The Abandoned Lands...A Journey Through the Colorado Plateau: The fusion of geology and architecture, part 2

For today's post on the Abandoned Lands I am jumping into my personal "Wayback Machine" to revisit a hike I did in 2003 on Cedar Mesa, the western edge of the Ancestral Puebloan "fertile crescent". The crescent was (and still is) a highly productive agricultural area, and supported a large population between about 600 - 1,300 AD. We didn't do this hike on our more recent trip, but I thought it fit nicely with my theme of the fusion of rock and architecture. It remains one of the most memorable hikes of my life.

Access is the death-knell to Ancestral Puebloan ruins. The closer they are to roads, the more likely they are to be destroyed by pothunters and vandals (both of whom are the lowest of human beings). To see these wonderful ruins, we had to walk a total of eight miles, and that doesn't count the required climbing to approach the ruins themselves. There was only a trail of use to follow.

The trail began in a shallow canyon with an ephemeral stream. After a mile or so, the canyon deepened, and the first of the ruins appeared (above). It just goes to show how I can miss significant sights sometimes, by realizing that the ruin above is famous, and is found in posters and art exhibits. It's called the House on Fire Ruin (or some variant), and I totally missed the effect of the crossbedded Cedar Mesa Sandstone that flares out above the dwelling. Check out this page (or this one) for an example of a shot taken with a photographer's eye

The ruins in the canyon (there are eight or so of them spread over three miles) are in surprisingly nice condition, with intact walls, doorways and ceilings.

The dwelling in the pictures above and below even has an intact stairwell. This particular ruin is relatively inaccessible; people can get to it, but it requires a somewhat vertiginous crawl up some precariously perched logs on an 8 or 10 foot overhang. I haven't managed it yet in two tries (because I knew I had to get back down, and wasn't sure of myself).

Some of the alcoves don't have dwellings (anymore) but they do have pictographs, including the hand prints below. These messages communicate to me the humanity of a single individual who lived in this place 700+ years ago.

 There are also ghostly dancing figures...

I talked in previous posts of the frustration of having ruins that have been stabilized and "cleaned up". One starts to lose that sense of personal discovery (my so-called Indiana Jones effect; it's addictive and not really good archaeology). Of course it makes sense that a park with high visitation would never leave artifacts out in plain sight. They would disappear quickly. Here, miles from the end of the road, people have decently left things in place for others to see.

 The remnants of some kind of woven yucca fibers, a moccasin maybe?

Corncobs, minus the corn (rodents are very active in these ruins). The Ancestral Puebloans subsisted on maize, beans and squash, with the occasional supplementary meat provided by rabbits, deer, and bighorn sheep.

The upper canyon held what was to me one of the most fascinating dwellings I've run across (below). It's in a side canyon choked with willows and brush. Except for the fact that I knew a dwelling was up there somewhere, I never would have fought my way through the brush, but I did, and I almost missed the ruins anyway. The logs sticking out of the sheer cliff (and the small dark openings) were my only clue. I got the impression these people did not want to be found...

As we drew closer, more walls appeared, molded seamlessly into the vertical cliff. The walls hid a series of small alcoves into which rooms had been constructed. Instead of a single room perched on a block of rock, this was a small pueblo complex with at least seven or eight rooms. The upper log sticking out of the cliff was probably the brace for a ladder that accessed the rooms even higher up the cliff.

We shimmied up the log to access the pueblo, and were surprised by how much space was present behind the outer wall.

The walls and doorways were remarkably well preserved. The lintels over the doors were still encased in the adobe, and in many places, the fingerprints of the builders were preserved.

 The logs forming the ceilings were unchanged, except for generations of cooking fires.

 Roof intact, plaster coverings intact, wood unburnt...this was one of the best-preserved pueblos I've ever seen.

The dwelling is referred to as the Wall Ruin, and it is 3.7 miles up the canyon. You may notice I'm not making a big issue about where the dwellings are located, but there are enough clues here to figure it out on the internets with a bit of searching. I want this place to be here 700 years from now, and even though these sites are legally protected, any idiot can destroy centuries of culture in a matter of minutes. I've even heard of morons who used wood beams from 700 years ago...as firewood.

I like to think that spirits of the ancestors still inhabit these places, and I like to think that they will make life miserable for those who abuse and vandalize their realm.

The next portion of our journey would take us into a different landscape, one that was largely ignored by the Ancestral Pueblo people, a place where it was too dry to grow crops and subsist off the land. We were headed into the Canyonlands.

Meanwhile, in the present day, I will be on the road for a few days, taking our students on a field studies excursion into the eastern Sierra Nevada and Owens Valley. See ya'll in a few days!

The Abandoned Lands...A Journey Through the Colorado Plateau: What will the evidence be of your passage?

Paleoindian artifacts at the Anasazi Heritage Center, dating to 7,000-9,500 years BC

Our journey throught the Abandoned Lands continued. We were on a combined geology/archaeology field studies trip last June, and for much of middle part of the trip we were following in reverse the journey of the Pueblo People to their present-day homes along the Rio Grande River. We explored Bandelier, Chaco Canyon and Mesa Verde, and were now making our way through the "fertile crescent" of the Ancestral Puebloans that extended from Mesa Verde to Cedar Mesa in Utah.

Artifacts from the Archaic Period, 7,000 BC -200 AD

As a rank amateur in archaeology, I had always somehow assumed that the cliff dwellings in places like Mesa Verde had always been the home of the Ancestral Puebloans for hundreds of years. As we have seen in the last few posts of this series, the famous cliff dwellings were home to the people for only a few generations before they abandoned the region for the Hopi mesas or the Rio Grande. For more than a thousand years, the people lived in pithouses and small pueblos spread widely across the Colorado Plateau. From what we can tell today, fear of invasion or warfare was not part of their story until the very end, the last few generations.

Basketmaker II artifacts, from about 0-500 AD

I always had a tendency to think of the lives of the Ancestral Pueblo people in terms of their buildings, their pottery and their arrowheads. In my own journeys that was nearly all I ever saw of their lives, aside from the petroglyphs and pictographs I've discovered here and there. The meticulous work of the archaeologists goes a long way towards filling out the daily lives of the people who lived on this land for so very long.

Basketmaker III artifacts from about 500-700 AD

The Dolores Rivers carves a deep canyon just north of Cortez, Colorado, and was an ideal site for a reservoir to be built in this arid landscape. The resulting lake would have covered and destroyed hundreds of sites, so a rapid excavation of as many sites as possible was undertaken, and the three million artifacts formed the basis for the collection at the Anasazi Heritage Center in Dolores, Colorado, an excellent museum and research center run by the Bureau of Land Management. The Center also serves as the headquarters for the Canyons of the Ancients National Monument.

Pueblo I artifacts, from about 700-900 AD

We were on a field trip, but artifacts like these are rarely seen in the field. This was as close as we could get to "feeling" the lives of these people, of getting close to what daily existence was like. So today is a series of pictures that are snapshots of a particular period in the lives of the Ancestral Pueblo people. It is amazing to me how well some of these artifacts survived (especially considering the trepidations of pothunters and other vandals).

Pueblo II artifacts from about 900-1100 AD

I always dream of finding things like this while on an expedition in the wilds of the Plateau country. Who doesn't want to be the next Indiana Jones? But as the years have passed, I have come to realize the value of allowing excavations to be done by those who have the training to interpret what they are seeing, and the value of seeing the objects in context. The issues are the same as those involved with paleontology and the loss of information when vandals dig up dinosaur bones or precious fossils like those of the Burgess Shale in British Columbia.

Pueblo III artifacts, from about 1,100-1,300 AD. I love the mug...

Will our artifacts and trash middens be as interesting in a thousand years, or will anyone be looking? What will people think of iPods if they have no way of turning them on? The ongoing joke among anthropology folks is that anything whose role is unclear must be interpreted as a ceremonial object. And in the case of an iPod, they may be right...

In our next post we explore the heart of the "fertile crescent" of the Ancestral Pueblo people at Canyon of the Ancients and Hovenweep National Monuments.

The Abandoned Lands...A Journey Through the Colorado Plateau: Walnut Canyon...Would you have been one of them??

A thought exercise: you've lost your house...to foreclosure perhaps. The sheriff kicked you out so quickly that you had to leave most of your belongings behind. Maybe it was the family farm. Your parents and grandparents were buried there in a family plot. You've been locked out and will never able to return.

How do you feel about the new owners who take over the property? Do they have the right to dispose of your things as they see fit? Do they have the right to bulldoze the trees in the family cemetery and put a minimart on top of the graves? (Actually, I think I have an idea for a horror movie...someone call Steven Speilberg). Okay, maybe it wasn't you who lost the home, maybe it happened a hundred years ago, in Ireland, or Scotland, or in Senegal? How long do we have a right to feel like our family heritage has been molested? Is 800 years too much? Say a family castle in southern Europe that was built by your forebears in the 1200's?

Around 800 years ago, the Sinagua People felt they had to abandon their lands. We don't know why...long term drought is suspected as a cause, although that would be ironic for a people whose name means "without water". They often lived in parts of the central Colorado Plateau that did not have secure water sources, including Wupatki (see one of my previous posts), and Walnut Canyon, southeast of Flagstaff. They left behind entire villages in the cliffs at Walnut Canyon, a place that is protected today as Walnut Canyon National Monument.

I visited Walnut Canyon as a 10 year old, and I was fascinated with the place. Here were abandoned homes and villages, it seemed like hundreds of them spread on the alcoved cliffs of Kaibab Limestone. I combed over the floors of each of the small rooms like a young Indiana Jones. I wasn't interested so much in the walls that remained; I wanted to discover things. Things like pottery sherds, arrowheads, the evidence of the lives that were lived here. Somehow I knew that I would see what the hundreds of thousands of tourists who were there before me had missed, if I looked hard enough.

It occurred to me even then that maybe I needed to be looking at the dwellings that weren't on the tourist trail. You could see them off in the distance, their remoteness (and the stern signs prohibiting access) making them a magnet of my desires to search and discover what obviously must be hidden just off the trail. Oh, how I wanted to climb up into these mysterious dwellings!

I found out many years later that in the late 1800's it was a tradition for Flagstaff residents to take a wagon ride out to Walnut Canyon to search the ruins for pottery and other artifacts, and that many thousands of artifacts disappeared into local households. These former homes of the Sinagua People had been plundered of their treasures and destroyed many decades before I happened upon the scene. Sometimes the pothunters used dynamite. Now that I was an adult, the very thought infuriated me. How could they allow such a desecration to take place? It's not even justified to say that the Sinagua People no longer exist. Their descendants live in the pueblos of New Mexico and on the Hopi Reservation (To their absolute credit, it was the work of many citizens in Flagstaff that resulted in the formation of the national monument in 1915. They were horrified at the destruction that was taking place. I am not aware if the descendants of the Sinagua were ever consulted.).

I felt a similar sense of disgust and indignation when a river runner told me many years ago that he had the mummified remains of an Anasazi child in his garage. This was on the same river trip that I was told that the walls of the seemingly pristine ruins that we saw on the San Juan River had been repaired three or four times after pothunters had winched them down to get at burial sites. Pothunters are criminals, pure and simple. If you are having trouble understanding this, imagine if someone was digging up the remains of your grandmother for the purpose of stealing the jewelry she was buried with.

The exhilaration of discovery, whether it involves a gold nugget in a stream, a dinosaur bone in the desert of Utah, a perfect topaz crystal in a rhyolite tuff, or an unbroken Puebloan pot from 800 years ago is like an addictive drug. There is nothing quite like it. It is easy to condemn pothunters who are interested only in selling their finds. Can we judge the people of Flagstaff and other nearby communities for taking artifacts a century ago who were only after the thrill of discovery?

Likewise, how do you judge the little kid who collected square nails at a ghost town in a state park and was enraged when his father told him to put them back? They were just pieces of rusted iron. And what about the kid who finds a beautiful spearpoint high on a mountain ridge miles from any actual archaeological site, and keeps it? What harm could it do? I have to face the fact that the little kid was me. It took me years to outgrow the desire to possess, and I also know for a fact that if I lived in Flagstaff a hundred years ago, I would have been one of the plunderers.

I have not had the rush of finding an intact pot in a cliff dwelling. I like to think that over the years, I've developed the judgement to leave it in place and notify the authorities of the discovery, but I know that won't be my first impulse. What would you do?

Here is the explanation of my "abandonment" theme for this series: http://geotripper.blogspot.com/2012/06/abandoned-landsa-journey-through.html