, or most of them, are out to answer the question of who the Chaco were not within this Pueblo Space that’s shrouded in Pueblo Mystique but instead in the real world. And Lekson thinks he’s thrown off the yoke of Mystique and has found the closest reality of the Anasazi we can know with the knowledge we have now. He says, quote, most (almost all! Trust me) of this research seems to support the chaco I’ve described… He goes on to say, he’s describing quote, Chaco NOT in pueblo space. Headlines like “ancient chaco society was ruled by a matrilineal dynasty” make me happy as does the mounting confirmation that chaco indeed relocated to aztec ruins, as does validation of chaco as a region center/ consumer/ black hole for pots, rocks, timbers, labor, and food. And a few hold the press shockers: it started a half century earlier than we’d (I’d) thought; chaco’s first love was not the north, but the south (provenance of construction wood); and chaco’s matrilineal rulers were knocking back both Mesoamerican cacao and Mississippian “black drink”. The knowledge and taste of chaco elites were continental. End quote. So what I’m describing to you is the way it was, not some fantasy land the modern puebloans, of which I mean no offense to, the hippies in Santa Fe, of which I mean a little offense to, older archaeologists that wrote the book on the region even without EVER setting one foot in Chaco Canyon, and the freakin railroad barons, a good amount of offense to, came up with.

And lastly, one final word on the words Anasazi and Ancestral Puebloan… as you’ll soon see, the people of Northern Mexico were in fact part of the puebloan/ Anasazi saga. They are the end of the spiral but they did not in fact begin pueblos, nor were they the ancestors of modern pueblo societies in the United States yet they were Anasazi. You’ll see what I mean shortly but Pueblo Mystique and the tortilla curtain effectively cuts off northern Mexico and the southwestern United States and says there was never any contact or help or diffusion of goods or ideas or ways of life except of course corn and turquoise. Obviously that’s wrong. A final quote from Lekson on this: North of Mexico, every boat is a canoe, every pyramid a mound, and every king a chief.

Obviously not every boat north of Mexico was a canoe, a fact I just learned myself in August of this year when I visited Spiro Indian Mounds in Oklahoma and learned that they had big ships with sails that let them go up and down the rivers, probably all the way up to Cahokia which has the largest pyramid north of Teotihuacan, yet, it’s still called a mound. And when it comes to every king a chief up in these parts… well, now we know Chaco had a king.

I’ll end this section before we continue with Chaco by saying, wouldn’t we know more if the Indians gave us more help? Surprisingly, in 2004, Paul Reed of the Puebloan Society of Chaco Canyon said, quote, specific stories that refer to chaco in a recognizable manner are not apparent in the oral histories of most pueblos. End quote. Then again, that isn’t surprising when you remember the ceremony of forgetting. But there could be more to it… Here’s Lekson to expound upon that, quote, Indians are understandably disinclined to make their heritage public. End quote. And also, quote, I don't think any histories we can write will justify archaeology for native America. They know their heritage: Indians are not our audience. End quote. For me, everyone’s my audience though and if anyone from any tribe is listening, or have listened to any previous episode, I hope I’ve done just a little bit of right by y’all. I see no problem in telling other people’s stories as long as I’m doing it reverently and to the best of my knowledge and ability. I ain’t half assin’ these episodes as anyone around me knows. But okay, let’s get back into that canyon…

In Chaco Canyon there is a glorious landmark known as Fajada Butte. You can’t miss it, it’s visible from a long distance away and it’s one of the first things you notice when you drive into the canyon wether that’s from the south or the north. It’s a powerful looking butte that the Anasazi no doubt imbued with meaning. I say no doubt because the entire canyon, indeed the entire landscape is imbued with meaning to the Anasazi. But on the side of Fajada Butte, behind three giant slabs of sandstone that may or may not have been purposefully put there by the Anasazi, is etched a pair of spirals, one large and one small and this is known as the sun dagger. Not only does the sun dagger mark the solstices, but it also tracks the 18.6 year lunar cycle… It’s called Sun Dagger because during the summer solstice, a vertical shaft, or dagger of light pierces the main spiral at its exact center. Then, on the winter solstice, two daggers of light perfectly bracket the large spiral. And lastly, a dagger of light strikes the perfect center of the smaller spiral during the fall and spring equinoxes. Unfortunately those slabs have fallen over now and the effect is ruined and the place is closed to travelers but for the ten years it stood and was known about, it was studied extensively. Just like their cousins to the south, calendars were important to the Anasazi and spirals may have represented time and astronomical events on the calendars…

I know I just talked about how it’s dangerous to use ethnographies to make conjectures about the past but that’s what we’re fixin’ to do as I talk about the meaning of a spiral. To modern puebloans the spiral can be a representation of time, or of ancestors whirling by. They can be a sign of nearby water. Some spirals even mark springs and places where water sits beneath the surface. But most of all, that spiral could mean movement. They could mean migration. I mean a spiral is movement in etched or drawn out form. So the spiral is movement. Movement of the people, of the stars, of time. It’s life migrating forward and inward and the spiral is everywhere in the southwest. Childs says this of the spiral and migration, quote, variables of possible placements and directions are as numerous as stories of migration among Pueblo people. Movement is written into the foundation of these people. Over their history, their journeys might look like a turning, changing circle, a constant search for a center-place, every bend honing inward. End quote.

The spiral may signify movement, wether it be of the people or the sun, but it didn’t show up in huge numbers until the advent of agriculture so they may indeed be important markers of time and of the movement of the earth around the sun. In a place where being a week off for planting your crops may mean starving, the calendar becomes everything. It becomes the center of your universe. The center of the spiral.

Whatever the spiral may have meant to the Anasazi people, it truly is everywhere in the Southwest and not just the Anasazi use it. But for them, it seems to be unbelievably important. They were absolutely skilled astronomers and they seemingly built everything in accordance to what was happening in the sky. Including their monumental architecture and to me, even more than the Great Houses, and Great Kivas, the truest form of Monumental Architecture in the Chaco region is what’s known as the Chaco Roads.

From Lekson, quote, Chaco’s region was a system. Chaco’s famous roads were both monuments and transportation corridors, freighted both with goods and with symbolism. End quote. The Anasazi constructed one of the most extensive road networks in the world that not only connected everything within the canyon but also radiated out into the desert like the spokes of a wheel in every direction except northeast where there is a noticeable lack of Great Houses known as Chaco Outliers. The presence of these Chaco Outlier great houses and kivas are the defining feature of the Chaco Region. Where the Great House outliers stop, the Chaco Region ceases and these roads lead to many of them. Some of the roads go in straight lines for 62 miles leading directly to a distant settlement’s Great House. Hundreds of miles of roads and over 150 Chacoan Outlier Communities have been discovered so far with more being mapped every single year. Not only Chaco Outliers were the target of these roads though, some head to significant natural features and some end abruptly in the middle of the desert which suggests that they may have played a ritual component of life in Chaco times. The roads have carved stairs and ramps and hand and foot holds on cliffsides where they are necessary for safe traversing so the roads no doubt carried people. There are even segments with holes in the wall where it is believed a platform or scaffolding or a ladder would have either been placed or stood there always.

Not only people, the roads also carried continuity and connection. They also carried symbolism, a way to connect the people with the past. They were truly of a monumental design with some parts of the road being 30 to 40 feet wide and sections of the path were lined with earthen or adobe curbs. They can still be seen from the air and Childs tried to walk a few, although modern life has erased many miles of them. Childs discusses the most famous of these roads that leave Chaco, the Great North Road, quote, The Great North Road was only one avenue leading to and from this place, part of a network of thoroughfares that required more labor to build than even the great houses. Workers transported unknown tons of earth, cutting and filling to keep roads straight regardless of the topography they passed through. Where it would have been far more efficient to jog around some butte or lone cliff, the roads aimed straight ahead, incorporating costly ramps or carved stairs directly up to the top. End quote. One road even goes down the Comb Ridge, which, if you’ve seen it, is amazing…

They may have been straight so that they could be seen from great distances. Nothing in nature is straight so they would have immediately been noticed by anyone passing though the territory. And the road’s territory is massive stretching even into eastern Utah. Although those eastern Utah roads are built a little later during the 12th and 13th centuries. They’re big and impressive and while they’re built in the same Chacoan style, the evidence points to them being a lane of travel for much longer than that. Maybe even the 500s AD. And from wherever they came from, they point directly towards Bears Ears. Possibly even directly between the two cute ears themselves. I’ve been up there and to them ears and I had no idea at the time… Honestly, doing research for this episode just makes me want to be on the Colorado plateau so badly.

Accompanying these amazing Chacoan Roads is the little understood and even littler studied, Line of Sight Communication or Signaling Networks which both paralleled and operated separately from the monumental roads. They really are not very well documented and they’ve only just been discovered but they are absolutely there, in the desert, at the Bears Ears in Utah, in the Southern Rockies of Colorado and stretching to Arizona and all the way into Mexico. This network basically consisted of hills that would have been operated by a person ready to light a giant bonfire or use a signaling mirror like the Mesoamericans were doing down south. There’s archaeological evidence for these fires in charcoal and even stones so heated that they shattered… as well as finer broken pottery of black on white designs, that famous Anasazi design, that have been smashed at many sites. At some hills, turquoise filled Anasazi painted pottery was found delicately buried beneath them and each man made hill is visible by at least two but sometimes three other man made hills or even natural structures like buttes. Each one seems deliberately planned and placed with almost mathematical precision. Childs quotes Archaeologist Tom Windes who says, quote, you could flash messages in minutes across the whole Chaco world. End quote.

Clearly the Anasazi world of Chaco Canyon could be what’s known as a ritual landscape, but it gets even more intense…  Here’s a fantastic extended quote from Childs:

Some researchers believe that the Anasazi planned their settlements and monuments to line up exactly with trends in the landscape. Dennis Doxtater, an architecture professor at the University of Arizona who has studied how various cultures align themselves on the land, took a close look at the Chaco region and discovered startling configurations. He plotted on a map every prominent archaeological site in this part of northwest New Mexico, along with the summits of the highest nearby mountains, mesas, and buttes. When Doxtater drew lines between these points- even if they were over the horizon, a hundred miles out of view from each other-a pattern emerged. Lines radiating from Casa Rinconada in Chaco Canyon passed directly through a number of great houses and straight through the centers of their largest kivas to meet significant landmarks in the distance. On his map he saw flawlessly symmetrical angles and intersections that when added together made a nearly irrefutable argument: the Anasazi, Doxtater believed, had intentionally nested themselves into a geo-ritual landscape with impressive accuracy, possibly utilizing surveyor/priests and astronomers to determine where sites should be built. Doxtater ran a line from the great kiva of Casa Rinconada on the floor of Chaco Canyon, out the center of its northern T-shaped portal, directly over the rim through a conspicuous gateway at Pueblo Alto, and straight to this cluster of buttes almost twenty miles away. Here the line continues through a throng of ruins and a collapsed great house, setting up an impressive long-distance alignment. He concluded that these buttes must have been a crucial axis in a land. scape of "spirit lines."

These lines may have been used by these people’s ancestors and other various groups for 10,000 years. Since the mammoth eaters roamed the landscape. And to back that up, Paleo Indian Points have been found at Chaco Canyon.

On a PBS Special about the place, I saw a rather eccentric and seemingly well known park ranger named GB Cornucopia talk about Chaco and its ritual landscape. He said the Anasazi, quote, watched everything and the sky gave them a sense of time and they understood it in very intimate ways. Now we find alignments in buildings we find alignment between buildings they all have the same problem we cannot prove intentionality but we see it over and over again. And after a while you get the idea there is a pattern here and while you might be discussing one alignment like this and not know for sure if this was intentional you know you’ve got dozens of others. For them all to be coincidental is the greatest coincidence.

In AD 1054, July to be precise, a supernova exploded in space that was visible during the day and was as bright as a full moon in the night sky. While no European commented on it, the Chinese said it could be seen for 23 days when they recorded it… and so did the Anasazi. On a canyon wall near the Peñasco Blanco Great House, someone painted a crescent moon with a star below it. From Plog, quote, although these rock paintings cannot be dated, the correspondence between the date of the supernova and the concentration of building activity in Chaco Canyon between AD 1030 and 1130 is extremely suggestive. End quote. Then, 6 years later, in 1060, a volcano exploded in northern Arizona that sent ash raining down on Chaco Canyon and buried 800 square miles of southwestern land in glowing cinders. People probably came from all over to witness it and we know it was witnessed because some Anasazi or Mogollon or Hohokam or all of them pressed corn into the hot lava rocks, leaving an impression of the kernels for people to still see today. Then 2 years later, in 1062, Haley’s Comet streaked by. None of this would have been ignored by the people on the ground at Chaco Canyon or anywhere else in the southwest. Archaeologist Mark Varien told Childs, quote, their landscape was not just a physical one. I think they were moving within a landscape imbued with meaning. End quote.

One thing that Chaco and the Anasazi and especially the Mimbres of the Mogollon Region are very well known for is their pottery, which I really only just recently mentioned but it’s what helped propel them into the consciousness of the nation way back when! Not a single Mimbres broken bottom ceramic vessel that was placed atop the dead’s face has been recovered… they’ve all been looted. Heck, I even have a piece of Anasazi pottery I received for free from an antique shop owner who had a bowl of them at the register. When I asked about it he said he gets people all the time who come in with handfuls of the white and black stuff asking to pawn them and he says they shouldn’t have taken them in the first place so to devalue them he encourages they leave them for free and now you can take them for free. And I took the prettiest one in the bowl. It’s the oldest man made object I own and it’s beautiful even though it’s only a broken sliver. Ceramic Vessels or pots and pottery, were incredibly important to the people of the southwest. It housed their corn, water, and pots of turquoise have been found beneath the signal hills and in Great Houses. It seems pottery was intentionally broken at important sites with one site in Chaco Canyon having 80,000 ceramic vessels intentionally smashed. My wife and I went to a site near Monument Valley that required some sleuthing to find and some maneuvering down a cliff to reach and before we even could see the site, we were walking on a bed of broken pottery. More pot sherds than I’ve ever seen. Of all kinds and varieties. It was unreal. We spent the first little while just raking the ground looking for more and more elaborate pot sherds, it was incredible. Eventually we had to ignore them and carefully explore the ruins but I was amazed. I’ve been to so many sites and most of them are quite a bit more accessible which means I run into 10 or 20 pot sherds but at that place it was shocking the sheer amount of them. They seemed almost as numerous as the desert sand.

Burrillo says, quote, pottery, it seems, had cultural importance that extended beyond the realms of both mundane and ritual usage. It said who you were. End quote. Most of the most recognizable pottery is white with black geometric designs, like the pot sherd I was given. There are grey, non painted ones that were most likely used for cooking and storing as opposed to possibly ceremonial or they could have been used like fine china is today. Surprisingly, some ceramic vessels have been found with 10 layers of paint on them. I kind of took the discussion of pottery for granted when researching because I’ve just seen so much of it and it’s one of the first things you learn about when studying southwestern archaeology. You can date a vessel by its color and the patterns. You can even say where the vessel was fired from, or at least where the clays were gotten. You can also tell what culture the person belonged to who decorated it. They’re important not only for aesthetic reasons but also for dating and identifying. I’ll talk more about the pottery in the next episode because you can track the movement of the Anasazi on their spiral and chaco meridian by seeing the slow evolution of their pottery once they leave Chaco but there is something relevant to the end of our discussion here, which we’re approaching.

Around the Mesa Verde region, north of Chaco, and in the Bears Ears, a new type of pottery was beginning to emerge during the heyday of the Canyon known to us as Red Ware, San Juan Red Wares, or even better, Deadman’s Black on Red. After firing, because of minerals in the clay and of the way it’s fired, the vessel comes out red or orange or at least with a reddish hue. The Anasazi figured out that if you burn the clay, which is full of iron in a very oxygenized environment, like with a steady breeze, the clay rusts. The only problem with this is the sheer amount of wood and attention that’s necessary.

Here’s Burrillo with some insight into why that’s important:

Modern reconstructionist potters and other primitive-technology wonks are always very eager to point this out, because it means that firing red wares is a lot harder and more involved than firing white or gray wares. Most of them, anyway; my friend Kelly Magleby is convinced that it's easier to make red wares, because it takes place aboveground where you can keep an eye on things.

In any case, it certainly takes a greater toll on local wood stores. Kilns for firing pottery took up an exceptional amount of firewood in a place that lacks a lot of wood. And an immense amount of ceramics have been found.

These gorgeous orange-hued ceramics, called either Abajo or San Juan Red Wares, became all the rage for a while, being traded all over the greater Mesa Verde region and beyond. It appears that they were highly prized and sought-after. Serving food to your guests in a genuine San Juan Red Ware bowl was probably the equivalent of offering to pick your friends up in a Porsche. Its association with large architectural sites and ritual centers, however, suggests that it was more often a ritual item than a flashy domestic one. End quote.

These vessels didn’t disappear until the Pueblo II period, coinciding with the imminent relocation and tumult of the Anasazi which the complete depletion of wood stores in and around Chaco may have contributed to.

While pottery certainly was fired within Chaco Canyon, it does seem as Lekson suggested, that Chaco was a black hole for all things it needed and wanted from the surrounding area, especially pottery. Like that one site in Chaco with 80,000 broken vessels. Another of Lekson’s fun facts is that, quote, Chaco had bulk and prestige economies. End quote. Bulk goods, like ceramics, corn, and wood, moved in and out of Chaco from great distances, and prestige goods moved in and out from even further distances. Some of the prestige items came from over 600 miles away. A quarter million pine beams for use in construction of kivas, Great Houses, unit Pueblos, Great Kivas, and every other monumental architectural feature in Chaco came from distant forests on people’s backs. Lekson says also, quote, not to mention tons of crockery, rocks, meat, and quite possibly vegetables. End quote. He goes on to say, quote, Chaco had a lot of bling. And the honored dead of Pueblo Bonito had way more than most. End quote. That way more than most includes lots of shell and a whole lot of turquoise as we’ve talked about. The turquoise came from Central and Southern Nevada, Southern Colorado, and Northern and Southern New Mexico. So all around the Chaco Region. And a whole lot of it was made into jewelry right there at the great houses in what look like sweatshops to be worn by the nobles. Beyond turquoise there’s the Scarlett macaws, a beautiful and very important bird from down south. Also from Mexico are Copper Bells that would have been manufactured in the northwestern region. Also Marine Shell from the Gulf of California. And, not only Cacao as previously mentioned but also the vessel used by elites in Mesoamerica with which to drink the special spiced cacao was brought to Chaco. In Mexico, from murals, we know that it was brewed into a hot cocoa mixed with spicy peppers and then someone climbs a ladder or set of stairs and pours it from a great height into this vessel before it’s drank, which gives it lots of air and frothy bubbles. Not only Cacao was being drank. I mentioned a long time ago something called the Mississippian Black Drink which I did not know what on earth that was so I did some research. The black drink is made of the yaupon Holly which is North America’s only native plant that contains caffeine but also, a few psychotropic effects as well. For Discovery, Justin Fornal wrote, quote, For groups such as the Cherokee, Timucua, Choctaw, Muscogee, and Yugi, the Black Drink would have been an integral part of ceremonial life. Research suggests the Black Drink — known for its powerful concentration enhancing and euphoria-inducing elixir with psychotropic effects — was used for special rituals including debates, religious engagements, and even in preparation for battle. End quote. Even Hohokam clothing has been found at the site. Remember, the Hohokam cultivated cotton. The Chacoan Anasazi really wore more skins, leather, feathers, and braided yucca including a braided yucca and feather type of sock which they… yes, wore with their sandals. And don’t forget that ceremonial heart cutting knife from Mesoamerica that was found ominously in the Canyon.

Some archaeologists, like Tim Pauketat in his 2007 Chiefdoms and Other Archaeological Delusions, clearly sees the influence of Mesoamerica as quite large and significant not only in that eastern capital of the Mississippian known as Cahokia but also in the eastern gulf area of the United States. Obviously, there’s more than enough evidence for its influence in Chaco and with the Anasazi as well. Again, this is only worth defending so vehemently because of Pueblo Mystique.

I did my archaeological dig which is necessary to graduate, in Belize on a Maya great house outside the city core which may have belonged to the capital of the region, Lamani. I picked archaeology to study the Maya! Over time though my love of all things Maya became my love of all things southwest, But the more I’m learning the more I’m realizing, maybe the Southwest is just an extension of the Maya?! What if the  mounds I grew up near in Georgia like Etowah are also just an extension!? Maybe not an extension, but a secondary state that grew up to emulate the areas south of the tortilla curtain, no doubt…

Lekson says, quote, objects and actions at distance enhanced elite knowledge and prestige. Kings were supposed to not only know what was going on elsewhere; in many narratives kings were supposed to BE from elsewhere. Marshall Sahlins's (2008) important essay on “stranger-kings" identifies this pattern across the globe. End quote. All of those mesoamerican goods and even some of the beliefs may have been imported into the Chacoan realm to support the prestige and power of the rulers of the Canyon and the vast region of the Anasazi. These goods such as cacao, macaws, and even ideology all come from pretty distant lands of the Maya realm, not nearby neighbors. Plus, Macaws, which I’ll talk about shortly do not work with down the line trading. They won’t survive.

Lekson comments on how he saw a piece of pottery, an elaborate piece of effigy pottery from the Mimbres valley of New Mexico called Ramos polychrome, in a museum in Tabasco, Mexico. If you’re wondering how far away that is, go to google maps and type in Mimbres valley to Villahermosa Tabasco state, Mexico, wait for it to think, and then you’ll see it’s almost 3,000 kilometers. Let’s say someone walked it in a straight line instead of the route it chooses, that’s still about 2,500 km or 1,500 miles as the crow flies. Mexican obsidian has been found in Spiro, Oklahoma. Italian glass beads were in circulation in Alaska before Christopher Columbus landed. The fact that Gengis Khans mother was a Christian… ideas and goods can and do travel. That was no exception in North America and between the Mayas, Mesoamericans, and the Southwesterners of the Mogollon, Hohokam, or Anasazi. These people were descended from the greatest travelers to have ever lived.

Those Macaw birds I mentioned were a pretty big deal to have had in the Southwest. They are not native to the area and they do not do well either. They appear to have arrived around AD 900, with the advent of the Chacoan system, from down south of course in the Jungles of Mexico. They have long tail feathers and strikingly vibrant colors and those feathers were used in Mesoamerica not necessarily as money but in reciprocal exchanges. Which is exactly what they may have been doing up in Chaco. But beyond Chaco, there are hints at macaw pens further out in the hinterlands and on Mimbres pottery, baby macaws were painted on bowls suggesting they were being locally bred.

And speaking of birds, Turkeys were a huge part of life for people in the Southwest and had been by this point for a thousand years or more, possibly as early as 1,000 BC. But they weren’t eaten, not yet at least. They were more used as feather providers for clothing and blankets, but also used in rituals. When they died, there’s even evidence they were given formal burials like one would give a beloved pet. But then, just before Chaco rose up and overtook the Four Corners, the people began to eat ‘em and by 1100, they were a staple being imported to Chaco with everything else.

Even after Chaco though, Turkeys were important to the Anasazi. From Childs, quote, A researcher named Kathy Roler Durand recently discovered that the use of birds and their feathers increased after Chaco lost its central power, an indication that the Anasazi structure was not necessarily weakened by Chaco's decline… he goes on to say… She had found from Salmon Ruins a macaw and a turkey buried together, to her a very curious and auspicious arrangement. Turkeys are known to have been used in Mesoamerica as substitutes for human sacrifices, and macaws signify a connection with the tropical regions where such sacrifices were common. It seems that everywhere Durand found the remains of birds, she also found evidence of ritual life. End quote. We’ll talk about Salmon at the end of this episode but what if Turkeys were used after Chaco as substitutions for human sacrifice once Chaco’s demise is spiraling out of control… they kept the birds but got rid of the human sacrifice which means, there could have been human sacrifice in the Canyon… remember the ratio of young girls to men. And that heart carving knife…

Clearly, Chaco imported everything, but what did it export? Well, besides turquoise, it doesn’t appear that it exported many physical goods, but that makes sense if it’s mostly a ceremonial capital city. The turquoise that it did export though has been found in coastal Oaxaca at a site named Tututepec where it then went into circulation around Mesoamerica. And truthfully, it may have exported things back out into the economy like prestige goods for outlier great houses but all that the chaco valley really has is mustard colored sandstone.

So nothing seems to have really left Chaco in terms of artifacts besides Turquoise, well, and shortly, its people. But its ideas and way of life may have been its most valuable resource anyways. Enter with me, through the only really completely novel and original thing to come out of Chaco: The T shaped doorway.

Archaeologist Joe Pachak said to Childs that the T shaped doors aren’t doors but are instead, quote, windows, entries, and exits. They’re holes of emergence. They are sipapus in the architecture. People would have been reminded of their story daily, going in and out of the house, emerging into the world, then going back inside. End quote. The sipapu, remember, is the hole that you emerge from when leaving the underworld. Pachak also points out that rock art symbols, those often on walls or boulders near pueblos have been found carved and etched into the frame of the T shaped entry ways, meaning they must have been symbolic, much like the landscape. But the T shaped door or entryway’s function is ultimately unknown. Researchers have suggested it would have been easier to carry things on your back into the room with that shape… and that’s probably how it started out. It’s also hard to close the T shaped door. The way the Anasazi closed their doors, by the way, is to insert a sandstone slab, effectively blocking it. I’ve seen closed granaries and wondered what was beyond the sandstone slab… I was so tempted to open it but… I did not. Eventually, they become associated with rooms adjacent to Kivas, entryways to towers, which we’ll talk about next time, and rooms within towers. Burrillo says of them, quote, they appear in rock art, on textiles, etched into the plaster on kiva walls, and even carved into mug handles. End quote.

At Chaco, the T shaped doors only appear on exterior entries of Great Houses, hence the bringing stuff in train of thought. Once the capital moves to Aztec, they start to appear on Great Houses and Common Pueblos suggesting the meaning has changed or that the elites have given up some ritual knowledge or power. Soon after that they start to appear on Mesa Verde and then in Utah, but curiously as later features of those pueblos suggesting migrants moved in and added them. They then disappear in 1300… at least until their reappearance at the end of our story in the next episode, in the Mexican State of Chihuahua at a place called Paquime.

Beyond turquoise and T shaped doors, Chaco spread its influence throughout the Southwest through colonies like at the very important ritual site of Chimney Rock in south central Colorado… and in the Bears Ears. Both places were copying Chaco or possibly even asking Chaco to come proselytize to them. Burrillo says, quote, it’s altogether possible that the Chaco system wasn't something to which people were bent, but rather something to which they bended themselves. End quote. Remember our American bias about not wanting a king… I mean… some people in this country these days sure do want a big daddy government but… anyways… Although I have driven past chimney rock four separate times, it has always been closed to the public because of its very short duration of being open throughout the year, it is rather high up in the rockies, afterall. Even though two of those times there was no snow and I was very disappointed. But the chimney rock ruins are important to mention because of its clearly ritual space and influence from Chaco.

At the site, there are two naturally occurring stone towers where every 18.6 years, which is the lunar cycle, and which was also marked and noticed by the Sun Dagger at Chaco Canyon, but every 18.6 years the moon rises directly between those two natural towers. There’s also a distinct lack of trash and artifacts, not to mention its difficult living environment, further suggesting it was a ritual space utilized for its natural features. But the ritual landscape was all important and a part of that is the number two.

In Navajo, Hopi, Aztec, the Mississippian, the Maya, and more, there’s the legend of the hero twins helping humanity… and all of those cultures also love picking spots with twin rocks or twin substantial features to build at. It really happened all over North America but one of the most obvious places is in the southwest and even more obvious, at Bears Ears, the two rock features sticking up out of the landscape that’s important to… oh, 25 separate indigenous groups around the region?

But again, probably the most noticeable export of Chaco is its people, which we will see shortly. But by the 1100s, during the Medieval warm period and the height of Chaco, the Anasazi were everywhere again, returning to their old places, seeking new ones, and finding ingenious ways to live in such a harsh environment. In some places 7,000 feet up, Anasazi ruins have been found where 65 inches of snow can drop and the temperature in winter reaches -20°. Sure, that may have been a summer home, but remember, these places were also connected ritually and even monumentally with hilltop signal stations and sometimes roads. Anasazi structures begin showing up at this time in the Beef Basin of Utah just outside of Canyonlands National Park. Plog says this of the people’s movement, quote, the expansion of southwestern peoples into virtually every available niche is perhaps best exemplified by the Anasazi of the Grand Canyon. During the last half of the 11th century, the population here exploded and communities were established in scores of locations deep within the canyon. When Douglas Schwartz began work at one such community at Unkar Delta in may 1967, using a helicopter to bring in people and supplies because access was so difficult, he remembers that, and now he’s quoting Schwartz, the first two days we were tested severely by the 120 degree heat and high winds that stung us with sand and knocked down every tent. End Schwartz’ quote. Yet this was a setting where ten Anasazi families had constructed a masonry pueblo with 23 rooms and two kivas. End quote. Beyond the great climatic environment, why were they moving? Was it that Clovis gene reemerging after generations of sedentism, staying put, and submitting to Chacoan authority?

The people of Chaco and the Anasazi gave considerable time and effort into this secondary state and ritual capital. Pueblo Bonito has 650 rooms. Wijiji, another Great House in the Canyon, has over 100 rooms. Most of the dozen great houses in the 9 mile stretch of Chaco were multi story buildings with massive sandstone walls up to 3 feet thick. They felled over 200,000 trees to create the many structures’ floors, rooms, and ceilings. Many of these trees were harvested from up to 50 miles away and brought in on humans’ backs as we’ve discussed. Some sections of the houses were three or four stories tall. One wall is 5 stories. They were carefully planned and built. It was a truly monumental construction from top to bottom, from the food, corn, and turkeys brought in, to the ceramics and turquoise, to the roads and hills, to the walls, and subterranean kivas. This place meant something and it took considerable effort, blood, sweat, and probably tears to make. And it took the people around 80 years to build it all from 1050 to 1130. Then after that, no new construction occurred. All that for what seems like a short period… but what if the average person didn’t live past 30?

In the Southwest Region, only 5-15 percent of people at this time reached the age of 50… for the people of Chaco Canyon, life expectancy was 27. Not averaged out with infant mortality but 27 is the average age of the dead found there. So when we talk about these places only being inhabited for roughly 100 years… that’s over 3 generations of Anasazi! Some of these places we’ll discuss next time took a decade to build… a third of these people’s lives! And then they were abandoned 20 years later. All this work for such a short amount of time may seem remarkable but some of these people may have been born and died in these pueblos… which really hadn’t been true for their constantly moving and migrating recent and as we know, distant ancestors.

Individuals who survived childhood often had arthritis and spinal degeneration from toting heavy loads. Plog says, quote, skeletal indicators show that although males and females may have participated in different tasks, such tasks were equally strenuous. End quote. The people who reached 50 had few teeth remaining because of the stone grit in their diet and many of the women suffered from osteoporosis from the lack of Vitamin D. But amazingly, by studying the coprolites, or fossilized poop, of some of the buried dead who had stools in their lower colon when they were buried, evidence of a pain killer in the form of a tea has been found. So life at the Canyon certainly wasn’t easy and maybe over time, the people that the elites depended on for all of this trading, building, possible sacrificing, and even eating, because remember, the elite women weren’t slaving over manos and matates, the literal female slaves may have been doing that, but all of these people may have eventually decided after generations of being ruled, that enough was enough.

Childs says, quote, I have heard Chaco called an ancient Las Vegas, an isolated strip of grandiose architecture in an ill-watered desert where people came from all directions to participate in flashy ceremonies and where they left all their wealth before heading home. End quote. I read that the Navajo call Chaco Demonic and say it is not a happy place at all where the king enslaved quote unquote everybody. The Rio Grande Pueblo people of today do not even discuss Chaco. So what on earth happened?

From Lekson: All around the edges of Chaco’s region, the eleventh century saw marked increases in populations and the appearance of Anasazi hallmarks: corn agriculture, masonry pueblos, and black on white and corrugated pottery. To the west, virgin Anasazi; to the east, the population jump of late developmental Rio Grande, and the conspicuous shift from pit house to pueblo; to the south, Mimbres populations doubled (or tripled?) and ditched from Hohokam-inspired pit houses to Anasazi-like pueblos and pottery; and to the north, Mesa Verde was repopulated, with Chaco’s corona reaching perhaps as far as central Utah’s Fremont. Everywhere around Chaco, people who had formerly minded their own business suddenly chose to look like Chacoan commoners- that is, like pueblos; and everywhere around Chaco, population skyrocketed.

Part of that explosion of population to the hinterlands of the Grand Canyon, Canyonlands, Mogollon Rim, Bears Ears, and Mesa Verde region was the realization that it was much easier to farm and the fact that the trees and animals had returned after centuries of abandonment. Many people left Chaco, following the roads out of town and like I mentioned earlier, these roads probably predate Chaco and were probably the same ones they used to move to the Canyon in the first place.

As the Southwestern population grew, the Chacoan elites prospered. Then… the entire region faced a tough reality when the drought of 1130-1180 brought a severe lack of rain and hit the Anasazi with fear and starvation once the great warehouses began distributing less and less. Then, the great houses turned on each other. There are according to Lekson, quote, signs of inter-elite competition with the conversion of Pueblo Bonito from a solstitial/lunar cosmology to a solar/cardinal cosmology in the early twelfth century. End quote. This was probably due to a larger power struggle among and between the noble houses of the Canyon that for some time had probably taken turns ruling.

Noble consumption, it seems, overshot commoner production which resulted in commoners turning on nobles and nobles turning on each other and as Lekson points out, quote, the result was the remarkable violence of the twelfth century. End quote. Childs paints a grim picture when he says, quote, the skeletons of children buried in Chaco trash piles show severe anemia and other diseases of malnutrition in this period of decline. Violence erupted. Rooms have been found cluttered with bones bearing the marks of weapons. Burials were dug up, funerary objects disturbed, skulls kicked around like soccer balls. Some of these burials were robbed. End quote. Coprolites have been found in the kivas from this time period… meaning, someone relieved themselves in the communal meeting houses of what was most likely other enemy families and that refuse was found 700 years later or so. Clearly something dangerous and violent was going on but it didn’t yet collapse and the people rebuilt, just not as handsomely. Burrillo adds… archaeological evidence from this period indicates an extreme uptick of interpersonal violence throughout the region that’s almost undoubtedly associated with a major breakdown of social influence or control. Of course, the golden era of the Pax Chaco also meant that everyone was living pretty happily and harmoniously in or near dense community centers when it all went pear-shaped in the early to mid-1100s. One option was to stay put, and either condone or endure the waves of accompanying interpersonal tension in the stubborn hope that it would all prove short-lived. The other option was to vamoose. End quote.

Childs says, quote, at first people may have begun to leave Chaco by rooms, and then by clans, and then by whole villages. End quote. And as I’ve hinted before, most people chose to vote with their feet and move, and the place preplanned, chosen, and built specifically for this purpose is known to us as Aztec Ruin. Lekson suggests the move to Aztec may have been a move by some houses to leave during a growing conflict and probably to be closer to that precious resource of water, which Chaco is severely lacking. But this move was absolutely planned and as Burrillo puts it, quote, Aztec hit its stride as twilight fell on Chaco. End quote.

I know I’m quoting a lot here but these guys say everything so well… More from Childs: Aztec's great houses mirror those of Downtown Chaco. They were designed to match Chaco down to the exact square footage, angled toward and away from one another in the same fashion as Chaco's great houses, even elevated around one another in a similar way: one representing the position of Pueblo Alto, another emulating Pueblo Bonito, another Chetro Ketl, and so on. This was an almost exact duplication. The distances between prominent kivas are nearly the same as well, the directions of lines formed by various walls repeated to within a small degree of accuracy. John Stein, who surveyed both sites, told me that Aztec reproduces Chaco one to one. "The West Ruin at Aztec is the dimension of Pueblo Bonito," he said, All the architectural arrangements, the critical dimensions of symmetry, the proportions, the actual size, are based on the Bonito formula.

Similarly, not far from Aztec, Salmon Ruins appeared in an almost identical fashion in that it was planned and built perfectly before anyone moved in as opposed to the adding on of the Great Houses slowly over time. It took hundreds of years for Pueblo Bonito to reach what it was before Aztec whereas Aztec took 10 years to recreate it. These places were designed to house those fleeing Chaco as if the move was preordained, but it didn’t go as smoothly as planned. And then the drought began. But after Chaco, Childs says Aztec was the quote, next largest, most intensive concentration of people and architecture in the region. End quote.

It seems just like how Rome moved to Constantinople, Chaco had been reborn during a complex shaking up of the Capital City in Aztec where every brick was planned by people more than willing to leave the ceremonial center even before the spiral began to unravel in the Canyon, which possibly further sped up the unraveling. But it didn’t truly unravel, instead as Childs puts it, quote, formalized links of continuity were built into the system, allowing people to slip out from under environmental pressure and establish themselves elsewhere with their entire culture intact. End quote.

Meanwhile, as Burrillo puts it, the entire region found itself in the grip of a severe drought, and people throughout the Four Corners ceased construction of big Chaco-style great houses. Which makes sense- communal labor is a lot harder to organize when people are both disillusioned and very hungry. Local families built much fewer homes, with a region-wide lull in tree-cutting dates suggesting that people stopped moving around and hunkered down to weather the bad times. End quote. Some people stayed in the canyon and actually some construction did continue there and old kivas were plastered over while new roofs were put on top, but it wasn’t meant to last.

The drought eventually devastated the new Capital at Aztec but the people there, the remnants of the Chacoan Elites kept building and adding on. Three major Great Houses appear at Aztec and quite a few secondary ones are thrown up but when Aztec collapses, when the people decide they’re done producing for the elites and willfully allow Aztec and the Chacoan Nobles to fail, 10,000 people will move as a political system ends and throws the entire southwestern Four Corners region of around 100,000 people comprised of multiple different cultures and groups and clans into a spiral of truly devastating violence, fire, destruction, and change.

In the next episode, the Anasazi will move from Aztec to Mesa Verde, and then to areas in Utah and then down Arizona, through the Hohokam and Mogollon lands, across the Tortilla Curtain, and into the distant mountains of the Sierra Madres in Mexico. All the while, they’ll attempt to maintain their core beliefs, ways of life, and power while adapting to the people they come into contact with. Unfortunately, their migration will leave a trail of violence and abandoned pueblos as they searched for their center place.