The Ancient Ones: Spiral Migration or The Anasazi Art of Vanishing Into Thin Air

In 2006, one of the most peculiar grave sites in all of Preclassic Mesoamerican history was discovered in Mexico City. I know Mexico City is quite a distance from the American Southwest and our history of the Chaco Anasazi but stay with me… there are some parallels to our story here. This particular grave site buried deep under D. F. has been dated to 2,000 and 400 years before present or around 400BC. Beneath the Pontifical University of Mexico in the Tlalpan area of that very old city, the single largest number of skeletons found in a single burial from that Preclassic period of Mesoamerican History was discovered. And in that burial it appears around 10 individuals were arranged into the shape… of a spiral. Because of the ages of the 10 dead, the site’s leader Jimena Rivera Escamilla told the website Noticieros Televisa, quote, We believe that it could be some interpretation of life, because individuals have different ages: There is a baby, a child, an infant, some young adults, adults, and an older adult. End quote. The bodies had their arms intertwined… some of them are touching the other’s back. In some of their hands were ceramic spheres and around their heads were ceramic pots… What does this burial site mean? I have no idea. Neither do the people who excavated it, besides saying it’s probably ceremonial as Escamilla suggested. As a matter of fact, the culture that buried these people under what would later become the Aztec Capital of Tenochtitlan… is completely unknown as well. It wasn’t the Olmec, certainly, who had flourished around the Gulf of Mexico. It wasn’t the Maya either. The Aztec were somewhere in Aztalan, maybe, or possibly still wandering, searching, migrating… The people that buried these ten individuals into a spiral’s fate is ultimately unknown. Much like the Anasazi’s fate. At least the fate of a lot of the Anasazi. But like the Anasazi, they went somewhere… they didn’t just disappear.

I Know I’ve talked a lot about the spiral. It’s a key theme, much like migration, but it’s a key theme in these episodes over the people who inhabited the American Southwest. Are spirals completely unique to the Anasazi? Absolutely not. Spirals are found with the massive seen from the air Nazca lines in Peru. Spirals depict wind, water, the stars, all sorts of things all over the Americas. It’s a pretty prolific piece of iconography.

Take for instance the Las Plazuelas ruins in Guanajuato Mexico, where most of the 1,400 petroglyphs at the massive site… depict spirals. Spirals also inhabit the walls of rooms inside the large buildings known as the Casas Tapadas, or covered houses… because they’re big… houses… with roofs. Las Plazuelas is around 215 miles due west northwest from Mexico City and the spiral burial. Las Plazuelas was built around 600 AD… a thousand years after those spiral burials. The Site, las Plazuelas contains quite a bit of turquoise, a ball court, an engineered straight road… and a half sunken into the earth structure known as a temazcal, or a mesoamerican sweat lodge, not to be confused with a half sunken kiva. Who built the site? Much like the question of who buried the 10 spiral skeletons, researchers aren’t sure… the going theory is that it was most likely a collection of cultures that inhabited the region both near and far who had come together to build something unique, maybe to better interact with Teotihuacan… most of the groups at las Plazuelas were probably nomadic and they’re known today as Chichimeca… which is a Nahuatl word for Barbarian, as the Romans would have used it. But clearly the people who built Plazuelas weren’t barbarians. So an area where different hunter gatherer groups decided to build some monumental architecture together including ball courts, a massive road, and big roofed houses, and where they etched over a thousand spirals into nearby boulders and into the walls of buildings…

Here’s a quote for the Instituto Nacional de Anthropología e Historia or INAH of Mexico by anthropologist Martha Ruth Ortega Rivera… Another distinctive feature of Plazuelas is the harmony of the architecture with its environment, as well as the urban layout and the complexity of the buildings. End quote. Elsewhere on the INAH website she says Plazuelas was, quote, carefully built to preserve the harmony of its surroundings. End quote. Sacred Landscape ceremonial architecture? Covered Houses of intricate and complex design… I didn’t say the words Great and Houses together, that was your mind that thought that. Sacred landscape architecture… the Covered houses, the ball court, the road, the spirals… Am I saying because these unidentified people who abandoned this settlement… two things you should be familiar with when it comes to the Anasazi and this series so far, unidentified people and abandonment of an area… but am I saying these unknown cultures that came together from differing parts of the region to build what sounds like on paper a very similar thing to… Chaco Canyon, that these people are the same ones that built Chaco? Well, not the exact same ones, no of course not… don’t be ridiculous. Sure the site’s abandoned around 100 years before Chaco really starts but that is probably coincidental. The two groups being the same sounds crazy. That would be like suggesting a group of people built many of their largest settlements, great pueblos, a massive road, an entire region of fire towers, and ceremonial buildings in a straight line that could theoretically be called something liiiike.. a Chaco meridian… Plazuelas though, is not anywhere near the Chaco Meridian. But…

At a site on the coast of the Pacific Ocean, a place one… degree… off… of the Chaco Meridian… one degree… very far south mind you, actually, as far south as the line can take you because it hits the Pacific Ocean and you can’t walk any further south… but less than one degree at 106 degrees and 77 minutes as opposed to 107 degrees and 57 minutes… I cannot emphasize that enough, but at almost the exact same Chaco Meridian Degree of Longitude near a city called Culiacan at a site known as The Las Labradas Archaeological Zone, there sits on the sand, often beaten by waves and covered by the rising tides, an extremely rare and amazing phenomenon in archaeology… but on the pacific sand sits a group of volcanic rocks. And on these volcanic rocks have been carved, for the last four thousand five hundred years, at least 640 rock engravings. And these 640 engravings seem to follow a well structured order. And among these well structured and planned 640 petroglyphs that were carved into the black volcanic stones that sit strikingly on the creamy beach sand that get hit by waves, which smooth out the etches, and which often are covered by the tide… among these six hundred and forty petroglyphs, many of them are, you guessed it… spirals. When I saw pictures of these spirals… I gasped. I showed my wife and even her eyes widened at what she was seeing. She’s been up close and personal with a giant white etched spiral on a steep red sandstone wall in the deserts of Utah. She knows what an Anasazi spiral looks like. She knows what it feels like to see them, to see into them. She’s also seen the stylized animals on rocks… she’s seen both the spirals and the animals from Moab to the north rim of the grand canyon. And on these rocks of the Las Labradas site are also carved stylized humans and animals. She could see the similarity from the pictures as quickly as I did. We’ve both even seen spirals on volcanic rocks! In northern Arizona… But my wife’s not seen even a fraction of what I have… both in studying and in the wild. On the computer, in books, in magazines. In real life. With my own eyes. What I was seeing in the pictures of the Las Labradas volcanic black stones was remarkably familiar… not identical, mind you, but something felt… familiar.

Information on Las Labradas is hard to come by… at least in English, and my Spanish is not great. So maybe I am absolutely wrong and crazy and really beyond my depth here… but that’s what science is all about, right? That’s when people make discoveries… When they’re out of their league and pushing the boundaries. Look at Steven Lekson and his Chaco Meridian! Not that he was ever out of his league, but he certainly was pushing boundaries. And yeah, you definitely can’t compare the two of us, Steven lekson and I. He’s an accomplished writer, archaeologist, anthropologist, historian, and researcher in the field. I’m an armchair, something using, book reading, map pouring over, occasional traveler who gets as worked up as a golden retriever whenever he thinks he’s onto something new and exciting.

With this intro I’m not suggesting the people of Las Labradas, a site abandoned in the 1200s¸. Hmmmm… But I’m not saying the people of Las Labradas and the people of Las Plazuelas, and the people who buried the ten skeletons underneath Tenochtitlan and Mexico City… I’m not saying all of those cultures and people and the Anasazi of Chaco Aztec were all the same… I’m not suggesting that. Again… migration, migration, migration. People in the Americas moved constantly. It was literally in their blood, their DNA. Since way back with the Clovis, but even before that because they came across the sea or the straight. But they came across vast distances and entire continents after leaving Africa and they didn’t stop… But it only takes a few faithful evangelical individuals to go from one place to the next with neat enough ideas that can take off in each new area and then for that neat idea to spread and grow and grow until boom.. you’ve got spirals and Chaco and little Chacos and T shaped doors and Macaws and copper bells and turquoise just… everywhere…

In a totally unexpected and humbling and awesome turn of events, I emailed Dr. Steve Lekson with a brief question about Las Labradas and if he’d ever heard of it because it’s so close to the Chaco Meridian and to my joy and surprise, he responded! I was so excited I called my wife immediately and giddily told her before I composed myself and responded back to the great and powerful archaeologist. He said he’d never heard of Las Labradas but that it looked pretty spectacular. Although, despite my imagination running away from me, again, Golden Retriever finding a ball, but despite my initial thoughts, he didn’t really see anything in the pictures that reminded him of the Southwest… except of course, for the spiral but as he put it in the email, the spiral’s pretty universal. And of course he’s correct and I wrote the opening of this episode talking about the ubiquity of the spiral before his response because… I mean, the spiral really is everywhere in the Americas. But science and history is all about educated and sometimes not so educated guesses and theories and being wrong is part of the fun.

If you can’t tell already, a lot of what I’m going to be talking about is more or less conjecture and theory and guesses… educated guesses, by people smarter than me but guesses none the less. I have my own theories which I’m not qualified to entertain but I obviously am going to anyways… I even interjected some of these theories into the last one, although in this one, I really go off the published and researcher backed rails… but thankfully, I am neither published nor a backed researcher… That being said, I may get some stuff wrong… but definitely nothing major. Hopefully. I am probably wrong about Las Labradas being remarkably close to Anasazi and it being on the Chaco meridian as Lekson hinted to me in his response. But if some of the stuff I have and will discuss and hypothesize and guess at turns out to be wrong, don’t judge my whole podcast! Or even this whole episode… or me! I’m just guessin’ after all. And if you are learned in this field and know something I do not or have heard something I have said that is totally wrong, and not wrong in a you don’t like what I said way, but wrong as in, hey, what you said is factually incorrect because this data says otherwise then… hit me up. Not only do I need to hear that but I will totally cite you in a correction later. That’s a southern gentleman’s promise. And I have done corrections. If you’ll recall my clarification of the Ceruti Mastadon site most likely not in fact being a site from people that came to the west coast some 130,000 years ago…

There’s actually a great story in David Roberts The Lost World of the Old Ones where he’s talking to a colorful old timer rancher who knew his land extensively and had grown up on it and his family had grown up on it before him, this land is in Utah and he gave it up to the state, which, always a terrible idea, don't give anything to the state or the feds, please… but he gave it to the state or a museum or a university, I can’t remember… all the same thing anyways. I actually talked about him briefly in the last episode when I discussed the rancher who found all the bodies with arrowheads still in situ around them. Well, this man, who’s named Waldo, Waldo explains to some archaeologists that are on his land, or what used to be his land to conduct the much hyped studies and digs and what have you, but he’s talking to the head guy, an archaeologist named Metcalf, well Waldo, the long time owner who’d seen more ruins and skeletons and artifacts than most entire archaeology departments will in a lifetime, all of which had been laying where they were placed or fell, or built for almost a thousand years give or take… Waldo explained his theory of who the Ancient Ones were that inhabited his land. His theory, is rather outlandish but.. who knows? It’s a fun story and I think Waldo knew that when he told these researchers and professors and university archaeologists and students that were now vacuuming up every artifact in the land and destroying the essence of the finds and sites… he knew it was a fanciful story that he mostly told with a wink but, author David Roberts, after the old timer had told his theory, witnessed the head archaeologist, Metcalf, who turned out to be a not a great guy by the way, well Metcalf totally dismisses Waldo’s theory in an offhanded way and Roberts has this to say…

Waldo perceived the dismissal. Later he told me, quote, I may not know what I'm talkin' about, but hell, them archaeologists don't know either. They're just guessin. End quote.

Me? I’m just guessin’ too, and I’m having a great time doing it. So strap your sandals on and let’s follow the Anasazi on their Spiral Migration.

A startling change darted through the American Southwest from the south around AD400. We already know this cause I talked about it in the Archaic episode but not only beans and the Bow and Arrow flourished as they poured in from the south, but even chocolate was being consumed as far north as southern Utah by AD800. Hundreds of years before it’s been suggested it was being consumed in Chaco. Archaeologist Dorothy Washburn, at the University of Pennsylvania’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology studied this evidence of chocolate and the strange non-Anasazi bowls they were stored and consumed in and came to a conclusion that backs the somewhat controversial view that I’ve been telling y’all for a while now. She said, quote, We’re arguing that people were moving from Mesoamerican areas up north into the Southwest. It was not just traders and isolated instances of trade. End quote. In the article for Western Digs she later tells the author, quote, the bigger picture is, you can’t understand what’s happening in the [American] Southwest without understanding what’s happening in the areas to the south. End quote. Just prior to that influx of southern migrants with their chocolate and weird shaped yellow and red thin walled ceramic vessels though, with the crops and the technology from the south across the Tortilla Curtain, also came cultural characteristics and that all important architectural feature we’ve discussed so heavily. Craig Childs says of this cultural migration that quote, along with this push came kiva style pit houses on the Colorado Plateau and the first noteworthy gatherings of people and architecture at Chaco Canyon. People who had been relatively isolated in the Southwest were suddenly connected with a much larger civilization far to the south. Just as suddenly and at the same time, amaranth, a grain native to the southwest, first appeared in the Tehuacan valley of southern Mexico. Turquoise mined in New Mexico showed up in Guatemala. A reciprocal flow had begun. End quote.

By 1300, the year of the Great Divide, the year of the Great Migration out of the four corners Colorado Plateau when the Anasazi abandon their great houses and their pueblo cities and their cliff dwellings, by the year 1300, that reciprocal flow was only flowing one way, southward. The Anasazi Civil War seems to have been decided and two… or I guess three things followed. The first, which is broken up into two actions, is that a large number of people, whom we will henceforth call the ancestral puebloans, because for real, they’re the ancestors of the modern pueblo peoples, but the ancestral puebloans will leave the Chacoan heartland four corners area and head to the modern pueblo spheres and geographies. That group itself will split up with a portion of them heading to the rio grande near Santa Fe and Taos and the Jemez Mountains and another group going to the Zuni Mountains and to the Acoma and even the Hopi Pueblos. These Ancestral Puebloans will almost immediately start leaving behind for future archaeologists, evidence of their new, or maybe not new, but suppressed… suppressed during and throughout the Chaco Aztec Anasazi period by those Southerners and their religion, you know, the other team during the civil war, but these ancestral puebloans will begin or begin again to practice… the kachina culture, which they’re so known for today and which pueblo mystique dictates you remember them by. So one side becomes the ancestral puebloans and begin to practice their kachina culture and build pueblos on mesa edges throughout Arizona and New Mexico… and the other group goes south.

I’m still going to refer to this other group, this group who was probably from the south at one time, or were at least spiritually linked to the south and who were now returning to the south on their Chaco Meridian, I’m going to refer to this group of Ancient Ones as Anasazi. Although other names that archaeologists have given them like the Salado culture, will come up, I believe they’re the same group of people that left Chaco, the Salado, I mean, so I’m going to call them the Anasazi. I’m actually going to call them a lot of names and I try to clarify exactly who I’m talking about as I do it. The Anasazi’s for real ultimate fate, as in where they were when the Spanish arrived, the Anasazi or Salado or what have you, what happened to them and who their descendants are today, those questions are completely unanswered… it is a for real mystery where they ultimately ended up. There are some theories, and some rather good ones, as we will discuss later. Those theories state that they could have returned to space in their pyramid ships or whatever… We know how I feel about that theory. They could have continued on down south on the Chaco Meridian even deeper into Mexico. Or they could have become the ancestors to a group of people famous for their ability to run vast distances in high altitudes, tough weather, and in any difficult geography… which… sounds like the Anasazi we have come to know, right? Those great walkers who had decorated footprint sandals and who painted feet and six toes all over the boulders and walls of the Four Corners Colorado Plateau… Maybe it’s a combination of all of these theories… except for going back home to outer space. “No, Elvis is NOT dead, he just went home.” Okay, K… Well, I’m getting way way way ahead of myself here.

Long before the Spanish write about armies of tens of thousands in the Sierra Madre Mountains on the Chaco Meridian, the Anasazi leapt up and were leaving the Four Corners, following the spiral southward on a defined course that will put them into contact with the Anasazi neighbors we’ve talked about before like the Mogollon and the Hohokam. Their destination? At least, at first, is a place known as Paquime.

Before we talk about the interactions on their journey southward and how they help end those quite old systems, we should introduce and talk a little about Paquime, because honestly, even before the Great Divide and Migration of 1300, Paquime was growing and its material culture was changing with what can only be recognized as influences from… Chaco. Not only the pottery, but T shaped doorways abound at Paquime and the surrounding mountains. And even found further south into the imposing and quite grand Sierra madres. But Paquime.. Paquime sits on the northeastern tip of those Sierra madre Mountains of Mexico in the Chihuahua desert. If you turn modern geopolitical boundaries off in your maps app and switch it to satellite mode, and you then plot the place spelled P A Q U I M E, you’ll see it is in a place that looks a whole lot like the rest of the American Southwest on the satellite image. The Chihuahua desert is not all that different from the Sonoran desert or Colorado Plateau except it actually receives even more rain in the summer monsoons. The summer’s are still super hot and the winters are still very cold. Actually, they’re even colder in the Chihuahua desert than up north. The Anasazi weren’t moving to a completely alien landscape. Even the mountains, the Sierra Madres don’t differ all that much from the canyons of the four corners, especially Cedar Mesa. Not to mention… Paquime is STRAIGHT south down the line from Aztec, Chaco, and many other settlements as it sits perfectly on the 107° Chaco Meridian. Archaeologist Stephen Lekson’s Chaco Meridian theory to me, is not really a theory, but should be considered a fact at this point. His genuine theories, which will probably bear out like all of his previous ones, like where the Anasazi went AFTER the Spanish, those other theories we will talk about at the end but by 1300, Paquime is a growing Anasazi center in northern modern day Mexico. Even BEFORE the northern Anasazi show up. Well… show up in great numbers, because the two populations were probably incredibly linked.

On a side note, Mexico is a Nahuatl word which means a place in the center of either the moon or an Agave plant, no one’s sure, but the Anasazi most likely spoke an Uto-Aztecan language, probably like the Hopi do today. The Anasazi spoke multiple languages, really, but a main one would have been the Uto-Aztecan Hopi. The Hopi Language is actually pretty close to Nahuatl, which the Aztecs spoke so the Anasazi may have called Mexico… Mexico… they could have… although the Aztecs called Mexico Anahuac which meant land surrounded by water which.. yeah, that’s true kinda, but.. I guess I can’t argue with the Aztecs so that’s beside the point. Maybe they meant Mexico City… Tenochtitlan, which was on an island… but Mexico surrounded by water? Anyways, The point is the Anasazi that we are talking about now, that were heading south towards Paquime, probably spoke an Uto-Aztecan language similar to both what the Aztecs spoke and Hopi people speak. On a side side note, the Hopi people, they’ve got a pretty strong case to be made that they’re descended from the Anasazi. At least, the Anasazi that stayed behind. But these Anasazi that were traveling, they were heading back towards their once long ago ancestral or at least spiritual homeland and current sister capitol Paquime, which was also closer to their Aztec cousins, while keeping on this Chaco Meridian Line.

SO. Paquime. Those signal hills with the fires or maybe mirrors on top of them, because the Mesoamerican southerners at the time were indeed using mirrors. Not just Mesoamerica though, but 36 mirrors with Mesoamerican designs have been found in sites of the Hohokam! But these fire signal hills that are still being pondered over and excavated and discussed today… since they’re a fairly recent discovery, but those fire signal hills that connected the Chacoan world of the Four Corners… they’re found at Paquime. It’s a safe assumption, according to Dr. Stephen Lekson, a favorite archaeologist, historian, and writer of mine when it comes to the Southwest, whom I talked about a lot in the last two episodes and mentioned in the intro. Dr. Stephen Lekson suggests it’s a safe bet that those signal hills found at Paquime reached all the way to Chaco long before 1300. They actually stretch all the way to Chimney Rock in Colorado and the Bears Ears in Utah. Probably over to modern day Flagstaff in Arizona. But probably even further. Paquime was actually analogous and a contemporary to Chaco AND Aztec up in New Mexico. 400 miles north… While those great houses were becoming greater and the Chacoan altepetl was growing in influence, while the things that were happening which I discussed in the last few episodes were going on, Paquime was being built, and being built with some heavy northern influence. Or maybe the north was being built by some heavy southern influence… we’ll say both. But by this point, the Chaco Alteptl or secondary state, started by the southern immigrants, whatever they were, be it priests, or diplomats, or strong men, or war lords… the southerner’s who shaped the Chacoan era of plenty and order.. they were looking back south. Maybe they felt their experiment was working, because they began building Paquime around 1130. More likely, it was a joint effort of building Chaco to the north, and Paquime to the south near around the same time. In both great centers, the great houses began to be built and the altepetl began influencing the regions. Might there have been an even further southern center being built simultaneously?

I mentioned the Great Houses in the Chaco episode as well and I mentioned that they are a truly unique to the American Southwest phenomenon. Only the Anasazi and Ancestral Puebloans were building them, The Mogollon were as well, but to a lesser extent and the Hohokam did at the end to an even lesser extent. They’re found nowhere else outside of the four corners… except of course at Paquime, where Stephen Lekson tells the late great writer and adventurer, David Roberts in his book The Lost World of the Old Ones, which is about the Anasazi… but Stephen Lekson says of Paquime, quote, It's a dozen Great Houses all jammed together! It’s the Emerald City of Oz. This is Chaco translated into Pueblo IV, with a good dollop of Mesoamerica thrown in. End quote. Pueblo 4 is the era in Southwestern Archaeology that contains the years 1350 to 1600, so it’s after the great divide and migration and end of the civil war when it really takes off. One faction, I still haven’t decided if they were the winners or the losers, or maybe it was a draw and that’s why they all left, but one side of the civil war packed up their Chacoan Aztecan ways and headed south on the Chaco Meridian to help grow and add onto a newer, bigger, greater Chaco at Paquime. And that’s what they did… but this time their numbers had grown exponentially as the main Anasazi Spiral Migration headed south through New Mexico and Arizona for fifty odd years picking up converts, warriors, slaves, followers, friends? I don’t know how the groups interacted as they travelled, but by researching and reading and studying other’s works, I can paint for y’all, a picture of what it looked like as the Anasazi travelled southward on their search for their center place. I can describe to you the evidence they left as they interacted with their Mogollon and Hohokam neighbors. As you’ll see, everywhere these Anasazi migrated through, they brought corn, fire, death, and abandonment of entire regions.

Not far from the four corners Anasazi homeland slash battlefield slash now empty of Anasazi Chaco altepetl region, were quite a few centers of living, large centers of living that were popping up at the same time as Chaco and Aztec. So before the great Migration and the civil war. These places were popping up with Anasazi traits like Great houses, kivas, T shaped doors, and that almighty maize… AND most recognizable of all, ceramics. Ceramics will be important in this episode because it’s what archaeologists and researchers can trace on the landscape to guess where the Anasazi migration headed. We’ll get into that in just a little bit but the ceramic aspect of the story is so technical and it doesn’t quite lend itself to talking… as, it’s so much better to view them than to hear about them… but anyways.

One of these centers is a place called Wupatki. You may have heard of Wupatki. You may have even visited Wupatki. And if you haven’t, you absolutely should.

Wupatki sits north of Flagstaff and the San Francisco Mountains which dominate the southern skyline. It commands an imposing view of the entirety of the landscape. You can see the San Francisco Sunset Crater Volcanic Field and lava rocks and to the northwest you can make out the Coconino Plateau which makes up the south rim of the grand canyon. You can see the painted desert that stretches all the way to Petrified Forest National Park. It’s an incredible spot that I’ve been to a few times and I recommend all of my listeners visit as well. The main ruin of Wupatki, the Wupatki Pueblo, is the largest residential community for 50 miles in any direction. It was first occupied in 500 AD but it really took off during the Chaco Aztec Altepetl heydays. And Lekson even suggests it was a rival to Chaco & Aztec and he’s probably right… at least it was probably a rival to the northern faction of the Chacoan Anasazi.

The people who built Wupatki and the surrounding centers were of differing origins, like much of the Anasazi segregated world. One of the groups is the Anasazi, or a more specific group of Anasazi known as Kayenta Anasazi, and the other is a group known as the Sinagua. Sinagua’s Spanish for without water, sin agua, and they’re called that because when the Spanish showed up to the San Francisco Mountains of Flagstaff, they couldn’t believe that there were no springs or rivers flowing down from the peaks. The Sinagua culture seems to be an extension of the Anasazi with a more southern and a slightly more Hohokam flare mixed in but researchers aren’t quite sure. What is certain is that at Wupatki and many other Sinagua sites, T shaped doors, Anasazi iconography, and other important Chacoan cultural hallmarks abound at Wupatki… like… Macaws.

Macaws are those colorful birds from very far south down in Mexico that were found in abundance at Chaco. The Maya would use their feathers as a form of currency. There are Macaw pens in the Mimbres region of New Mexico, another place we will soon talk about. But at Wupatki, there were more Macaws than there were at Pueblo Bonito in Chaco Canyon at Chaco height. Remember, Pueblo Bonito was that impressively massive Great House in Chaco with the incredible burials that reminded archaeologists, like Stephen Plog, who I’ve also quoted from a lot last time and will quote again next episode, but not too much in this one, but that Great House of Pueblo Bonito had the amazing and richly adorned graves that reminded him, Stephen Plog, and a few others including the Spanish of Mesoamerican Maya and Toltec burials… And another link with the southern peoples across the tortilla curtain… Wupatki has the northernmost mesoamerican ball court found in the Americas. These Wupatki, Sinaguan, Southern Anasazi clearly had ties to their Uto-Aztecan Nahual neighbors from down south. But they also clearly had ties to their Chacoan friends because Wupatki also features a very large great house, and a very large great kiva. Two kivas, actually. And amazingly… if you remember the sun dagger on Fajada Butte in the Chaco Episode that marked the passage of the solstices and seasons… well, Wupatki has one too! Except, curiously, there’s doesn’t mark the Summer Solstice. That’s quite a commanding and strong link to Chaco. I haven’t found any evidence that Wupatki is linked physically with Chaco using those fire signal hills but I guarantee you they’re there and they were used. Again, studying those hills is a newer field of research.

So the population of Wupatki takes off at the same time the Chaco Aztec Altepetl is gaining influence until 1275 when… you’ll never guess what happens at Wupatki… I’m kidding, it’s abandoned. Totally and completely. That’s a theme, a major theme, of this episode. As it was at the end of the last episode. And I suppose a theme since the Mammoth Eaters episode when I discussed the Clovis. The people of the Americas and especially of the American Southwest, these people are a migratory people… They’re always moving… always searching for their center place. You’re probably sick of me mentioning that by now…

It’s at this point, it appears this group of Sinagua Anasazi at Wupatki split into two groups just like their Chacoan Aztec cousins. One of these groups no doubt continues on their Chaco Meridian down south, joining their migrating neighbors, and we’ll follow them shortly, but first let’s talk about the other group… the group that stayed… they’re known to us today, as the Hopi. Probably. Definitely most likely.

These Wupatki Sinagua Anasazi that stayed behind and didn’t continue south didn’t actually stay at Wupatki, but instead, they fled northeastward towards a place known today as Hopi Mesa. Hopi mesa is actually three mesas titled First mesa, second mesa, and third mesa. But there are other mesas nearby, such as Antelope mesa. When the Sinagua Anasazi arrived there were already people living there actually. These people already living there in the early 1300s mixed with the newcomers and they became some of the ancestors of today’s Hopi Indians.

Beneath Hopi mesa though, was something that was beginning to be used in the creation of pottery and ceramics. This tool, if you will, was changing the appearance of the pottery which would overtake the Mesa Verde black on white completely, and even the kayenta red ware version of pottery and this pottery is known to archaeologists today as Jeddito Yellow Ware and it was made exclusively on the Hopi mesas because of the rich deposits of coal that they used to fire this pottery.

Now I know you’ve had an earful from me of believing wholeheartedly in oral tradition in the last episode, and even a little before that, but it is worth noting that the Hopi of today have stories of their clans migrating from all sorts of different places. Some came after a slaughter near sleeping Ute in southwest Colorado, that place we talked a lot about in gory detail in the last episode. Others walked from New Mexico, still others migrated up from Mexico or the Phoenix Basin region. Interestingly, the Hopi’s symbol for migration is… a spiral. They believe they found the center of the universe on Antelope Mesa and the other nearby mesas which is why they never left. Here’s a quote from author Craig Childs in his book House of Rain which he wrote to help explain where the Anasazi disappeared to. Quote, The famous question of what happened to the Anasazi is partly answered here. They are now called Hopi, living on an island of a reservation, a cluster of mesas settled long ago. They are the ones who did not leave. End quote.

But of course, there are the ones that did leave. And truthfully, even a lot of the Hopi Mesas were abandoned. 36 of the 47 villages were emptied in the Great Migration. Where’d they go? Well they probably followed the Anasazi down south.

We’re not done with the Hopi though. This episode’s about following the Anasazi, the next episode will be about the Ancestral puebloans, including the Hopi. And it’ll be about their way of life, their history starting after the Great Divide, their intra warring, and absolutely that pueblo mystique behemoth, The Kachina Culture.

Not far from Wupatki, right off of Route 66 and I-40, sits a place known today as Homolovi State Park. In April of 2022 on my way out to move to California from Wisconsin, with the bed of the truck and the passenger seat overflowing. And with my old dog in the back, I pulled over to stay the night at Homolovi. Unfortunately, I’d gotten there just a bit too late to see the site and I left before sunrise so I didn’t get to see it in the morning either. I’ll be back one day but that’s not why I’m mentioning it now. It’s important because, just as the Chaco Aztec Civil War was about to come to an end, and just before Wupatki and the rest of the four corners were abandoned, Homolovi began to take off.

Homolovi may have been one of the first destinations built on the Anasazi’s way down south. Although the first major Pueblo was built and settled around 1260, it was replaced a few decades later, around the Great Migration, with five newer ones. Thousands of new rooms went up in a matter of mere months in a spectacularly ordered fashion on man made hills. Homolovi is actually a Hopi word which means place of the little hills. The area immediately surrounding Homolovi is rather flat and from the campground I can confirm you can actually see the San Francisco Mountains near Flagstaff some 65 miles due west northwest. My dog and I sat on folding camping chairs in the sandy scrub and watched the sun set behind them mountains in April. It was a beautiful sunset.

By 1300, the Pueblo of Homolovi with its many hills, no doubt some of them being those fire signal hills that would have connected it to places further south, but the people of Homolovi were mainly growing and exporting cotton to the Ancestral Puebloans that had stayed behind on Antelope mesa as well as other both nearby and far off settlements. And for their cotton, it appears the Anasazi of Homolovi received thousands upon thousands of the coal fired Jeddito Yellow Ware vessels. But they also passed those vessels on southwards to their still migrating friends and relatives as well.

I didn’t actually read this anywhere but it’s easy to assume some of the people that became the Hopi’s ancestors, some of these Anasazi that stayed behind on Antelope Mesa and the others, they may have been told to stay behind by the elites before they headed south with the larger group. The ability to use coal instead of cutting down and burning the very precious resource of timber, especially during the great drought which is for real raging now in the Southwest and probably helped fuel the continual movement of people out of the area… although I don't think the great drought was the catalyst for the original movement as I talked about last time. I think that was the Civil War, but the great drought helped fuel the migration eventually. Back to my thought though… what if people were told to stay behind and utilize this coal fired technique and on their way down south they will trade with them as they came into contact with more and more settlements.. which they do. I could be on to something there. But who knows. Like Waldo suggested, I’m just guessin’.

By around 1400 though, the party at Homolovi was over and the people either joined their Anasazi Ancestral Puebloan future Hopi friends or they headed south to join the growing group of migrating Anasazi on their Chaco Meridian Spiral.

So when I say they’re following the Chaco Meridian Spiral, I don’t actually mean these Anasazi were following the 107° Line in the landscape Chaco Meridian. People absolutely did follow that line straight south and I think they probably did before the civil war even got out of hand. But those people were probably the elite or other important persons who needed to flee. Lekson suggests there are sites, great houses, or small pueblos every twenty or thirty miles on the actual Chaco meridian. The entire group of Four Corners Anasazi who Migrated South before and during the great divide of 1300 didn’t line up in a straight line and walk it down to Paquime and then beyond. Instead, maybe the leaders and elites did while the rest of the people went from settlement to settlement in Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and even a little of Nevada on their way south, where they traded, adopted new ways, influenced entrenched ones, and ultimately lead to these settlements abandonment as well.

So this group we’re following that had fled Utah before heading to Northern Arizona before going even further south, well this group that was leaving the Colorado Plateau behind, they were about to run right smack into the Mogollon Rim and the Mogollon People that inhabited it. Not to mention the Hohokam people that lived beyond them… but they may have had little colonies, missionary enclaves, or 5th columns already among the people in those areas and population centers.

If you’ll remember my episode the Anasazi Neighbors where I talked bout the Hohokam and the Mogollon, I mentioned how different the Arizona and New Mexican, but definitely how different the Arizona climate, geography, and especially appearance… but how different all of that is above and below the Mogollon Rim. It’s truly two different worlds. Not to mention the rim itself feels so out of place when you think of the Sonoran Desert below and the Colorado Plateau above it. It’s so gorgeous and cooler and forested and green. I recently drove through it after leaving Homolovi, which I also mention in the episode if you remember the Skinwalker Elk.. you know the one… well I couldn’t believe how gorgeous it was! I knew the area was littered with natural wonders and ruins but I didn’t really know the extent of it until reading Childs book, House of Rain. Which is going to be referenced quite a bit from here on out. He really does a fantastic job describing the sites and the migrations and the possible outcome of these amazing people we’ve been talking about for months now, these Anasazi Spiral Migrants.

Childs paints the picture, and I enjoyed imagining it, but Childs paints a picture of the Anasazi migrating south from up north, making their way to this steep rocky geological line and standing on the literal edge of the black cliffs of the Rim and staring southward seeing smoke from the many many pueblos and believing that this was theirs for the taking as they made their way south. By this point, the 1300s Great Migration Era, by this point, the Mogollon people that sat beneath the Mogollon rim had been hunting plentiful deer, elk, and rabbits, planting and gathering crops, building small pueblos, trading with, and even intermarrying with the Anasazi for almost three hundred years. But now those ties were about to heat up and accelerate… like a fire set with stalks of corn.

During the 11th century, pottery trade between the Chacoan Anasazi and the Mogollon Rim peoples began to be solidified… until the 1300s, when not only pottery made its way south but also entire villages of these Chacoan Aztec Anasazi Migrants. At the same time the north was undergoing depopulation, the southern end of the southwest was being inundated with northern people’s cultural markers, artifacts… And eventually the Chacoan Anasazi people themselves. And with them, they brought their kivas, pueblos, and cliff dwellings. Childs quotes archaeologist Jeff Clark who said of the Anasazi on their migration, quote, seldom would they have entered unknown territory. They traveled to where they had ties, following lines set by other migrants who’d come through long before them. End quote. Remember those fifth columners I just mentioned?

A fifth column is a foreign group of people working within a local system for that foreign group… usually during war. I only used the term fifth column instead of say… diplomat or missionary because of the civil war that had raged for so long and because of what happens to the Mogollon people later. Prolonged war changes a society. Just look at the Spanish who invaded Mesoamerica. 700 years of the Reconquista made them perfectly suited to conquering near entire continents.

The reconquista was the 700 year conflict on the Iberian peninsula that the Spanish and Portuguese fought against the Muslim Caliphate before finally winning and taking back Spain for the Spanish in 1492. Which, is… the same year that Christopher Columbus sailed the Ocean Blue… which is why the Spanish crown was so willing to give anybody a fleet who promised them gold and spices in return… back to our regularly scheduled program. The Anasazi!

In the eleven hundreds some Anasazi adventurers had built one of the largest great kivas in the southwest on the mogollon rim. So a couple hundred years before the great migration. This kiva is 80 feet across… This largest great kiva was actually one of 14 great kivas along this long cliff in Arizona, with many of them being the largest ever constructed anywhere in the southwest. But curiously, they lack the Chacoan kiva characteristics. Childs quotes a different archaeologist, archaeologist Sarah Herr who says that the Mogollon people were, quote, not aware of certain ceremonial traits that were core to chaco. They were not from the center. But in many ways, they are Chaco kivas, and they are very much out of place. End quote. The biggest difference in the kivas was that they were probably open air instead of closed dark spaces. Which… that is a pretty big difference… but it kinda makes sense. This difference in how they were built makes sense when you think of the fact that the Hohokam just south of them would have heavily influenced the Mogollon as well. And the Hohokam had open air plazas instead of kivas as I talked about in the Anasazi Neighbors episode.

There’s also the great distance between the Mogollon and the Chacoan Anasazi but… distance doesn’t seem to affect the people of the Americas all that much… I mean distance may have affected them a little once they started to settle down into great houses and pueblos but they still traveled a lot and extensively and the Anasazi of the American Southwest still would have kept up with what Chaco was doing no matter how far they were from that Altepetl center… that is until the civil war started. So… the distance MAY have played a role, but only because the distance was filled with the quite diverse, dangerous, and difficult terrain of the rim, mountains, deserts, canyons, rivers… you know… I’m not overly convinced… The Chacoan Aztec Anasazi were in pretty good contact with Paquime after all, as you’ll see… and for some of the Anasazi descendants we’ll soon talk about, distance is nothing… I believe it may have been a conscientious decision to connect the Anasazi & Mogollon with the Hohokam. I don’t feel like I should keep saying this but I will anyways… I don’t know, I’m just guessin’.

Alright, so the kivas of the Mogollon Rim were built in the 1100s by some Chacoan missionaries or traders or elites or future fifth columns, what have you, and that is absolutely true.. but actually, there’s a kiva even older than those on the rim. It’s believed to be the very first kiva ever built anywhere in the southwest… it was built in the Three Hundreds AD… 700 years before Chaco even takes off and three hundred years before the first kivas appear in that mustard colored Canyon. I couldn’t find out much more about it than what I just said and I don’t know how that fits into our story or if it’s even true… but… it sure is interesting. And I hope someone publishes something about it soon… although in my brief search for answers about it I did see something archaeologist Sarah Herr wrote and maybe she discusses it in her 2001 Beyond Chaco.

The rest of the kivas on the Rim really come into their own in the 1100s, but the massive pueblos built next to them that can be seen today… they weren’t constructed until the 1300s. And we know what happened in the 1300s. Think back to those Anasazi migrants standing on the edge of the precipice. The Mogollon Rim population begins to explode after the start of the great migration with people clearly from the north. Things in the archaeological record really seem to change.

Not only do these northerners… which, yes the northerners I’m discussing now are the same people I’ve been calling… the Southern influenced Chaco Aztecan Anasazi Sinagua… it’s tough to parse through all of the designations, cultures, names, and nicknames at this point and I don’t help by adding my own and giving you more technical names, which… I am about to do again actually… but… so the Northerners in this case are the Chaco Aztec Anasazi that were influenced by the southerners from across the tortilla curtain and you know what… I’m just gonna call them Anasazi for simplicity’s sake. From here on out, at least for a little bit, I’m just gonna call this diverse group of growing peoples, Anasazi…  or at least I’ll try to. So!… the Anasazi begin to build their great houses and their smaller kivas amongst the Mogollon. But they also brought their pottery. And lots of it. Once the Chacoan Aztec Anasazi migrants… see, should have just said Anasazi… but once the Anasazi enter the area, the black on white pottery that had been in use for over seven hundred years within the Mogollon region disappears and is replaced with that coal fired Yellow Ware from above the Mogollon Rim that the Hopi Ancestral Puebloans were firing. Not only do the colors change though, but the ceramics also become much larger and they seem to feed a whole lot more people… which makes sense when you think of all of the places up north that are abandoned. The people had to have gone somewhere. And the mogollon rim is one of those places.

But this picture kind of replicates itself all over the Southwest. From Sedona to Gilla in New Mexico. The Four Corners Anasazi leave the Colorado Plateau and they make their way south, filling every nook and cranny as they love to do, in the process. They kind of take over an area, changing it to suit their worldview, and then… they leave and they take most of the survivors with them.

Again with the pottery though, the ceramic vessels change in color, shape, and even decoration. The designs on the pottery of the Mogollon people seems to become more playful and kind as opposed to the rigid images of the Colorado Plateau Anasazi Wares. Butterflies and flowers and clouds and birds begin to appear and that motif and change in design seemingly spread faster throughout the Southwest than any other cultural influence had done prior. Ever… Maybe the Anasazi wanted to forget about the recent violence and dangers they’d fled from up north.

Apparently though the Anasazi couldn’t totally quit their defensive natures. In the 1300s, as the migrants fled into and filled the rim area, a familiar form of masonry began showing up. In the sharper, darker, harsher rocky canyons of the Mogollon Rim, The Anasazi seemingly filled quite a few spaces with the quintessential defensive cliff dwellings they’re so well known for on the Colorado Plateau. Maybe they were leery of moving in with the Mogollon peoples so quickly after moving down there. Maybe they weren’t being presumptuous… at first. Either way, many of these cliff dwellings were only lived in for a generation or less before being abandoned and those pueblos and kivas I mentioned earlier began to be built and occupied in the Mogollon area by a growing number of peoples. 

This culture of native Mogollon and migrant Anasazi is known to archaeologists today as the Salado Culture. Archaeologists and historians and anthropologists may disagree with this interpretation of the culture’s history that I’m giving you now, but to Craig Childs and a few others, and myself, it seems to make the most sense and fits the best into the timeline and material artifacts left behind. The Salado culture starts in the 1100s in the Mogollon Rim area and goes until the 1400s when they disappear… it isn’t a stretch to imagine those Anasazi missionaries in the 1100s who built the massive kivas were the ones that began the culture… and it isn’t a stretch to assume they welcomed their cousins and friends from the Chaco Aztec Homeland with open arms. Especially after they would have gotten word about the terrible violence that had occurred in their old homeland during the civil war.

From Childs: In the thirteenth century, during a time of increasing cultural movement and unrest on the Colorado plateau, mesa verde and Kayenta rose to power with their massive cliff dwellings. Shortly after their fall, fourteenth century salado cliff dwellings appears just to the south beneath the mogollon rim. These events are not isolated from each other, but are strung together like a row of falling dominoes, anasazi turning into salado. An exodus was under way, gathering new members and probably losing old ones; expanding, contracting, and pushing ahead with shields, pueblos, polychrome pottery, and cliff dwellings. A vigorous cultural force was dropping through the southwest, following the rains. End quote.

When the people from the north, the Anasazi showed up and built their towering structures, the local Mogollon people no doubt mixed with them and a relationship began that we call the Salado Culture. But this relationship was not necessarily a relationship that worked both ways. Shortly after the Anasazi appeared, the Mogollon region, which had been ripe and overflowing with trees, deer, elk, and other food sources like cactus, rabbits, mesquite, beans, and more… well the area became hunted and gathered out. And then corn was planted. And then it was only a matter of time before the environment with the great drought would abandon the people… and then the people would follow suit.

Childs quotes a southern archaeologist named Jeff Reid who said quote, the original mogollon people were people of diverse resources, not like those northern folk coming on them. They preferred deer and rabbits in their stew rather than corn, corn, corn, corn, like the anasazi did. End quote.

Jeff Reid, who excavated one of the largest sites in the Mogollon Rim region called Grasshopper, talks about how he sees three distinct people inhabiting the area around the 1300s, quote, Reid called the locals he uncovered at grasshopper, the home team. A second group that he was able to decipher he called anasaz-ized mogollon, then offered mogollon-ized anasazi as an alternative: people who at some point left the highlands for the Colorado plateau, where they picked up pottery, habits, and probably northern bloodlines through marriage and then brought everything back here. A third group Reid recognized as a pure strain of northerners, those he explicitly called Anasazi. End quote.

That movement and mobility was definitely happening in the southwest and it helped the fleeing northerners to be able to inhabit this place already filled with inhabitants. Some isotopic measurements of bone and teeth at these Mogollon Rim sites show clear evidence that people from the area, people recently from the north, and people who’d come from the Colorado plateau some time before ALL lived in the area and within these large pueblos and all at the same time. They seemed to be building these bigger pueblos with the idea of segregation in mind. The Salado people of the Mogollon Rim area were keeping to themselves in one of those three distinct groups that Jeff Reid talked about and they were doing it within residential roomblocks of ethnicities. It reminds me of when similar ethnic immigrants would get off the boat at ellis island and congregate together in cities and communities, recreating their old slice of home in this new land. 

Even those in the Mogollon Rim Pueblos that would live outside their genetic community within the pueblo, like women who’d been married off, would still keep their ancestral culture and heritage. Sometimes, mud used for pottery was brought in from all the way up north, one hundred miles away on the Colorado plateau. And the same with pigments. Childs says, quote, the kinds of wood they preferred for their fires were different even when they all lived in the same environment. End quote. And with the newcomers came the big new pots, the big new pueblos, and in those big new pueblos, came the T shaped doors… Those Chacoan T shaped doors…

I know I’ve mentioned those T shaped doors before. They filled every major site from Chaco to Aztec to Mesa to Bears Ears to the Kayenta Region and everywhere. They’re a truly Anasazi phenomenon and they don’t stop being used after the Civil War and great abandonment. The migrating Anasazi bring them with them everywhere they go and all the way down to Mexico, deep into those mountains we will talk about later.

The largest site of the Mogollon Rim is in a place called Point of Pines and it is unlike any other Salado or Mogollon or Anasazi site in the area. By the time the Anasazi northerners had arrived, Point of Pines already had a sprawling one story pueblo with much smaller rooms, a pottery style indicative of even further south, so not the Yellow Coal Fired ware but something more Mimbres black on white, Point of Pines really had almost no influence from the Colorado Plateau. Well, that changed rapidly when the northern newcomers took over. They quickly set about building much larger pueblos both in height and in square space right in the middle of the already existing town. They brought their bright pottery and built big D shaped Chacoan kivas into the ground. But they brought even more than that… Childs says quote, they brought with them strains of corn, beans, and squash that were previously unknown here, products of the Colorado plateau, and they did not share. None of these strains have been found in any of the surrounding sites. End quote. It was as if the Anasazi were coming here and setting up shop regardless of if anyone already lived there or not. Or if those living there wanted them there or not. It was a perfect spot for them on their spiral migration, locals be damned… but as with most of these Salado spots… it would prove to be a temporary home.

After only 30 years, Point of Pines goes up in flames. Not the entire site, mind you. But every single migrant household was burned, and in each burned building was thrown in loads of freshly gathered corn. And sometimes living humans.

Childs again:

I once saw the remains of that end in a series of bins in an archaeological collection. The bins were filled with masses of burned corn excavated from point of pines, the kernels turned molten and fused together. Each room belonging to migrants was burned early in the fourteenth century, many of the chambers loaded with freshly harvested corn. Excavators found bodies in the burned wreckage, in one room a man, a woman, and two children sprawled on the floor. A skull was unearthed, its shell blackened and popped open, revealing a powdery gray lump inside. The lump was a carbonized brain, evidence that these people had still had their soft parts intact near the time of the fire. It seems that they had been burned alive or shortly after their death. Curiously, none of the surrounding rooms lived in by locals had been damaged by the fire. Only the proud migrant enclave had been burned. End quote.

Reading House of Rain I learned that corn burns much hotter than wood and is capable of shattering rock and melting walls. It seems the Anasazi migrants had worn out their welcome… or maybe they set the fire themselves once it was time to go. It seems a generation of time passing before moving on is the theme for these Corn bringing T shaped doorway building Kiva constructing northern Anasazi Migrants who were ultimately headed south.

Once the newcomers had left and their northern style pueblo was burnt to a crisp… with uh, some inhabitants still inside it… but after the fire, Point of Pines’ remaining residents built the most substantial perimeter wall of the 1300s in the southwest. Make of that what you will but… it makes me doubt that the Anasazi set that fire themselves as they left. It’s more like that, as Childs says, quote, it was a message: Point of Pines will take no more of these northern people, these people of fire. End quote.

You don’t often see perimeter walls in the Southwest. We’ve talked about some sites that have them in the last one but they’re not a standard practice among the Anasazi. I do know of at least one large one though, I’ve parked my truck just outside it. I walked over that crumbled wall to explore the ruins within. I was in Agua Fria National Monument and the site’s name has recently been deemed politically incorrect or whatever, but it was an impressive site. I actually did briefly mention it in the last episode actually. The large site has 150 to 200 room blocks, some petroglyphs, a few remaining pieces of beautiful pot sherds, an impressive view on the edge of the mesa cliff of the mountains to the east and the mesa top to the west with the Bradshaw Mountains further beyond them, and surrounding it was a massive wall. On a quick side note about this site, one quite curious thing about it is the quote unquote racetrack that archaeologists only recently discovered was there after studying aerial photographs of the place. I certainly couldn’t see it from the ground even though I knew it was there and even though it measures 400 feet long and 70 feet wide and is oriented in a straight north south orientation. My guess is, since the Sinagua built this site and since they were somewhat Hohokam, it was an evolution of the ball game They just didn’t build the ball courts anymore… although, 400 feet is far too long for a mesoamerican ball game, but maybe the racetrack served the same function as the ball court which doesn’t seem to have been built in the area… But they certainly built that massive site surrounding wall.

Like I just mentioned, the Sinagua built this site and they built it between the years 1250 and 1450. That means the wall makes sense… especially if they were keeping out northern migrant newcomers, or the threat of newer ones after the Anasazi left.

Other nearby sites built by the Sinagua also seem to be very defensive in nature. How closely tied to the Anasazi were these Sinagua if they really wanted to keep them out? Maybe they were much more tied to the Hohokam. Which would make sense if the racetrack is an evolution of the ball game.

One of those defensive Sinagua sites nearby is called Tuzigoot and it’s essentially a hilltop fortress. It’s a little national monument near Sedona and it’s awesome and it has a nice museum as well. Not far from Tuzigoot is Montezuma’s Castle, another amazing and quite famous national monument that was a very defensive Sinagua site. And now, recent research suggests that this story I’m telling y’all about, with migrants and corn fires, this story repeats itself at Montezuma’s Castle.

Montezuma was the Aztec leader when the Spanish got to the future site of Mexico City, which was at that time called Tenochtitlan, and like Aztec National Monument, a lot of European people named things in the American Southwest after the Aztecs because they couldn’t believe the Indians who inhabited the area, or Indians at all really, but they refused to believe the natives could have built the structures they were seeing. The European immigrants were partially correct, but for very wrong reasons. The Navajo and Apache didn’t build the ruins the immigrants were seeing but their neighbors ancestors did and we’ve been talking about them and will again a lot more next episode. But of course… if the Sinagua and Anasazi spoke a Nahua related Uto-Aztecan language… well then, the Aztecs didn’t build them but their cousins sure did… distant… cousins… anyways…

Matt Guebard, an archaeologist with the National Park Service did some further studies on the burned ruins and buried bodies uncovered decades ago at the Castle and when he did he found that the story of a peaceful end and ritual fire of the site needed to be… amended. He’s interviewed in a piece by Blake De Pastino for Western Digs magazine where he quotes Guebard…

But a closer examination of previous research done on those remains revealed that the dead had sustained trauma before their deaths, as evidenced by cut marks on their bones, burn marks, and fractures in three of the four skulls.

We learned that the interior portion of each fracture displayed evidence of singeing on live bone,” Guebard said. “So, the sequence of events seems to be blunt trauma followed closely by burning. It is also interesting to note that all of the remains with reported evidence of trauma and burning were found in a single grave. End quote.

Archaeologists aren’t sure who set the fire or why or who burned but if the pattern we’ve been outlining of the Anasazi Migrants coming in, overstaying their welcome, and then being burned, sometimes alive, in a fire of corn… if that pattern is regional, it sure seems to fit at the Castle as well.

That being said… it may not have been the Anasazi migrants but instead, Apache migrants who arrived two hundred years before the Apache were thought to have arrived in the area from up north. That interpretation was gleaned by using some Apache oral traditions but… we’ve talked about using oral traditions in archaeology and how it can be a slippery slope. Often helpful and sometimes useful and always important to take into account but to rely upon them… that can be tricky. I’m not totally sure the Anasazi migrants had anything to do with burning Montezuma’s Castle but I am totally sure that their previous arrival and then departure made the Sinagua, just like it made their mogollon Salado neighbors, but the Anasazis ultimate migration out of the area led the people in Arizona like the Sinagua and Salado to start building much more defensively with massive walls and hard to reach strongholds we call castles today.

Here’s another slightly off topic side note for you. I’m not totally sure why historians and anthropologists are stuck on the dates for when the Navajo and Apache arrived from up north. Like I discussed in the last episode, it’s totally possible the Navajo participated in the Anasazi Civil War, they certainly arrived not long after the Anasazi left but it doesn’t matter too much to our story if they did or not. The Navajo and Apache will feature a little more in the next episode but they’re just totally separate from the Ancestral Puebloans and Anasazi and they’ll have their own episodes later. I mean, I talk a good bit about the Apache in the Buffalo Soldiers episodes and I have promised a Navajo series next year. I do though, think the Navajo’s and Apache’s arrival to the Southwest wasn’t an accident after the Ancient Ones left. I think some Navajo and Apache explorers and adventurers witnessed the end of the civil war and the almost complete abandonment of the Anasazi four corners region, they then waited a few years, and when no one returned to the Four Corners land, not even to pay their respects or visit sacred sites, the Navajo and apache explorers sent word to the rest of the people to come down and fill in this near empty abundant space. But, unfortunately for them, they weren’t quite as adept at farming as the old inhabitants had been plus the Great Drought really hurt their chances to flourish. And… the Navajo definitely still farmed corn. Wether they learned it from the Ancestral Puebloans after the Anasazi left or from the Anasazi themselves, the Navajo could indeed farm and, according to the Crow Canyon Archaeology website, the word Navajo comes from the Spanish pronunciation of an ancestral puebloan Tewa word, navahu’u, which means, "farm fields in the valley.” The first Spanish in the area actually called the Navajo, Apaches de Nabajo but eventually shortened it to what we use today, Navajo. The Navajo call themselves the People, or Dine. So while the Navajo could indeed farm, they weren’t as adept as the Anasazi had been and they didn’t have help from the great drought. It isn’t overly relevant to our story of where the Anasazi go that we’re telling and maybe this would fit better in the next episode or even in the Navajo series but it does help reinforce the idea of the Americans being an extremely migratory people. Wether these Americans are from central America or north America.

I opened this episode with a wink and a nod possibility that the Anasazi’s ancestors, and not ancient ones, but recent ancestors… okay, maybe some ancient ones as well, but the Anasazi’s ancestors were from the area around central Mexico before going northwest until they establish the Chaco Meridian and head straight north on that line from the Ocean. Is that a long way? It sure is! But the Aztecs of Montezuma, the Montezuma that would meet Cortez, but the Aztecs spoke a language quite similar to the Hopi people of modern Arizona. That’s quite a long distance as well. And you know what’s an even longer distance with extremely diverse terrain in the way? The area the Navajo and Apache are believed to have traveled from in northern Canada and Alaska. Deep rooted southerners came up and helped build Chaco before returning… Deep rooted northerners filled in the spaces when the southerners left. Maybe one day the Navajo and Apache would have gone back north but… we’ll never know.

In that email conversation I had with the awesome Steve Lekson, he mentions the fact that some very Maya looking individuals have been found buried in a settlement in the Sierra Madres between Paquime and a city in the state of Sinaloa called Culiacan, which we will mention at the end, the state of Sinaloa is the same state as the Las Labradas site on the beach with the black volcanic rocks and the spirals. But Lekson said that some very Maya looking individuals in a Maya looking settlement have been found quite far from their homeland and that, quote, folks were getting around, it’s not all north-to-south. End quote.

The Anasazi Spiral Salado Migrants, we’re still in the 1300s, but the Anasazi left the Mogollon Rim area and their newer cliff dwellings and Point of Pines and segregated pueblos and travelled to southeast Arizona, again a land filled with people. These people were heavily influenced and interacted with the Mimbres to the east and the Hohokam to the west. They had even less influence from the Anasazi than the Rim peoples and their area was densely populated with its own unique culture… and then the Anasazi Salado arrived.

Again from Childs: Salado was the new world order as the old guard cultures of Hohokam, Mimbres, Mogollon, and Anasazi were swept up into a cohesive assembly. End quote.

By now, the pottery of these Salado Anasazi people had continued to evolve as if changing and becoming more elaborate with each new migration. And this new pottery, just like the last new pottery, was heavily sought after everywhere they travelled and even to places where they didn’t travel to. The pottery everyone loved is called cleverly, Salado Polychrome and you should look up pictures of them on the line. They are beautiful and by this point it looks like the people have mixed the old black on white and their patterns, with the red Kayenta ware, and the Jeddito Yellow. But by the mid 1300s The Salado Polychrome were everywhere and everyone was using them. From northern Mexico to northern Arizona, and all the way to El Paso in Texas. The people couldn’t get enough of Salado Polychrome.

But like everywhere else in this story so far, the newcomers did what they always do and in southeast Arizona, they set up camp and built their huge impressive buildings and northern style kivas with influences of Chaco, and a little southern Utah. A buried body at the site of Goat Hill near a small town called Safford, Arizona, a site that was built on top of a large butte that overlooks the existing one story pueblos like a castle, but that buried body discovered in the castle had come from three hundred miles away. You guessed it… three hundred miles to the north. And much like at Betatakin in Navajo National Monument and quite a few other sites, the newcomers to the area of southeast Arizona came in orderly waves with people coming and building not only for themselves but for people they knew would be there soon. It was yet another planned community, or so it seems. Once all the migrants from up north had completed their construction, which did contain a massive D shaped kiva of course, but once the Salado Anasazi migrants had moved into their planned pueblos, they also fully occupied every available living site for miles around. They filled every canyon cranny and hilltop nook with their Anasazi Spiral Salado Migrant slowly evolving way of life. Even one hundred miles to the west, in Tucson, excavations turned up heavy influences from the north.

Today, if you go to Saguaro National Park, and you head to the western Tucson Mountain district, there’s a hike, a beautiful hike with rough and rugged mountains all around, and more beautiful tall Saguaros than you can shake a stick at. But on this hike called the Signal Hill Trail, you can hike to a group of blackened and grey rocks framed with the beautiful mountains behind them as you turn around and look south. On a sharp pyramid of a rock sits a beautiful and elaborate and unmistakably Anasazi spiral. Unmistakable to me at least, I guarantee smarter people would disagree. A picture I took of it in 2020 will be up at the site for this episode. Did the Anasazi etch it into the rock before descending into the Hohokam territory before it all came crashing down? We will probably never know that answer.

Childs, in House of Rain says two hundred years after these hilltop forts and pueblos were built and subsequently abandoned in southeast Arizona, the Spanish would come across these fortified and walled ruins and suggest they were built by quote, civilized and warlike foreigners who had come from far away. End quote. Far away indeed. Far away up north. Except everywhere these Salado Anasazi went, they had to have picked up converts, new family members and friends… slaves, right? They certainly picked up new ideas and incorporated them into their own migrating and ever changing pantheon of beliefs on their way down south.

In the Anasazi Neighbors episode I talked about the evolution of the Hohokam and how they went from ball courts and platform mounds to no more ball courts and walled mounds and having entire parts of their cities becoming walled off. Not only did walls start to flood into the area, but the all popular Anasazi Salado Polychrome flooded the Hohokam scene as if one of their many amazing Hohokam dams had burst, spewing that northeastern style all over and down the Phoenix Basin.

But even beyond pottery, the northerners may have inundated the Hohokam area with new beliefs. And with those new beliefs, came ritual practitioners who could oversee this… new northern belief.

From Childs: The Tohono O’odham, who now live in southern Arizona, call the people who ruled these Hohokam platform mounds siwañ (with an Ñ at the end), a word that is phonetically out of place in the O’odham’s Pima language. When spoken out loud, siwañ is nearly identical to shiwanni a word from the Colorado plateau and a Zuni term for their rain priests. Siwañ and shiwanni are similar enough in two completely different languages that they suggest a connection, a word left in the southern lands by northern travelers. The name of rain priests from the north was planted like a flag in the mighty Hohokam platform mounds of southern Arizona. End quote.

It’s now believed or at least for some researchers, but it’s believed that the Tohono O’odham may have descended from the Hohokam. They may have been the ones that stayed behind while the rest of the Hohokam may have followed the Anasazi south. Much like the Hopi’s ancestors stayed. So for the Hohokam, along with words, religion, and pottery, when the Anasazi arrived, they also brought castles, walls, and ruins that later excavations reveal are filled with slaughtered human remains.

By the 1400s the area of southern Arizona, you’ll find this shocking, I guarantee it, but the whole place was…. Abandoned. Shortly after the Salado spiral Anasazi migrants seemingly invaded the entire area, stretching resources thin, building monuments, and conquering cultures, The Salado Anasazi and the original Hohokam & Mogollon inhabitants disappeared. It appears the entire region of the American archaeological southwest was destabilized. From Childs: Communities began falling apart. A century of woodcutting, hunting, and intensive farming had decimated the land during a time of unprecedented growth. Pueblos began competing for resources. This competition shattered critical trade networks, severing the cultural fabric that held these regions together. The sharing of resources, ideas, and artifacts in the area ceased. People began to scatter once again, heading for distant sanctuaries. Birthrates declined. People died younger as malnutrition coursed through their remaining settlements. End quote.

Many of the sites I’ve recently talked about, Point of Pines, Grasshopper, & Homolovi, they were all completely abandoned. Even the stragglers eventually left. Just like had happened in the north. After the large pueblos dwindled, smaller one story homes were built like the older, pre-migrant days, but before long, even they were left desolate and empty in the region of the Mogollon Rim and Southern Arizona. Even up into the Colorado Plateau. Remember when I said 46 of the 37 Ancestral Hopi Pueblos were eventually abandoned? Places that held families and communities… seen birth, and life, and death. Places that had given rise to new beliefs and strengthened old ones. Places that had been homes for almost a thousand years were almost all left to ultimately be fascinating features on the landscape for later migrants, migrants from even further away, but for later far off migrants to find. And all of it, all of this abandonment occurred after those Spiral Salado Anasazis had arrived, taken over, planted corn, flourished, and then… left. Often times they left with fire and death in their wake. Wether it was their own deaths or the deaths of those who opposed them, it’s unclear. But fire and death signaled the Anasazi’s departure. Even those later built walls by those who stayed behind couldn’t help the people who’d spent quite a bit of time and generations settled into their homes and pueblos of southern Arizona that weren’t historically Anasazi. Now, I will say, for the people of the Americas, it does seem settling into anywhere is certain death or certainly has a degenerating effect… but the Anasazi absolutely & seemingly prioritized the downfall of their neighbors after their own tragic and violent civil war. And the great drought wasn’t helping anything either.

At this point… The Anasazi spiral… well… it might as well represent a black hole.

I’ve only ever been to Mexico three times…

I really wish Mexico was just… easer to visit. I wish I could go there freely and feel safer and even more importantly, I wish my wife could visit with me and feel safe. If that were the case, we’d be down there exploring the sites I talked about in the intro and am about to talk about now… but we’d be there way more often! Which means, these sites in Mexico, like Paquime, but even the sites beyond and further south of Paquime that I will talk about are completely foreign to me. I’ve never been there, I’ve never seen them, I’ve never been near them. So I am trusting the eyes and minds of the many authors and archaeologists and historians that I’ve been mentioning quite often this entire episode and the many before it. I’m about to quote and reference and summarize a lot of Craig Childs in his book House of Rain but also David Roberts in his Lost World of the Old Ones, as well as the great and powerful Steve Lekson in his many works. But also, a whole lot more smarter and better traveled men than I. Curiously, one… not source, but one person I read a little from but know personally, or, used to know as a teacher was Professor and Archaeologist and published researcher Paul Minnis, but Minnis doesn’t quite agree with the direction I’m about to take and the direction the authors I just mentioned took and especially the direction Lekson took. Lekson says of archaeologists like Minnis that they created entire careers out of diminishing the importance and grandness of the Paquime site in northern Mexico while also disputing what the original gringo archaeologist who excavated it in the late 50s, a man named Charles Di Peso, said about it all. As Lekson puts it about researchers and archaeologists, quote, whole careers have been made out of pulling Di Peso apart. I call it devaluing Di Peso. End quote. Lekson loves puns, and I love him for that.

At the University of Oklahoma, Paul Minnis was one of my professors and I took two courses from him and he was great and I enjoyed the courses but that was so long ago and I don’t remember much at all from college, truthfully. But I do remember that Paul Minnis was adept at studying Coprolites, as in fossilized feces. And in college, I thought that was rad. I still do! Anyways, Minnis, through his published works, has actively diminished the size, impact, and importance of the place I introduced earlier and the place I’m about to talk extensively about, Paquime, and I would say without reading or seeing this specific point of view, but I would guess that Minnis probably disagrees with Lekson on Paquime. But I personally disagree with Minnis… despite me never having been there and Minnis actually having worked there… but… that’s okay! That’s what science is all about. And in the end, I could have it wrong anyways. After all, I’m just guessin!

From here on out though, I’m trusting those more traveled and researched and intellectual authors and scientists and researchers I just mentioned… well I’m trusting them to guide me through to the end of the Anasazi story.

In the Chihuahuan desert of northern Mexico there is a place that exists with roads, very Chacoan roads. Very Chacoan roads that radiate out from the center of the site into the many hundreds of surrounding villages. Not only straight old roads but mounds that once held signal fires. Not only mounds with cracked stones, broken from intense heat, that housed signal fires but also a tower. A very Anasazi looking tower. This is all near the prehistoric site that I mentioned before called Paquime near Casas Grandes, Mexico. Paquime is a place larger and more condensed than anything in the American Southwest and a place that was probably the most remarkable society in all of the Southwestern region. Paquime had 2,000 central rooms, Lekson thinks it held 4,700 people and it probably had two rulers… it stood at five stories tall, it had ball courts, small pyramids, a snake effigy mound, a bird effigy mound, canals to bring water and canals to take water away, and in the center of it, the residents had built a staircase that led forty feet down into a well. They had that precious precious water.

Paquime was established in the early centuries after Christ but really took off by 1300, at the same time that the northerners began their spiral journey that would eventually lead them to this spot at Paquime. Paquime may have only held 4,700 residents but much like Chaco, the surrounding area was filled with tens of thousands of people. The site would have been a cultural beacon for peoples in a thirty thousand square mile radius from Texas to Arizona to northern Mexico. At Paquime proper, there are rooms a thousand square feet… while others are only 30 square feet. The largest building at the site covered a full acre. The place is enormous and sprawling. The people that lived there ate corns, beans, and squash, but also hunted our friend the bison. Ceramic vessels have been dug up in detailed shape of naked men and women. There are ceramic vessels of men smoking Precolumbian cigarettes. And they’re all decorated with those famous southwestern geometric designs, except at Paquime, they’re even more exotic. It was a place of immense skill and beauty. At Paquime, they were forging copper, making shell jewelry, and erecting structures littered, or decorated, is a better word, but the place is decorated with those T shaped Anasazi Pueblo doorways. They are truly everywhere. And they were doing all of this with a clearly evident very strict hierarchy. But some apparent differences exist between this place and the old Chacoan settlements.

Clear evidence of human sacrifice exists, not just hints like at Chaco. A giant effigy mound in the shape of a horned serpent lays near the city. A ton of macaw pens lay in a room dubbed by Charles di Peso, House of the Macaws. While macaws and macaw pens did exist up north in Chaco and other great houses like Wupatki, these were different. They took care of those birds at Paquime. The people gave them sunlight and created humidity and made sure their bones didn’t become soft and worthless like the ones found in the four corners.

Excavations from Paquime’s lower floors, underneath the spiral migrant’s grand city, show pottery from four hundred miles away in northeast Arizona. The pottery and ceramics had arrived there as early as the 1100s. Similarly, pottery from the western coast of Mexico, near the possible home of Aztalan, where the Aztecs had probably migrated from before ending up in Tenochtitlan, what we call Mexico City, but ceramics from the Mexican coast have been found in Paquime alongside the four corners pieces. Childs says of Paquime, quote, from the beginning, this place was a cultural repository for a much more extensive region, connected to far provinces like the Colorado Plateau well before Lekson's Chaco Meridian came into play. The common archaeological view of Paquimé as existing on the periphery is false. This ancient city, or the communities surrounding it, may have been where many migrants from the north were heading. It is probably no coincidence that Paquimé rose to power while Chaco was disbanding, and reached its apex in the time that nearly all of the Southwest was in motion. Lekson may be right: all roads that once led to Chaco now lead straight to Paquimé. End quote.

Lekson believes that when the Anasazi left Chaco they went to Aztec and then spread out throughout the Four Corners Colorado Plateau area from there. But when they were done with Aztec, they headed four hundred miles due south on a straight line to Paquime where they ran into some locals they spun into their spiral and made the city what it is. Childs, talking about Lekson’s theory of Anasazi in Mexico says, quote, newly arrived migrants from the Colorado Plateau whipped everyone into shape, shouting orders this way and that, and pretty soon had a new ceremonial city built for themselves at the foot of the Sierra madre. Here they indulged in heavily ritualized habits of human sacrifice as they had at Chaco, wearing necklaces made of human bones and dressing in feathers of turkeys and exotic jungle birds as they presided over colorful rituals. End quote.

Lekson’s not the first to suggest migrants from the north came to Paquime though. In 1890, the Norwegian archaeologist Carl Sofus Lumholtz posited the same theory while he lived in Mexico among the Tarahumara, a group we’ll come back to shortly… and for a good reason. But he lived in the area of northern Mexico for quite some time, gave a series of lectures on quote, The Characteristics of Cave Dwellers of the Sierra Madre, end quote, and described plenty of archaeological sites. The man knew his Indigenous northern Mexicans and he could see a connection between them and the Pueblos of the Colorado Plateau Four Corners area.

Nearby to Paquime, on a small mountain named Cerro Moctezuma, is another set of ruins known as El Pueblito, little Pueblo, and it’s built almost completely in the fashion of the spiral Anasazi migrants, obviously with a lot of Mesoamerican thrown in. Some of the walls of the dilapidated ruins of El Pueblito are 11 feet tall. Up on the little mountain there was also an effigy snake wall, just like at Paquime, and it pointed north. A massive tower also stood at the site that would have been bigger than anything ever built in the southwest but it seemed to peer all the way over to the Colorado Plateau itself… where a fire or mirror signal would have reached Aztec in 15 minutes… Lekson, in Roberts Lost World even quips about how the site, El Pueblito looks identical to Aztec North at Aztec National Monument.

But truthfully, Paquime is pretty well Mesoamerican. As I mentioned, it’s got ball courts, horned serpent mounds, a plethora of human sacrifice, and clear rigid hierarchy. Not to mention the religion. The architecture of Paquime hints at Mesoamerican rain, thunder, and feathered serpent priests who would emerge out of hiding places to wow the crowd and communicate with the deities which is exactly how those Maya and other Mesoamerican cultures did things. Besides the ball courts, and priests, and human sacrifice, some of the differences are in iconography and ceramics. Some of the differences are simply in the color they painted important symbols onto the ceramics. Others are in designs. But the two, the northern Anasazi and the southern Paquime were sometimes in complete opposite of each other. Or… Yin and Yang? Question mark? Were they two pieces of the same puzzle as Childs puts it?

It seems that when the two cultures, the Paquime residents and the Spiral Anasazi migrants are in close proximity to each other, the two different cultures did not mix. And where sites exist that had both of them living together, they were segregated. On opposite sides of town. Like where ballcourts existed, the northern pottery did NOT. Just like had happened near the Mogollon Rim and in Southern Arizona that I talked about earlier. But that separation even existed on Mesa Verde. A separate but equal segregation of the two cousin cultures.

Childs speaks to archaeologist Christine Vanpool who says this about the two cultures, quote, It may be like some Christians making a cross one way and others making it another way: you're very similar, you have basic tenets, but you keep separate. Like Eastern Orthodox versus Roman Catholic. I believe the Americas share many central religious tenets. The horned-serpent images that are pan-American all have to do with sky and underworld, water and earth. They're prevalent in every single group, and in many groups they are paramount. We see it with the Aztecs and Olmecs. We see it in the eastern woodlands of North America, where there are feathered-rattlesnake images. We see it at Paquimé. There are horned, feathered serpents at Chaco in petroglyphs. These are icons tied to traditions that had to do with the propagation of rain and water, traditions that lie at the root of these cultures. End quote.

She’s not wrong. I studied the Maya extensively in college and even a little afterwards when I thought maybe I wanted to go back into the field for a doctorate. I suppose I am still studying them when I study the Southwest… in a way… if the southern migrant theory is correct, which, I mean, there are ball courts as far north as Wupatki for goodness sakes. But in the summer of 2008, to fulfill my archaeological fieldwork component of my archaeology degree, I spent weeks in the Belizian jungle on the border of Mexico on a dig where we uncovered signs of elite living in big stone houses that sat in the middle of Mennonite cow pastures. The local but not indigenous people were Mennonites who’d left the states in the mid 20th century to look for a place more untouched by the then ever growing and rapidly expanding modern world. They would find it, however briefly, in this remote corner of Belize where they used stones from these Maya ruins as door stops and bookends in their German style homes.

I do have to say quickly about my time in Belize… the dig was fantastic. I found potsherds with monkeys and amazing Maya designs. We found tiled floors we carefully cleaned. And we even found a large circular rock that guarded the entry for this important and wealthy family’s personal xibalba, or Maya for underworld. In this small man made cave were two skeletal remains, most likely the original couple who began the small dynasty and we all took turns excavating them. I got to sweat profusely in the small cramped cave in the summer jungle humidity as we delicately uncovered the bones and the jewelry they were buried in which sat around their limbs and in between their ribs. Okay, yeah, I did break the leg bone of the guy when descending the small wood beam with hand and foot holds chipped into it but our Maya friend who was there to help said it was okay, cause he broke bones all the time! Two days later I got malaria and almost died. I have no idea if the two experiences were related. The Mennonites saved my life because thankfully, a faction of them had liberalized in the 70s after growing a bunch of weed and shipping it to Mexico where it went off to the US. So they had modern medicine which saved my bacon. It was also strange to see amish dressed white boys riding in horse buggies with iPods in their pockets with the big white cords leading up to their ears… Other times they’d be doing wheelies on their dirt bikes in front of our place to impress the college girls. The Americas are just one big land of migration…

So! I’ve seen the rain gods and the feathered serpents of Tlaloc and Quetzalcoatl. I’ve held in my hands potsherds I plucked from the dark Yucatán soil that showed monkeys holding up the ceiling of the vessel surrounded by the geometric shapes that also appear in the Southwest. The two cultures do seem somewhat inseparable. Yet distinct. Childs agrees… or I guess I agree with Childs when he says quote, mixed in with unique Mexican images on Paquimé pottery are the same designs I saw etched into a floor stone at Mesa Verde in Colorado, the same geometric icons painted on cliffs around Hovenweep in Utah, and inscribed into the caprock of Antelope Mesa in northern Arizona. The Southwest, including northern Mexico, appears to have once contained a single cultural identity marked with regional variations that were in turn connected to Mesoamerica along the chain of the Sierra Madre. There was a continuous line of people whose most powerful gods dwelled in springs, clouds, and water-filled mountains. End quote.

Childs goes on to suggest this cultural identity that bound the Americans is water and I tend to agree with him. I mean… these people travelled extensively all over the continents and they would have noticed the end of the ice age and the drying up of the many enormous lakes and the glaciers and rivers becoming smaller over the thousands of years since the end of the ice age. But the exact cultural glue that bound the Americans together from central and north and even south America isn’t as important as the fact that it exists, or existed.

Like the rest of the settlements graced by the Anasazi, around 1450, Paquime is destroyed and abandoned… and unburied bodies are left thrown about the landscape within and around the once powerful Pueblo. Each and every home and room within the homes within the Pueblo of Paquime were destroyed or burned. Here is another long quote from Craig Childs:

The fall of Paquimé occurred just as major settlements were abandoned across most of the Southwest and the intricate cultural systems of Salado and Hohokam fell apart. This did not happen all at once. Migrants traveling south in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries had brought a boom to the lower Southwest. Too many people moved too quickly into what was once a landscape of dispersed settlements, turning them into urban centers as people massed around pueblos and large villages wherever there was water. Then came a century of complex demographic upheaval between 1350 and 1450. Resources diminished, and the health of the people deteriorated. Populations declined and retreated to a few core areas, and soon many of those areas were empty. At least forty thousand people living in parts of southern New Mexico and southern Arizona simply vanished from the archaeological record. Paquimé, a bastion of growth and art at its height, died in the face of this dramatically unsettled environment. It was the last great collapse in the prehistoric Southwest. After many centuries of occupation, the city was soon buried by wind and dust. Only a small portion of its fifteenth-century climax was now exposed, beige geometric walls crossing in and out of one another in warm spring sunlight. I looked across the ruins toward the Sierra Made in the distance, thinking, When the cities burn, you go to the mountains. You climb back into the earth, into places dark with water. End quote.

So let’s follow Childs and the Anasazi Salado Spiral migrants from the north, let’s follow them south into the mountains of northwestern Mexico where this story will end… like the center of that ubiquitous southwestern symbol.

At this point in Childs book House of Rain, he tells an incredible story filled with Spanish dialogue from a smoky bar in the mountains of northern Mexico, the mountains of the Sierra madre, where he learns of incredible ruins deeper in the canyons and mountains that few see and fewer discuss. I implore everyone to read the fantastic book instead of listening to me talk about it and read longer and longer quotes from it. After that, he and his then wife and two archaeology students travel even deeper into the mountains and meet with a rancher who in hermit Spanish, barely understood by the four Americans, agrees to show them the ruins that the Mexican rancher has no time for. He calls the place with the ruins and the bones, human bones, un malo lugar, quote, esta lleno de fantasmas, end quote. A bad place… filled with ghosts.

This place they travel to, in these Mexican mountains, a stone’s throw from the isolated Arizona mountains, is at the end of a nine hundred mile long range that starts just north of Mexico City. It goes from jungle to desert and at this northern end, the canyons and cliffs are littered with ruins. More ruins than one can shake a stick at. There’s coils of finely woven cotton ropes… which… may suggest that the Anasazi up north had them as well, if these people are Anasazi, that is. Maybe none of them have really survived… In these ruins there are wooden roof beams sawed down to flat surfaces before use. There is an excess beyond anything up north. And then there’s corn. Tons of cobs everywhere. And more than that… T shaped doors of every persuasion, size, and shape that can be imagined decorate more doorways than ever before in a Pueblo anywhere up north. And these pueblos here in the northern Mexican mountains reach three stories. A lot of it is seemingly unique unless you follow the lines of evolution and that spiral migration… not to mention the timeline. The whole area appears to Childs as an echo of the north. A distant on the other bank of the pond ripple but one caused by that initial drop of stone into the water that was the Anasazi Migration. Ripple or spiral, whichever it is, this place in the northern Mexican mountains mirrors the Anasazi Salado Migrants. Especially it’s pottery. There are slight variations and evolutions but the pottery checks out… And the dates match at around the 1400s. It’s almost too clean and concise to ignore.

And then there are the circular rooms complete with the structures and features necessary for them to possibly be… kivas. If kivas exist in this place, then I feel like there is no argument to be made about who built these ruins in the northern mountains of Mexico that border the American southwest... but with so little evidence and only a few sources to rely on, I have no idea. Like I said in the last episode though, I am not a scientist or a professor or a keeper of great secret knowledge, I am only a repeater and interpreter of it so I have no skin in the game except to make these stories more accessible and enjoyable to you, the listener. But to really get a feel for the story and history and facts, read the sources I list. Read the words of those who have travelled so much more extensively than I. Read the travels of those much harder and heartier and stronger than myself. Reading Childs and Roberts and about their adventures makes me realize how soft I really am. To some who I tell my stories to, they comment on how crazy or stupid or “fun but I could never do that”, the stories are yet there are much better adventurers out there than me. And thank goodness for that.

The Anasazi Spiral migrants it turns out, only briefly ended up in northern Mexico, in those mountains of the Sierra Madre, because they didn’t stop there. They continued to spread southward, ever onward. Ever forward… into the spiral… or at least down that line of Aztec, Chaco, and Paquime. Well… not all of them. Much like with the Hopi in Arizona who stayed behind as the Anasazi migrated southward… a group of people who still call the Sierra Madres home today stayed behind in those deep mountain canyons and on those steep mountain slopes. Some sources I read called these people descendants of the Mogollon. Some said Mimbres. Another said they’re Paquime descendants. But a few sources I read just outright claimed these people are descendants of the Anasazi. Even using the word Anasazi. There was no mincing words for some researchers and writers. Both Childs and Roberts suggests it as well. When first reading about these people who stayed behind I recognized their name from college. In Norman, Oklahoma there was, and still is, a Mexican restaurant named after this group of people which got me curious enough to do minimal research way back then. And what I discovered was that this group of people were known for running down deer with knives… they didn’t need ranged weapons because they’d chase their prey on foot until it gave up or died and dinner was served… If it weren’t for the delicious restaurant in south central Oklahoma, I may not have ever heard of these awesome and awe inspiring people until now. I’m talking about the Indigenous Mexican or Native American tribe of the Tarahumara. Or as the Spanish called them, the Taramara.

They call themselves though, and which the Spaniards could not pronounce, but they call themselves the Raramuri, and the reason why the Spaniards couldn’t pronounce their name is because they couldn’t ask them properly! Every time the explorers or conquistadors or missionaries would approach them, the Taramara would run away up into the hills! Their name, Raramuri, roughly translates to “people of light feet” “or lightning footed people” which that name alone seems to suggest their Anasazi origins. That ancient theme of migration and the six toes and the constant movement across the land and the spiral! It’s all represented with the Raramuri by what they call themselves! And they can really back up that name too. The Raramuri are famous for running over 200 miles in one stretch and they’ve been called the best runners in the world. Not only the best, but the most beautiful runners as well. In a piece titled Secrets of the Taramara by Christopher McDougall, a piece that is absolutely fun and fantastic, well the author describes an intense and grueling difficult 100 mile ultramarathon called the Leadville Trail that takes place very high up in the Colorado Rockies. This particular race he writes about in 2018 took place in 1993. Here’s the quote:

Once the starting gun sounded, around 4 a.m., a sea of taller heads quickly swallowed the Tarahumara runners, who faded into the middle of the pack behind the world’s most scientifically trained ultrarunners. As the sun rose, though, and the course began climbing toward the 12,640-foot peak at Hope Pass, the Tarahumara began easing forward, running so beautifully that one Leadville veteran was left mesmerized. “They seemed to move with the ground,” Henry Dupre would later tell The New York Times. “Kind of like a cloud or a fog moving across the mountains.” End quote.

For that particular race, the winner was 55-year-old Victoriano Churro, who back at home in the Copper Canyon region of the Sierra Madres was a farmer. He was also the oldest of the three chain smoking, I kid you not, oldest of the three chain smoking, homemade discarded rubber tire sandal wearing Raramuri runners in that ultra tough ultramarathon. In second place was another Raramuri and in fifth place was the final man from the Sierra Madres. The following year another Tarahumara man would win the Leadville Trail race with an even shorter time. That article is awesome and was very fun to read because it really dives into the details of how amazing the Raramuri are at running. It also goes heavily into something the Raramuri call the Rarajipari… which is a game that the Raramuri play from childhood until well into their 80s or longer.

Today there are only about 40,000 Taramara left and they’re some of the most remote people on the planet and with every new encroachment of people or civilization or violence, they retreat deeper into the mountains. Although like with everyone, the 21st Century is threatening their traditional ways of extremely good health, and extremely low rates of domestic violence, child abuse, and even crime… and that’s despite their economy predominantly being one based on trading things for beer! One writer quipped that for every two days they spend on their feet running, they spend one on the ground drunk. And of course their Anasazi ancestors would be proud because the beer they love to drink is made of fermented corn.

The Raramuri weren’t always in the rocky canyons and steep slopes of the Sierra Madre but after the Anasazi went further south on their Chaco Meridian, they stayed at the foot of the mountains farming in small Rancheria pueblito communities… at least until the Spanish arrived, at which point they ran into the protective canyons and cliff faces… a move their Anasazi ancestors of the Colorado Plateau knew all too well. Unfortunately the cartels and Mexican Soldiers and government and lumber companies and even worse, roads, grocery stores, chocolate, and coca-cola… it’s all further encroaching on their land and way of life but I hope and pray they don’t lose it forever. The article I quoted from is from a larger book by the author called Born To Run… which I will be reading now, but Born to run? We’re all born to run since we’re all human. It’s one of the things that makes us human. It’s just that the Raramuri focus their culture on it… practically their entire way of life is focused on running and they never lose their ability to chase a ball and each other up and over and down the very rugged and remote and steep mountains and canyons of their homeland.

Just like the other groups of Anasazi descendants who decided to stay put as the larger group migrated south, in search of their center place, the Raramuri of today are much different than the Anasazi would have been around 600 years ago. The Raramuri are known for being largely nonviolent, and for having no real tribal leader, which… is not quite the case for the Anasazi. Now, of course, most of, if not an overwhelming majority of the Anasazi people were probably a peaceful and nonviolent group as well, like every society. But we know from the last episode, and we will hear about in the next episode when I talk about the Ancestral Puebloans and their rejection of hierarchy and violence… to a degree… but as we know, the Anasazi practiced warfare, slavery, sacrifice, and cannibalism… and they would continue to do so as they headed south. So let’s pick up their trail… and I promise, it’s coming to an end.

A few hundred miles south of the ruins in the mountains that Childs explored, near the Taramara homeland.. but a hundred miles south of that, identical ruins in cliffs and canyons exist. So this story has now reached beyond science or archaeology and like a spiral itself, it has entered a smaller and smaller event until that event disappears into the ether like the center of an etched or painted spiral disappears into the rock in the Southwest. And at this metaphorical spiral center lies the historical end of the Mesoamericans. 50 years after Paquime is burned in the 1450s and the further south pueblos appear, something happens in the Americas… it’s discovered by the old world… again. Here’s a great and final quote from Childs about what the Spanish saw at the end of this spiral.

On their journeys Spanish scribes and generals reported endless indigenous settlements in northern Mexico, adobe pueblos and houses terraced all across the landscape. They wrote of encountering native communities with well-planned streets running between buildings, an attention to detail that impressed even these foreigners who had already waged war in the great southern city-states of the Aztecs and the Maya. The Spanish conquistadors found elaborate markets in northwest Mexico- slaves being bought and sold, exotic goods arriving from extensive trade networks. In the late sixteenth century, the Spanish explorer Baltazar de Obregón mentioned traveling from "town to town and from province to province," telling of large cultural centers surrounded by satellite villages laid out with surprising and strategic regularity across the country. One expedition moved for eight months through this region and every two or three days came upon yet another central town that had never before witnessed a European face. This land appeared to be widely populated with a highly ordered civilization. Early journals of Spanish travelers in northern Mexico relate their discovery of indigenous priesthoods and ceremonies of a celestial religion. There were native leaders with great wealth and power, their arms and chests draped with turquoise, their palanquins hoisted on the bare shoulders of young men. Of course, conflict started quickly between natives and the Spanish. Upon key hills and peaks fire signals were said to have erupted, sending word of war for hundreds of miles in all directions. In the battles that ensued, the Spanish were met with standing armies. Thousands of fighters--perhaps as many as ten thousand in one reported confrontation --gathered against them to the pounding of drums, the ringing calls of shell trumpets. The musket ball was fired in return, singing swiftly through the air, naming the end of an era. End quote.

David Roberts in Lost World of the Old Ones expands upon what I’ve been suggesting when he says, quote, The wildest surmise in Lekson's book is tucked away in a five-page appendix. There, the author slyly notes that when the first conquistadors pushed north from central Mexico into present-day Sinaloa in the 1530s, they found a massive, flourishing Indian civilization at a site they called Culiacán. Guess what? Culiacán is awfully close to 107°57' W. With the demise of Paquimé around A.D. 1450, could the same visionary migrants have carried their civilization another four hundred miles straight south, across the towering ridges of the Sierra Madre and the plunging chasms of Copper Canyon, to found the last of four great centers on the Meridian? End quote.

In the state of Sinaloa, the same state as the Las Labradas site with the spiral etched black lava rocks that pour into the Pacific Ocean extremely close to the end of that Chaco Meridian line… in the state of Sinaloa after the year 1500, there were two groups the Spanish ran into that put up quite the fight. The two groups are very similar in their language, an Uto-Aztecan Language… like the Anasazi, but the two groups are almost identical in language, lifestyles, and culture despite them being sworn enemies… almost like the truce between the segregated Salado factions that broke on the Mogollon Rim… or with the Anasazi Civil War in the Four Corners. Or with the segregated groups at Paquime… These almost identical but sworn enemy groups are named the Acaxees and Xiximes.

When the Spanish arrived, they ran right smack into the fearsome and fierce people of the Acaxees. The Acaxees way of life should sound somewhat familiar to you, dear listener, by now. They were a people who lived in the mountains and canyons of the Sierra Madres, a people who cultivated corn, beans, squash, & cotton, a people who lived in fixed settlements scattered over several miles that the Spanish called rancherias, they played the Mesoamerican ball game, had ritual warfare, and they practiced Cannibalism. And their cannibalism rumors that the Spanish told the crown weren’t just made up scary stories. Modern researchers have discovered both pot polishing and de-fleshing marks on human bones from the Acaxee region and we know from the last episode what those clues on the human record mean… man corn.

Meanwhile, the Acaxees’ near identical but sworn enemy, the Xiximes were remarked upon by the Spanish as being seemingly quote unquote civilized with their stone buildings and their farming techniques. Both groups have been recorded as being the only quote unquote warlike group of indigenous peoples in this part of Mexico… maybe because they’re not from that part of Mexico, or at least, they hadn’t been there in a very long time. The Xiximes too, practiced the art of man corn. One other tribe in the area did as well! The Tepehuan, and the Tepehuan are another near identical group to the other two… but they were deeper into the mountains than their neighboring cousins, the Xiximes and Acaxees. But they also farmed, spoke a similar language, warred, and had cannibalism.

In 1529, Nuño Beltrán de Guzmán, an infamously hated man, it turns out, but Guzman set out westward from Mexico City with three to four hundred conquistadors and up to 8,000 native allies partially in search of those seven cities of cibola and partially to bring to heel the many tribes and groups and civilizations that hadn’t yet fallen under Spanish control. Unfortunately, his campaign was harsh and has been described as genocidal but it ended with him establishing the city of Culiacan. A city where many more missionaries, fortune hunters, and soldiers would leave from, including Esteban! The first black man in the New world, if you’ll remember my episode over black explorers in the Southwest. He’d leave Culiacan shortly after its founding and go up north looking for those seven cities of cibola as well… only to be killed by the Zuni for demanding more women.

But before the establishment of Culiacan, Guzman and the other Spanish warriors and their allies would find what Acaxee and Xiximes soldiers had survived the epidemics and defeat them and place them under control of the Spanish. Very few peoples in the Americas escaped the control of their European Colonizers. The Tarahumara actually being an exception.

And that’s really all of the information I have on these three so very very Anasazi sounding groups. That’s it. That’s all I have for you… Are the warlike, Uto Aztecan, stone masonry building, corn, beans, and squash planting, mesoamerican ball game playing, and they were the only ones in the entire region playing the ball game, mind you, but were the warlike, Uto-Aztecan speaking, stone using, corn planting, man corn indulging Acaxee, Xiximes, and Tepehuan tribes the much changed and far off journeying end of the spiral Anasazi migrants? In that email response from the awesome Steve Lekson he said to me, quote, If there’s a southern end of the meridian, it’s probably Culiacan. Not sure how much I got into that in study of southwestern archaeology, but there’s some pretty interesting early Spanish accounts that suggest if you headed straight north from Culiacan, you’ll find cities - Casas Grandes, Chaco. Not functioning cities, but still… end quote.

Like Waldo said about them archaeologists, I have no idea, I’m just guessin’.

Next time I’ll be covering the Ancestral Puebloans from the Hopi Mesas to the Rio Grande Pueblos of Santa Fe and beyond after the Anasazi Civil War and the Great Migration left them behind. I’ll also talk about the evolution of their kachina culture. And in two episodes I will FINALLY be covering the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 that would not only change the course of the American Southwest but of the Great Plains and many eastern tribes as well. But before we go, and speaking of the Pueblo Revolt, something similar happened with the possible remainder of the Anasazi nearly 80 before the events of the American Southwest that you might find interesting.

In 1602, the captured and disease decimated and downtrodden Acaxee Indians of the Sierra Madre that may or may not be the final iteration of the Anasazi, well the Acaxee led what would later be known as the Acaxee Rebellion. In 1601 an Acaxee leader named Perico would use Indian and Christian religious practices to promise his followers that the Spanish would be exterminated if they followed him into the ultimately doomed rebellion. In the first week of the attacks, 50 Spaniards were killed, Spanish mining camps and 40 Spanish churches were burned, and Spanish silver mining was blocked in the area for 2 years as the Acaxee took up strong positions in the mountains. Of course in the end, they were defeated, Perico was publicly executed along with 48 other leaders, and many of the people were sold into slavery. The Jesuits then appointed their own leaders, attempted to educate their people, and stole their children.

In 1610 the Xiximes, after asking for help in their upcoming rebellion but being denied by their Acaxee sworn enemies, began raiding and killing Acaxee people. The Acaxee, having nowhere else to turn, asked for help from the Spanish who came and squashed the rebellion.

In 1616 the two did team up, this time in the Tepehuan Revolt, that third group of possible Anasazi descendants. The Tepehuan Revolt was called by one Spaniard at the time, quote, one of the greatest outbreaks of disorder, upheaval, and destruction that had been seen in New Spain...since the Conquest. End quote. It proved a lot harder to suppress but ultimately after four years and a lot of loss of life for both sides it was ended.

There may be less than 30,000 Tepehuan, Xiximes, and Acaxee Indians left in Mexico today. So besides the Tarahumara and Hopi and Ancestral Puebloans and Tohono O’odam along with no doubt quite a few more… that’s probably your answer for where the Anasazi are today.

In Search of the Old Ones: Exploring the Anasazi World of the Southwest by David Roberts

The Lost World of the Old Ones: Discoveries in the Ancient Southwest by David Roberts

Ancient Peoples of the American Southwest by Stephen Plog

A Study of Southwestern Archaeology by Stephen Lekson

House of Rain: Tracing a Vanished Civilization Across the American Southwest by Craig Childs

Secrets of the Tarahumara by Christopher McDougall

https://indigenousmexico.org/sinaloa/the-original-indigenous-people-of-sinaloa/

https://www.centerforconsciouseldering.com/2015/05/04/art-pilgrimage-meeting-ancient-wisdom-copper-canyon/

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/spiral-mass-grave-mesoamerican-mexico-city.amp

https://lugares.inah.gob.mx/en/museos-inah/museo/opinion/13653-rasgos-distintivos-de-plazuelas-13653.html?lugar_id=1723

http://westerndigs.org/new-evidence-reveals-violent-final-days-at-arizonas-montezuma-castle/

https://www.crowcanyon.org/educationproducts/peoples_mesa_verde/post_pueblo_navajo_name.asp

https://www.desertusa.com/desert-people/paquime.html

http://westerndigs.org/earliest-use-of-chocolate-in-america-discovered-suggesting-ancient-immigrants/