Ancient Ones: The Anasazi Civil War

The Kayenta region of northeastern Arizona that includes monument valley and the ruins of Navajo national monument that are called betatakin and kiet siel, and the pueblos of Canyon de chelly like white and antelope house on the border of New Mexico and Arizona near the Chuska Mountains, and the amazing palaces of mesa verde national park… southern Utah in the bears ears and on Cedar Mesa… aztec and salmon ruins in northern new mexico… sleeping ute mountain at the four corners… hovenweep and the sand canyon pueblos just above sleeping ute… The beautiful ruins of Comb Ridge like Monarch Cave… Chaco Canyon itself… I could keep going but I think you get the picture. In all of these places, all of these modern day monuments and parks and public lands, all of these mysterious and beautiful ruins… in all of these places and more, the Anasazi left, and never came back. They never again built pueblos or kivas or any structures in any of these once jam packed with people areas. Never again.

Some researchers argue they never came back to these once important places because of climactic events… like… the introduction of the other half of the world and its diseases that wiped out up to 90% of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas. Some say, myself included, that if it weren’t for the Spanish and later settlers, The Anasazi may have gone back up that Chaco Meridian and resettled much like their ancestors had in old familiar places… I truly think, just like the kivas of Chaco were abandoned and later returned to, these places and ruins may have seen new generations as well. The multi story pueblos and enormous palaces could have expanded again and grown larger again with new innovations from down south. Author Craig Childs, writer of some of my new favorite books like Atlas of a Lost world, tracing time, and house of rain, suggests the same thing when he’s talking to an archaeologist and says that the Anasazi were a, quote, civilization on a sliding scale, able to contract or expand at a moment's notice, abandoning regions for tens or hundreds of years before returning and building again as if they had never left. The people had a continuity that stretched beyond generations, a coherence of cultural practice surpassing time and place. End quote. But they didn’t return. Or maybe they would have continued on that Chaco Meridian even further south to clash with the Aztecs like the Aztecs had done before them. But regardless, The Anasazi never came back. They abandoned their homes in the deserts, cliffs, and canyons, of the Four Corners and left us with the greatest prehistory mystery of the American Southwest and possibly the lower 48.   

Along the spiral migration some groups or families or clans were flung off or they voluntarily stepped off the spiral to look for their own center place but for whatever reason, the Anasazi leapt up out the Southwest and never returned and as they followed their spiral migration, which honestly resembles a spiral itself on a map as it spins from Chaco to northern Mexico, but as they followed their spiral migration The Anasazi upended the entire American Southwest as they spread an over indulgence in corn, T shaped doors, and an always evolving Anasazi pottery style through every group and secondary city state and clan and pueblo they came across. Wether they absorbed everyone they encountered or swept them away is unknown but the fact remains that the events I’m about to discuss which involves man corn, lots of fire, and the abandonment of entire areas… is all true. But the mystery of the Anasazi will hopefully be much less of one when we’re done with this episode. No more listening to Mulder or that one Aliens dude from the unHistory Channel. The Anasazi were a real and, in my opinion, an amazing group of people that despite me hating on those two aforementioned cooks, are indeed mysterious. But only because in the end, we don’t  actually know what their ultimate fate was. But we do know where the trail goes cold… and it ain’t in outerspace. And where the trail goes cold is where this story will end. But we’re a long way from that…

In nearly all parts of the Southwest, during the period AD1250-1300, we find more evidence for warfare than in any preceding epoch.

That’s a quote from Plog’s 2008 edition of Ancient People’s of the American Southwest in a chapter titled Cliff dwellings, cooperation, and conflict. Which… is pretty much what this episode is about… or at least part of it. The past three… well, 5 if you include the episodes over the Clovis and Folsom and other ancient ancestors of the Ancient Ones, so the last 5 episodes have been setting up the events I’m going to describe in this one. My goal was to explain to y'all to the best of my knowledge and understanding the history and mystery of the Anasazi… but obviously, the story needed a foundation, so… I went back 140,000 years ago, who wouldn’t? And in the meantime, I whispered over 50,000 words into your ears.

If there’s one theme you should take away from this entire series over the people that have inhabited the American Southwest for the last 15,000 years or more… it’s Migration, both immense and small. That spiral has been a center piece of the last few episodes since I mentioned Masawu and the center place. But even the Mammoth eaters sprinted across the nation. The ancient ones abandoned the Southwest completely during th e Altithermal only to return a few thousand years later . Those that returned never stayed put either. The six toes and sandals pecked and painted all over the southwest remain as testaments to migration. And then pueblos and palaces and roads, I mean, they built roads, the ultimate symbol of movement on the landscape, but the monumental architecture of Chaco came along and the people even left that. There were migrations and return migrations and migrations again. Constantly turning. The people of the Southwest, they seemingly never stopped moving… at least until the 20th century when Uncle Sam forced them to at gun point or with threats of starvation to stand still in your reservations or else. That spiral migration has been a focus of these episodes and that migration truly ramps up at this time in our story.

We left off with Chaco being abandoned and Aztec and Salmon, near exact replicas of that Monumental Canyon, about to share the same fate so let’s continue from that point on the Chaco Meridian and follow the spiral. But first, what is this Chaco Meridian I keep talking about. I know I’ve mentioned it multiple times now and it is an extremely interesting and important Anasazi cultural fact… although, I guess it’s more of a theory.

The theory of the Chaco Meridian comes from… to borrow a phrase from a rather famous podcaster, the great and powerful Stephen Lekson, whom I used extensively last episode because he is probably the most knowledgeable person on earth when it comes to Chaco Canyon in my opinion. Craig Childs, a favorite author of mine, in his book House of Rain which he wrote to explain the disappearance of the Anasazi and in which he practically walks on foot from Chaco up to Mesa Verde through Aztec, over to the Bears Ears, and all the way down the Mogollon Rim across the Tortilla Curtain to the Sierra Madres in Mexico, where our story, and his… and the Anasazi’s will end… So Craig Childs has this to say of the great and powerful archaeologist, thinker, writer, and scholar that is Lekson, quote, Everyone in Southwest archaeology has something to say about Lekson. He has stirred up academic dissent and discussion as far away as Central America, where archaeologists previously paid very little attention to what was happening in the American Southwest, a far and dusty corner of the world. End quote. Childs goes on to further say that people squirm when his name’s mentioned in conversations and that Childs has quote, learned to use Lekson’s name with care when speaking among archaeologists. End quote. So you know he’s got some good ideas if he’s making the establishment uneasy. And you know I’ve got respect for people like that.

I’ll let Childs summation of Lekson’s Chaco Meridian explain the theory, quote, If you drew a line north out of Chaco, you would hit Aztec, New Mexico, home of Chaco’s immediate architectural progeny back in the twelfth century. If you took that same line four hundred miles due south, you would end up smack in the middle of Paquimé in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. This four hundred mile line is so accurate that even modern surveyors would be hard pressed to repeat it.

“Coincidence?” Lekson asked. “I don't think so.” End quote.

500 years before Chaco or more even, but at least since 500AD, the most impressive sites of each archaeological period in the Southwest is on that North South Line. You should honestly look at a map right now and draw a line from a place called casas grandes in northern Mexico, in the state of chihuahua, to Aztec, New Mexico… that line will include Chaco and many other important sites and it’s amazing.

North of Chaco, and just south of Durango Colorado is a place formerly known as Sacred Ridge but is now called the Animas La Plata Project, because Archaeologists, except for Lekson, Christy Turner of Man Corn, and a few others are not very inventive. But in this area known as Animas La Plata Project or ALP for short, an enormous, for the time, community grew out of the land as a possible precursor to Chaco. There's even monumental architecture! In the 8th Century! Here’s Lekson in his followup article after The Chao Meridian was published titled Amending the Meridian. Lekson says he was, quote, immensely impressed by the size and complexity of the pit-house sites, which dated to the eighth century A.D. There was nothing in the ALP area immediately before the eighth century, and nothing after. It was a big- -but short-lived—bang. A further tour of the eight-mile-wide swath of the project convinced Lekson that there were more eighth-century sites than in any other area in the northern Southwest. It was a continuous blur of houses and villages... ALP excavators found things on Sacred Ridge that no one had ever seen at eighth-century sites, such as the 10-foot-wide base of a two-story tower. Nobody built towers in the eighth century! End quote.

He also discusses a site known as Shabikeschee which was in Chaco Canyon in the 500s! It was a large site for its time with 80 houses and a great kiva. I mention Shabkeschee because it supports Lekson’s meridian theory. At the end of that previously mentioned article of his, he says this of the incredible if true line of Anasazi settlements:

Shabik'eschee, Sacred Ridge, Chaco, Aztec, and Paquimé—five unique points in a line, each the biggest and most important site of its respective era. The chances of that happening by accident are minuscule. There has to be history~-human decisions and human intentions--behind the Meridian. So, for seven centuries, the center of the Pueblo World bounced back and forth over (only) 80 miles, from Chaco Canyon to Sacred Ridge and back again--and then to Aztec Ruins. The southern extension to Paquimé is still a matter of doubt and debate, I admit. But the new data from Shabikeschee and the ALP complex give me some confidence that the Chaco Meridian was real, and that it meant something to ancient Pueblo people. What exactly did it mean?I don't know-yet.

Since that article’s release, the strength of evidence for Paquime being an Anasazi site has grown immensely. I think Lekson’s brilliant and he’s absolutely on to something. Besides, that straight line of settlements would not have been ignored by people who built straight roads and other monumental architectural features that aligned with the stars and cardinal directions.

The Chacoan Anasazi, Ancient Ones, Ancestral Puebloans, whatever you would like to call them, the Anasazi were everywhere by 1200, like I mentioned last time, they are filling every nook and cranny and canyon and cliffside and mesa top and valley of the southwestern four corners region. And everywhere they went, they brought kivas. And those kivas are everywhere, seriously, it only takes one walk through a four corners canyon to come up on a collapsed kiva surrounded by potsherds. The Anasazi are also expanding their great house outliers onto far flung landscapes and territories spreading their ceramics and T shaped doors and large pueblo mini palaces with them.

Some of these new pueblos were D shaped replicas of those distant but not forgotten, Chaco Canyon Great Houses. Except some of these D shaped Pueblos were built in defensive locations with defensive positions in mind while other newer settlements were adhering to the old ceremonial placing. As a matter of fact, at this time, some of the Pueblos were being built with the beloved southwestern style of south facing communities with kivas in the front while others were being built with the land’s topography and geography in mind in case they were raided. The reason the staple of southwestern building for the Anasazi in the Pueblo era was South facing is because that means during the winter you get more sun, and during the summer you get less of it. Which in turn means it’s cooler in the summer and warmer in the winter. So this difference in style, most likely means there were two different factions or maybe cultures by this point, operating at the same time in the same space, or at least very nearby each other. One group seemed to be living in comfort and possible peace while the other in defense and fear. As I’ve mentioned, it appears a division occurred in Chaco… a division that may have led to the Chaco and then Aztec and Mesa Verde split, but that division is mirrored in the copycat great houses and pueblo communities that are popping up all over the land. Even that extremely peculiar and exciting architectural feature, the Anasazi Tower, begins to pop up in the defensible position communities. More on those towers to come.

But when talking about the population growth and enormous increase in settlements, there’s a great example of this typical pattern for the southwestern four corners region in an amazing group of ruins in an alcove overhang in northern Arizona at a place called Navajo National Monument. I’ve mentioned it before, and even in the beginning of this episode. The name, Navajo National Monument is confusing because the Navajo have nothing to do with the ruins but they reside, like many amazing ruins, on Navajo land. This alcove inhabiting town is known to us as Betatakin. I’ve seen Betatakin, not up close mind you because of the many restrictions the Parks put on public lands but I’ve seen them from a distance where a great viewpoint is offered, the pictures are up on the site. This place is amazing, truly and it looks almost untouched since the people left it. But the population growth appears like this: the site began in 1267, we know that by the tree ring dates, so in 1267 they built three clusters of rooms. In the rooms there are living rooms, storage rooms, a courtyard, and sometimes a kitchen where the corn and beans were ground for consumption. So there’s three of these clusters or apartments built immediately and one more apartment built the following year. Then in 1275 a significant amount of people moved in and ten more apartments were built by 1277. Along with the new apartments came new ceramics and probably other new cultural artifacts which haven’t survived. For the next nine years of occupation a few more apartments were added as new families moved in. What’s very curious is the fact that the initial people that arrived in 1267 seemed to have known that more families would be arriving at a later date because they built the newer apartments with wood they’d cut down back in 67 and had stockpiled for that very purpose. The whole settlement seems to have been a planned community.

Yet… just 6 miles away down the canyon is another settlement, Kiet Siel, that began in the 1240s and grew quite large and rather haphazardly with each new group that arrived. As we’ll soon talk about, the all important date to define the region is 1300, and by that date, both Betatakin and Kiet Siel are abandoned… along with… everywhere else. That means Betatakin, one of the most magnificently planned communities of the Anasazi, was only occupied for maybe 20 years… not quite even a generation.

But regarding families moving into the area, Plog points out that the Hopi have an oral tradition that states that the addition of entire clans or tribes that had migrated from quite far away, happened a lot historically… iffin’ the newcomers could bring something useful to the tribe that is, like rain. Maybe that’s what was happening here… there’s evidence that some peoples travelled, taking their pottery with them, over 200 miles to resettle. Sometimes peacefully, other times, not so peacefully… as we’ll see.

This traveling to resettle with others is a defining characteristic of this time period before the great drought that starts in 1277 and the year of the great divide migration of 1300. Everyone’s coming together, building, and then everyone just… leaves.

Before the great abandonment though, regional ceramic differences become strikingly distinct as the 1200s progresses. And localized trade, which probably helped bolster this regional variation, became even more important.

Not only did the villages become larger during this time of expansion but their serving vessels were increasing in size as well. By a lot. This may seem insignificant, but it meant that more people were being fed at the same time in a group setting. Truly, the people were coming together like they’d never done before in the southwest.   

And one spot that the coming together seemed to elevate itself over the others, literally and figuratively was southern Colorado, more specifically, Mesa Verde.

Mesa Verde seemed straight forward to me at first during my research. It was an incredibly well defended and well built and well represented area of the Ancient One’s world that still captures the imagination of visitors worldwide today. I admit, I have only been there twice and both times were in the off season so all i could do was marvel at the structures the Mesa Verde Anasazi built from the wonderful but oh so far away viewpoint the park service provides. But the deeper i went (and the more I read) the blurrier the picture became until… it all… sorta clicked. Of course my sources are incredibly brilliant and talented individuals and I cannot pretend to have ever thought of or entertained the ideas that I’m going to present to you without reading their works and receiving their proverbial help. Again, this is based off of much more talented and experienced researchers, archaeologists, anthropologists, historians, and adventurers than I am. And everything I am saying could be proven wrong in the future, at least the part I’m going to speculate on.

But Mesa Verde… where do I start. First of all, I will start by telling you that a civil war is about to rock the Anasazi world. It will be brutal and violent and you’re going to hear all about it shortly but to set it up I’ve got to mention this very important place that is Mesa Verde. It sits on the New Mexican Coloradan border south of the towering and imposing rockies and from it’s high vantage point, you can seemingly see all of the Chacoan world to the south.

  Plog also has a great quote about Mesa Verde and how awe inspiring it is when he says, quote, nowhere else in the southwest can a visitor gain such a vivid impression of what life would have been like in the 13th century, from the smoke filtering out of kiva entryways, to the cries of infants resonating against rock shelter walls, to the appearance of the cliff dwellers themselves. End quote. He’s not wrong. It’s an incredible place and an incredibly well preserved place. And an incredibly well defensible place.

Starting in the 1080s, Chaco Canyon appears to have sent intruders to Mesa Verde settlements on the tops of the mesas in the form of priests or missionaries or emissaries or tax collectors or warriors or princely leaders, who knows. But those first intrusions would eventually turn Mesa Verde into a sort of major outpost for the Chaco Canyon Secondary State. It’s also possible that maybe Chaco didn’t send anyone up there but Mesa Verde requested some representation down in Chaco. I read both of those interpretations of how Mesa Verde gained prestige but what I truly believe, is that Chaco was actually established by Ancient Ones who called their home Mesa Verde before going down into the mustard colored canyon to join with the Southerners to build that magnificent secondary state and all its monumental architecture…

During those early years of the 1080s though, most of the Anasazi settlements not only of Mesa Verde, but of Bears Ears… and other surrounding areas as well, were situated on the TOPs of mesas. But once Chaco Aztec began to collapse in the early 1200s and the split between great houses spread throughout the countryside, and this civil war began, the villages left the flat open defenseless tops of mesas and valleys and moved into the canyons where the Chacoan refugees brought their old ways. And where we still hike and adventure out to see today.

I believe it is here, on Mesa Verde that a faction of Chacoan elites, the home team, I will call them, moved into the canyons of the Mesa and built a fortress. A fortress that must have seemed impenetrable to outsiders. As the home team mesa verde elites moved up there to build a rebel stronghold, the mesa began acting like a magnet. A magnet that stole people, resources, and possibly even religious practices right up until the abandonment of 1300, a concept we’ll get into later.

Childs says of Mesa Verde, quote, century old great houses became cores of residential settlements as they were overcome by waves of incoming migrants. End quote. And these rebel migrants became isolated from the outside world as pottery trade slowed with the people still remaining in the south. Shells from the distant sea stopped showing up in high numbers and macaws disappeared altogether. Obviously, this rebel outpost had wandered from the pure faith of Chaco Aztec and from the good graces of its heart carving leaders from the south as they stoked the rebellion in the north.

Pottery trade with the southern Anasazi slowed, yes, but pottery creation did not and on mesa verde a completely distinct style took shape and would eventually spread rapidly through the four corners… This also tells me, the home team was popular and while many people fled to the outskirts of the Anasazi world to avoid the coming violence, they still shared an identity with one side of the Civil War. Along with the new ceramics also came a new floor plan for the settlements in the mesa canyons. This floor plan appears to be based on the social engineering of keeping once distantly populated families and groups separate while being forced to become close neighbors… either, once again or for the first time with people they’d rather not be near or at the very least were leery of becoming completely incorporated into. An uneasy, as they always are, separate but equal situation seemed to be emerging at Mesa verde…

I interpret this as being… well, at the creation of Chaco, mesa verde elites or families or clans or what have you went down south to the mustard canyon and helped build that secondary state before going back up to Mesa Verde to ask for taxes or wives or warriors or tribute, or what have you. But the mesa Verdean elite living in Chaco called upon their old homeland to chip in and by doing so, that elevated some members of the Mesa Verde society by the sheer fact of being affiliated with that altepetl down south. But eventually Chaco fell apart. And when it did, the Mesa Verde elites fled what was now the capital at Aztec, and went back home to Mesa Verde where a leery population of elites, somewhat welcomed the old timers who would now be exerting an unwanted amount of influence on the people… but since they were from the same clan or family or at least shared ancestors, the new group of mesa verde elites who only got that way by being aligned with Chaco Mesa Verdeans in the first place… let them in… begrudgingly. Maybe…    there, on Mesa verde, the two rejoined sides would form the home team faction of the Civil War and they would build impenetrable defenses that would not see violence. on the mesa itself, there is little evidence for warfare. Some archaeologists suggest this is because the warfare element is overplayed and too hyped and these places were probably just sacred… While I myself KNOW the Anasazi practiced sacred architecture, I believe the lack of evidence for warfare on Mesa Verde means the embattlements were extremely successful at their job of… keeping people out.

It is also on Mesa Verde where the very famous and spectacular and defensible cliffside ruins known as Cliff Palace were built and occupied in a 20 year period between 1260 and 1280… the height of the civil war. Cliff Palace is truly the jewel of Mesa Verde and one of the many jewels of the Anasazi World in general. It is a truly remarkable place. And its name is so very fitting.

Enter Richard Wetherill, a monumentally important and controversial figure in southwestern and especially Anasazi and Ancestral Puebloan archaeology. He and his brothers and nephews and children will have their own episode one of these days because they lived fascinating and remarkable lives in my favorite place in the whole world and their story is truly incredible. One of the mesa fingers of mesa verde is called wetherill mesa, that was the first time I saw the name way back in 2017, but I did not know its significance until I read    Behind the Bears Ears in the summer of 22 for this series. Burrillo talks about Richard Wetherill and his family extremely unfavorably. I assumed because of that reading that the dude sucked and that he was responsible for destroying cultural heritage and artifacts as he pot hunted around the southwest. That couldn’t be further from reality and thankfully David Roberts in both In Search of the Old Ones and The Lost World of the Old Ones paints him in a much more forgiving and favorable and honestly, truthful light. It was refreshing every time Roberts brought up he or his family. Again, I will do an episode, a mini episode, on the family that I may put behind a paywall or something. You will love their story, seriously.

In the history of the Southwest, no scholar ever found or discovered more sites, or more important sites, than Richard Wetherill. That quote from Roberts sums him up pretty nicely. Not only was Richard Wetherill who was just a quaker rancher, not only was he the first to correlate depth in the soil with the age of the artifact, he coined the term Basketmaker for the ancient ones that made the baskets before they made ceramics. He also learned to speak Ute AND Navajo! Do you know how hard of a language Navajo is? I’ll tell you all about it next year on my Navajo series. Yes, he carted out everything from pots to skulls that he found but he donated dang near all of it to universities and museums! Actual archaeologists at the time weren’t that much better than he and his methods and a few were worse! And unlike all those archaeologists, he later admitted to essentially being a pothunter, but with good intentions. He   so hated that his initials, which he would carve on cave walls or boulders at sites he discovered were vandalized by later ra ngers and archaeologists. He would eventually move to Chaco Canyon where he would set up a trading post after being ordered by the court to stop excavating in the area. The ones who started the inquiry into his doings were just jealous of him and they did a much worse job than he ever would have at excavating the site. The story is kinda tragic. Roberts also says this of him, quote, Wetherill's Grand Gulch work (Grand Gulch is an immense area of canyons on cedar mesa)… Wetherill’s Grand Gulch work had a substantial influence on the development of Southwestern archaeology.. Also apparent is his empathy with the Anasazi. Not only had he spent years probing their buried secrets, but he, too, had lived most of his days directly on the land. He, too, knew how it felt to see his crops wither and fail, or to slip on a high ledge and catch himself just in time. He had what we would now call a "feel" for the pattern of Anasazi life. End quote. There’s so much more to him and his family but I will go into them, like I said, in a different episode and I’m excited for that one.

Wetherill, upon finding the magnificent ruins on Mesa Verde, named the most famous one, Cliff Palace. Which is exactly what it is. The place is astoundingly impressive. It’s got 220 masonry rooms and 23 kivas. Before the park service eased entry with ramps and handrails, the only way to get there was by climbing,    hand and toe holds carved into the sandstone cliffside wall by the Anasazi themselves. Because of this hard to reach access, the preservation is so great that some of the structures still have original roofs and paintings on the walls. Basketry and textiles have been found in excellent condition and even turkey droppings still lie in the pens that held those probably sacred birds.

Beyond Cliff Palace, there’s multiple other alcove ruins scattered around the mesa like Balcony House, Spruce Tree House, Step House, Long House, Square Tower House, and 600 other cliff dwellings… It was the most rooms per square mile in the entire southwest, and it was actually more populated then than it is now. Inside some of these dwellings, ceramic mugs have been found hanging on pegs, untouched since last placed there some 800 years ago. There are also walls and structures built around natural springs that pour out of the mesa and the people built lots of dams and diverted lots of precious water to suit their purpose. Trails between communities exist, fields were communally grown, and defenses were manned, probably night and day during this later occupation.

Were these structures on Mesa Verde, built by the rebel home team and the countless others throughout the region, especially in places like southeast Utah on Cedar Mesa built for defense? An old timer archaeologist from Sweden named Nordenskiöld certainly seemed to think so. Nordenskiöld actually wrote the very first scholarly monograph ever written about the Anasazi in his 1893 The Cliff Dwellers of the Mesa Verde, which was published in Stockholm. And I agree with the eventually run out of town for being a foreigner old timer. I have been to many an anasazi ruin… more than I can count, and some of them seem to be incapable of being anything other than being built in a defensible position. At this time, the 1200s, the Civil War is raging. In the area below Mesa Verde in the lowlands, which would have been allied with the Mesa Verde faction, far too many charred bodies and sacked villages have been uncovered. Santa Fe based archaeologist, Eric Blinman put it perfectly when he told David Roberts, quote, in the 1280s around Mesa Verde, a lot of people were killed. The society was decimated. End quote. The war began to take on a scorched earth policy.

Not far from Mesa Verde, built by those M.V. Anasazi is a place known as Yellowjacket Pueblo which, has the highest density of ceremonial structures ever found in the Southwest, including 182 kivas, a great kiva, 17 Anasazi towers, AND a great tower. Although construction of Yellowjacket began by at least AD950 the place was continuously occupied until every place in the Southwest was abandoned by the Anasazi in that important year of 1300. Certain parts of the pueblo were three stories tall and it’s suggested to be a communal area where people from across the region gathered… which, is backed up by the sheer number of kivas at the site. And according to David Breternitz, professor emeritus at the University of Colorado, Yellowjacket is the quote, key to understanding the final anasazi occupation of the area and how it relates to other sites of the period. End quote. By this, he’s referring to the fact that within every single one of the kivas within the so called great tower complex, in the ventilator tunnels, approximately 2 feet deep, were found… an axe… which the Crow Canyon Archaeology Center said, quote, may have been kept in readiness to meet a possible invader, and, if viewed in this light, may be a possible clue to the reason for the abandonment of the dwelling. End quote. The study later goes on to say quote, The construction of this block around a spring and the c ompact architectural style of the block suggest defensive protection of a key water source. Thus, there are signs of competition for resources during the time the great tower complex was occupied and possible hints of conflict, as has been documented at other sites occupied in the late 1200s. End quote.

I’ve continuously mentioned these towers, so what the heck are they?

When I think of towers, I think of the medieval towers my wife and I got dizzy climbing in France as we spiraled skyward past arrow slots towards a top platform that let’s one see great distances… well, that’s exactly what the Anasazi towers were as well. The towers appear to be the last archaeological feature built by the anasazi in the four corners region and they seem to be defensive in nature, built to look over crops and fields in this period of the late 1200s. A lot of them have T shaped doorways signifying possible ceremonial use, and some are connected to kivas. Others have tunnels beneath them which lead to nearby kivas. But many of these towers, show signs of warfare. Warfare and burning and death, with one tower excavation revealing 30 infants who’d been burned alive… another tower nearby on the Colorado Utah line held the remains of eleven adults and three infants… and in the doorway were the skulls of two infants… only the skulls… one was still complete with blood matted hair… after all of these years the hair and stains of death had remained on the bodiless skull of the child that’d been placed in the T shaped doorway of the Anasazi Tower.

The most beautiful tower I’ve seen is in Hovenweep but I’ve seen and peered carefully into others on Cedar Mesa and the surrounding areas. I’ve seen them square and I’ve seen them round. I’ve seen them in canyons, on boulders, in caves and alcoves, and I’ve seen them at the top of canyon rims. But the most fascinating tower is that square tower at Hovenweep built inside the canyon on a boulder where it seems it serves no purpose. Yet the other towers, constructed in a way that would have made them seen from great distances, are clearly defensive.. or at least a warning of what you’ll face if you come for a fight. But ultimately, the towers didn’t keep out the invaders. In the end, before the mass migration out of the region, these Anasazi Towers may have been a false hope, a last ditch effort at stopping the spiral.

Before the Great Divide of 1300 and the migration, one of my favorite places on earth, Canyonlands National park and the surrounding area of the Abajo mountains, the la sals, needles, islands in the sky, cedar mesa, all of them… became hiding places for desperate people to live in as they fled the violence of the anasazi’s core world as it broke apart in a civil war.

The Canyonlands area is a hot and a cold and a steep and a rocky dangerous place where many skeletons that have been excavated show signs of repeated breakage and healing from long falls. Legs, arms, even hips, have been recovered with signs of multiple breaks consistent with falls. It only takes one slip of the sandal or barefoot and you’re over the edge. Sometimes you’re 7 feet off the deck, and sometimes you’re 700. One article I read for this episode attempted some humor when the author suggested that the Anasazi built their dwellings on cliffs because they were trying to weed out the klutzes.

At a site I will not name but is located in the bears ears region, so a little south of the far hinterlands of the canyonlands but is still technically, like I suppose most of southern Utah, still a land full of canyons, but in the Bears Ears Region, I’ve walked amid ruins that have barely crumbled… if at all. I’ve peered inside a kiva where the roof’s being propped up by a log a modern man placed there to save it from collapse. There are stairs carved into the sandstone boulders they built their structures around… and the canyon floor… it lays almost 700 feet below the path. Straight down a sheer cliff… It’s my favorite site to be in although many others come close but it’s definitely the most dangerous site I’ve ever explored. But there are even more dangerous sites… ones that require modern ropes and expertise and the ability to use toe and finger holds that were drilled into the sandstone by the Ancient Ones.

As of 2022, a whole bunch of cords that the Anasazi wove have been found made up of yucca, dog, and human hair intertwined together, only one long and somewhat sturdy rope, capable of holding around 500 pounds has been found. And that was by the Wetherills… More ropes may exist out there, but none have been found yet. And that rope that was recovered was recreated and tested… it can hold 500 pounds but it can’t withstood a whipper… a climbing word for a fall. It would have snapped… Often times, The Ancient Ones reached these incredibly dangerous sites with little more than toe and finger holds, sticks plastered into cracks, and the occasional ladder of notched wood. They were by far the greatest climbers in the southwest. And their Fremont neighbors were even more impressive. In Roberts In Search of the Old Ones he says quote, The Navajo were so dazzled by the vertical skills of their predecessors that they attributed their technique to magic. The cliff dwellings, said Navajo sages, had been built by Anasazi who could fly, or who had special sticky feet, or who used shiny stones to slide up and down rock walls; the lizards of today, scuttling up and down the cliffs, are the descendants of the Anasazi, punished thus for having displeased the Holy Beings. End quote.

At that site on Cedar Mesa I just mentioned, I met a man and his dog who said he had been going there often for 30 years and was glad it remained so difficult to get to and find because of its beauty but he said something I hadn’t forgotten about the harsh realities of living there. He said, half jokingly… he’d hate to sleepwalk in these neighborhoods.   

Beyond the ever present possibility of plummeting to your death high up on these canyon walls, you’ve just made it incredibly difficult to farm. Not only that, but water now becomes unpredictable and every available nook and canyon cranny has to be utilized in an attempt to grow something, anything, while you huddle in fear of what’s happening up on the tops of the mesas. Yet, the Anasazi still built and lived in that harsh and steep area… for a time.

The Anasazi who had fled the four corners that fared better in this area are the ones that went to Cedar Mesa, like the ones I just mentioned on that steep cliffside. I have a storied past with cedar mesa and I’ve written a short story about it up at the site but it’s a haunting place. It’s a place I love dearly but one that leaves me feeling uneasy. I explained this to my wife the last time we were there as we drove from the Colorado river up to the bears ears and then down 261 towards Muley point and the Moki Dugway. She said she could feel it too.

I’m not a superstitious person but sometimes I’ve been in a place that felt heavier than the air on a coastal Georgia island. There’s an uneasiness that can settle into your consciousness almost like a warning. I once excitedly got ready to spend the night amongst some beautiful mesa rim side ruins in central Arizona. My truck was parked just outside of the massive but now crumbled wall that had defensively surrounded the place and I was going to sleep in the bed with the ruins behind me watching the sun set behind the Bradshaw Mountains, but that slight nagging feeling of fear had overtaken me… maybe not fear, but the feeling that I was trespassing and pushing my luck… I was forced to camp some ways away after my second camping spot was vetoed by lion prints in the mud. That was Arizona though, and I don’t know much about the history of the people of central Arizona, the ones who had built those structures that are so similar to the anasazi’s. But I do know a little about Cedar Mesa and that knowledge doesn’t lend itself to the feeling of tranquility, which the area really does offer plenty of… if you’re ignorant to its past. I love cedar mesa and I can’t get enough of it but there’s a haunting feeling to the place.

Burrillo helps explain the leeriness one can get in the area when he says quote, for about six hundred years, farmers in the Bears Ears area lived adjacent to the areas they farmed, journeying to fresh water sources when needed. And then, during the early 1200s, many of them began doing just the opposite--living by their water sources and journeying to their fields. Settlements often aggregated around springs, in a possessive posture that contrasts markedly from what looks almost like a taboo against settlement in direct proximity to springs in earlier periods. End quote.

Another quote about the change to cliff dwellings comes from David Roberts In Search of the Old Ones when he says, quote, yet I also had to recognize that cliff dwellings were not the Anasazi norm: far fewer than 10 percent of all their habitations, from the Archaic period through Pueblo III, were built on ledges above the void… he goes on to say… Only in the last half of the thirteenth century did cliff dwellings predominate, and then, as experts are beginning to prove, almost surely as a response to stress and threat. As beautiful as the tourist of today finds a cliff dwelling such as Betatakin, the men and women who lived there must have sensed its cramped confinement as a compromise, an uneasy solution to a world torn by fear and hunger. End quote.

Something was pushing the original inhabitant’s backs against the wall. Something, or more likely, someone. As I’ve already mentioned, that southern faction of the Anasazi were a real threat. Enough to change one’s entire world.

On cedar mesa and comb ridge, that long wall of land that’s been pushed up by geologic forces under the earth, the settlements continued to grow larger in the 1200s as refugees from a crumbling Chaco built great kivas, great houses, towers, and pueblos in what looks like an attempt at recreating that Chacoan monumentality with a Mesa Verde flair.

If you’ve never been out to these areas, any of them that I’ve talked about, from Cedar Mesa to Mesa verde, to chaco and sleeping ute mountain or canyons of the ancients, you really should check the website. I’ll have links to pictures and descriptions of these places that I’ve been to and love. They’ll definitely help you get a feel for the place. Visually seeing these striking places helps with the story, for sure. And of course, you’ve got to get out there yourself.

But Cedar Mesa had been inhabited for a very long time. In the 700s they were making fired clay pottery but it was red as opposed to that famous black on white of Chaco and the east. Then it would switch to an orange color by the 1200s when no doubt, Chacoan refugees were spilling into the area and influencing their ways of making ceramics. Not only ceramics changed on the Bears Ears when the pushy Anasazi briefly settled in… their kivas also began to be decorated differently as well.

Just south of Cedar Mesa in the Kayenta Region of northern Arizona, the people in Navajo National Monument, were also melding their practices and ceramics with the Mesa Verde ways. And all the while, the cliff dwellings and massive pueblos were being erected in both orderly and haphazard fashion with each new settlement being connected to each other by line of site or fire hills like we discussed last time. When the settlements couldn’t see each other, they’d carve gaps into the rocks to make it happen. It seems like you can take the Anasazi out of Chaco but you can’t take the Chaco out of the Anasazi.

So the violence… this violence I keep mentioning that the people are fleeing from, uprooting themselves and their families and clans and moving to difficult terrain where they rebuild Chaco again… what kind of violence would drive people to make such a drastic change?

On the sides of boulders and cliff faces and even on the sides of ceramic vessels and pots, one can find carved or painted a litany of evidence for conflict… swords, shields, atlatls… beheadings, limbs being ripped apart, detached heads, scalps, blood pouring out of both the defenseless and figures actively defending. There is actually a surprising number of figures with weapons… sometimes the figures are behind shields, sometimes they’re seen proudly with their weapons in the open, asking for a fight. There’s even a panel somewhere in the Four Corners area with a man behind a shield, holding his weapon, while wearing what appear to be Mountain lion ears on his head, bringing to mind an image of a fierce fighter who knows his stuff.

Violence, unlike what the Pueblo Mystique would have you believe, did occur in the Southwest, and it occurred brutally, as it does everywhere. But it didn’t occur all the time. A couple episodes ago, I mentioned that during the run-up to Chaco, violence was slowly increasing but not on a grand scale… it was more of a personal type of violence… although some grand episodes did occur. But then once Chaco came to be, surprisingly, the area grew quite peaceful… maybe… It seems, at least, that the secondary state leaders and rotating princely kings were able to keep the peace among their various clans and families and groups on the whole. Which was a great thing for the people that lived during and were a part of, Chaco’s Height. Because during the lead up to the Grand Secondary State, things were getting… dicey. Pardon my gnarly pun.

Roberts, in In Search Of, talks about one of those grander scale violent episodes when he mentions a site that is dated to 700 years prior to the collapse of the Chacoan Aztec region. He says of the crime scene, quote, we know very little about violence in Basketmaker Il times, but Christy Turner (who wrote Man Corn!) But, Christy Turner and Winston Hurst's painstaking reconstruction of what happened at Cave 7 in Whiskers Draw gives a vivid look at one event. In that shallow alcove in the middle of nowhere, sometime before A.D. 500, more than ninety men, women, and children were either massacred in an all-out attack or ritually executed. It was not enough simply to kill these unfortunates: some were scalped, and some may have been tortured before death. Who they were and why they met this grisly end, we have no idea. End quote. Roberts goes on to further say of this site that, quote, the carnage involved stabbing by daggers, shooting with atlatl darts, bludgeoning, scalping, and possibly even torture. End quote.

Three hundred years after Cave 7, in a pit house dated to the mid 800s in southwest Colorado, near Mesa Verde and Sleeping Ute Mountain, another episode of extreme violence was discovered during construction of a local reservoir. In that pit house, 14,880 chopped up bone fragments… pieces of 33 individuals ranging in age from 18 months to fifty years old were found scattered along the floor. Scalped skulls, smashed forearms, and even four dismembered dogs were found amongst the ruins. But curiously, no feet or hands were discovered among the almost 15,000 purposely taken apart and disassembled piece by piece bones. These instances have become known as Extreme Processing Events. After telling my wife this story she said, it makes sense if you’re punishing someone and you don't want them to go to the afterlife. Obviously, she’s brilliant and probably correct… but it doesn’t make it any less unsettling.

That instance of extreme processing may have been a warning to the nearby settlements not to mess with what would soon be Chaco Canyon. In reality, as I’ve mentioned, Chaco may have started out as a mix of southern mesoamerican ways, and a culture that was forming independently in this very area of southern Colorado and had been around for a very long time, their ancestors being the ones who painted and etched elaborately into the cliffs, boulders, and earthen walls of the southwest. Some argue that Chaco’s initial home was Mesa verde, and others say it’s from Mexico… in reality, it’s probably both. But this event may have been staged by a proto Chaco system of rulers or government as a warning. Not long after this, the people would move down south and inhabit that Canyon in relative peace. Lekson says of the peace during Chaco that, quote, the diminution of violence during Chaco's era probably reflected Chaco’s peace-keeping or order-keeping function, enforced by periodic acts of violence. End quote. During Chaco, again from Lekson, quote, farmsteads dotted the landscape, spaced at distances that suggests an absence of fear. End quote. Some believe, and Pueblo Mystique dictates, that the rulers accomplished this region wide peaceful time by ritual… coombyeya. Lekson says it was by seldom used force. Violence. Like taking apart your family and your dogs bone… by bone and leaving them scattered around.   

In one site around the time of Chaco, one of these little farmsteads surrounded by countless others is found to have been burned… and that burned pueblo contained the remains of its occupants. Like the Extreme Processing Event just described, neither this place nor that one were ever returned to again. Clearly, those that perpetrated this were sending a message. The fact that it was an isolated incident in the middle of a bunch of untouched other pueblos suggest that message was from someone they knew, not a foreign invader, which would have no doubt burned the other farmsteads to the ground as well. Or it could have been as Plog points out, quote, trading partners one day may be bitter enemies the next. End quote. Although I don’t think the rulers at Chaco would have allowed for such petty acts of violence. I believe they themselves were the perpetrator of these acts.

Here’s an extended quote from Lekson to further push this idea that the violence, during Chaco, was state sanctioned, quote, The violence that killed (and sometimes cannibalized) people was, I think, socially sanctioned. That is, it was an expected part of the social contract (the stuff in the nasty small print) and not a surprise raid, a random war, or a barbarian invasion. Executing witches, for example, would be socially sanctioned violence… "Witchcraft," broadly defined, means not playing by the rules; witches or tax evaders, the people were just as dead… he goes on to say… Extended families or even small settlements were rounded up, executed, and then systematically butchered, cut into pieces. Not a hit-and-run raid, but something drawn out and deliberate, by guys who knew what they were about. Perhaps this spectacle was public; certainly, people for miles around would know about it. But--and this is important!-settlement patterns did not change: People continued to live in isolated single-family farmsteads. At least initially, no defensive steps were taken. And we know they knew how to defend their settlements: Later, isolated farmsteads aggregated into large towns (sometimes walled), or shifted up into cliff overhangs, and so forth. But during Chaco's reign, when these violent events were less frequent than later, settlement patterns did not change: People did not react as if there was widespread war, or random violence, or indeed anything out of the ordinary. Not that mass executions were "ordinary," but apparently the knowledge of such executions did not alter the basic settlement patterns (and all that implies: Social structures, economies, litestyles, etc.). I think that whoever did the killing had a socially sanctioned right to do so. That would be consistent with a state's use of power. End. Quote. What Lekson is describing is something he has dubbed, a socialization for fear.

David Roberts would write for the Smithsonian, in a 2003 article titled Riddles of the Anasazi about this state sanctioned violence and he would quote our boy Lekson a good bit. Roberts would explain Lekson’s quote unquote socialization for fear when he wrote that this socialization for fear produced a quote, long-lasting violence that tore apart the Anasazi culture. In the 11th and early 12th centuries there is little archaeological evidence of true warfare, Lekson says, but there were executions. As he puts it, he’s now directly quoting Lekson, there seem to have been goon squads. Things were not going well for the leaders, and the governing structure wanted to perpetuate itself by making an example of social outcasts; the leaders executed and even cannibalized them. End Lekson quote. This practice, perpetrated by Chaco Canyon rulers, created a society-wide paranoia, according to Lekson’s theory, thus “socializing” the Anasazi people to live in constant fear. Lekson goes on to describe a grim scenario that he believes emerged during the next few hundred years. Again quoting Lekson, Entire villages go after one another,” he says, “alliance against alliance. And it persists well into the Spanish period. End all quotes.

Well into the Spanish period? He may be referring to the Zuni scalp ceremony… or maybe those ceremonial heart carving knives I have mentioned multiple times that we now know were used into the Spanish times to carve out hearts after slashing the victims throat. We will get into both of those in greater detail next time.

Remember those Monumental Chacoan Roads? Could they have been used to transport armies or those goon squads in plain view of the countryside as they headed towards the state’s next victim? Wether they marched armies down their roads to outliers or not, the Chaco Aztec Secondary State definitely used violence to keep the greater region in a state of peace… peace and fear, but peace… at least until the 1200s when the civil war would bring the entire area down in a fiery furnace of burned corn and human bodies.   

  Across the Pacific Ocean, on the far off island of Lombok in Indonesia, stay with me, a catastrophic eruption exploded into the atmosphere and became one of the largest volcanic eruptions since the end of the ice age even to this day. The 1257 Samalas volcanic eruption not only wiped out entire islands of people in the Pacific but it had devastating consequences in places as far away as Europe. According to National Geographic, the eruption was quote, an estimated eight times as large as the famed Krakatau erpution of 1883 and twice as large as Tambora in 1815. End quote. Medieval texts describe atrocious weather following the eruption in the summer of 1258 which brought cold, unrelenting rain, and flooding. Bruce Campbell, no, not that one, Bruce Campbell from Cambridge has said of England, quote, in 1258, as baronial opposition to Henry III erupted and the government became locked in constitutional conflict, the country found itself in the grip of a serious food crisis. To blame was a run of bad weather and failed harvests. Thousands of famished famine refugees flocked to London in quest of food and charity, where many of them perished and were buried in mass graves. The multiple burials recently discovered and excavated in the cemetery of the hospital of St Mary Spital highlight the plight of the poor at this time of political turmoil. End quote. To sum it up is Professor Lavigne who told the BBC quote, We cannot say for sure these two events are linked but the populations would definitely have been stressed. End quote. I also can’t say for sure that Chaco Canyon was effected by this eruption across the ocean but it sure coincides nicely with it… and even the Mississippian collapse too. This massive eruption, which would have been noticed by the people who had perfectly mapped the stars and their geography, and this eruptions possible changes to the weather may have been just the sign a dissatisfied rotating ruler was looking for to crack open the Canyon and take power himself. Especially if that wannabe ruler, or revolutionary could see the growing fear and dissent among the average residents of an area that was beginning to question the main religion.

From Burrillo, quote, the downfall of Chaco, a system of community organization that encompassed the entire Pueblo world, would have been like a mountain falling into the sea--not just a single splash but a series of reverberating sociocultural tsunamis. End quote. The downfall or schism or whatever it was that happened at Chaco not only tore up the peace that had held for hundreds of years, it would eventually engulf and tear up the entire southwestern region as well. We’ve seen it recently with the invasion of Iraq where a violent leader kept the peace between waring factions for decades. Once he was gone, well… we saw what happened and we’re still seeing it. Childs says, quote, the archaeological record from the thirteenth century around the Four Corners reads like a war crimes indictment: infants and children burned alive, skeletons marked by butchery, entire villages left with bodies unburied. Rock art depicts people bearing round decorated shields and using weapons on one another. End quote.     

This would have been a civil war of Anasazi vs Anasazi. We already know the people that made up what we call the Anasazi were of differing origins and ethnicities and it’s possible the only thing holding them back from killing their neighbors were their leaders in the Great Houses. Childs says of the Civil War, quote, The attackers, it appears, were the Anasazi themselves. The Anasazi were not merely one group of people. They were many. Even in the context of a single settlement, multiple ethnicities have been found, some groups of skeletons within a pueblo displaying more injuries--both healed and fatal --than others. End quote. In Chaco Canyon proper, evidence of domestic abuse has been discovered in the buried bodies of females, probably slaves. It’s possible Chaco’s leaders raided for female slaves.

In the late 19th century the aforementioned Wetherill brothers wrote that they, quote, found the skeletons of a man and a woman, with a child twelve or fourteen years old. Their skulls had been crushed in- and the boys found that the blade of a large stone axe beside them just fitted the dents in the skulls. With the murdered three was a child only a few months old, with the bones of its skull scattered. End quote.

During the civil war, there’s evidence that granaries were raided of their stores of food. Around the countryside, palisades of wood or stone began to encircle some villages… but it didn’t always work. From Plog, quote, burned settlements where the complete artifact assemblages and burned and unburied skeletons suggest that the occupants were surprised by the fire, mass graves that include the skeletal parts of several individuals or burned bone, evidence of scalping; kiva and rock art that illustrates combat; and, in a few instances, skeletons with embedded dart or arrow points. End quote. Evidence of hammers used in bone crushings, chop marks on bones, polished bones, burned bones, there are a lot of bones scattered among burned kivas and pueblos and their surrounding areas. Skulls have been found stacked inside the ventilator shaft of kivas… faces have been chopped off of some skulls… and that practice may have turned the victim’s head skin into a deboned portable trophy wrapped around a staff, as Roberts puts it. A portable trophy complete with an elaborate hairdo and face painting.

Elsewhere on Cedar Mesa, in the Grand Gulch area, Richard Wetherill found the remains, the mummified remains of a person he dubbed Cut In Two Man. He named him that because the body had been cut completely in two through the hips and abdomen, then sewn back together with twine of braided human hair. His entrails had been removed, and not on purpose like the Egyptians practiced during the art of mummification. The Anasazi didn’t practice intentional mummification although mummies are occasionally found in the Southwest… Spread around Cut In Two Man were what appeared to be offerings of dismembered arms and legs… from other people. The reason behind this macabre scene is so far completely unknown.

At the foot of Sleeping Ute Mountain not far from the Yellowjacket Pueblo and Hovenweep and modern day canyons of the ancients lies one of my favorite hikes, the Sand Canyon hike and near there is what’s known as the Sand Canyon and Castle Rock Pueblos where what looks like nothing other than a massacre took place. Childs says, quote, Castle Rock was built around a sturdy mast of rock, a natural watchtower at the bottom of the mountain. Excavating only about 5 percent of this site, crews came upon the partial remains of forty-one bodies in a state of disarray. Most of the remains of a man with much of his face removed were found in one room, while his right leg- the bones still articulated- was found in another room more than three hundred feet away. End quote. At Sand Canyon Pueblo, a similar violent fate was discovered… unburied bodies being strewn about, evidence of scalping on adults and even an 8 year old, and the remains of a man with most of his leg bones having been smashed and splintered… while he was still alive…

Sand Canyon wasn’t a small Pueblo either, by 1250, it had a massive site enclosing wall completed in a single construction period that would have taken about 40 people two months to complete. The Pueblo had 90 kivas and 420 rooms… but researchers suggest it may have only taken 200 warriors to take it down, and scatter its residents remains, and they probably did it quickly. Inside the Pueblo, an unfinished pot, not yet with it’s paint complete was found among the rubble.

Also in Sand Canyon, Roberts describes another violent but very curious find in the ruins during a conversation with Bruce Bradley from the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center. Quote. In one Kiva, we discovered a man of about forty-five or fifty, with his skull bashed in. And he had six toes. Now Neil Judd (an older archaeologist) found a six-toed guy in the ruins of Pueblo Bonito, back in the 1920s. There are six-toed petroglyphs on the rock wall directly behind Bonito., And even today, among the Pueblos, polydactyly- having an extra toe or finger--is regarded as a special gift. End quote. 45 or 50 is old for an Anasazi, but surprisingly, polydactyly, or having six digits on one hand or foot isn’t that rare in the Ancestral Puebloan world. This is a small tangent but an extremely interesting one.

Way back in the Archaic episode of this series that talked about the ancient ones after the ice age, I mentioned, how six toes shows up all over the American Hemisphere but it especially shows up in the Southwest. I’ve personally seen them everywhere. And Childs mentions that they may signify someone with power or as being a spiritual leader. What i didn't mention was the buried dead and murdered who had six toes during the Chacoan Civil War. As strange as it sounds, it may have been a prerequisite to being a leader or princely ruler. While it did offer you possible success and riches like turquoise and a Great House, it didn’t always guarantee your safety as the six toed man at Sand Canyon who had his skull bashed in can attest. Curiously, 3.1% of the population of Chaco Canyon itself has been found to have 6 toes while only .2% of Native Americans today have them and .13% of white Americans do… I have no idea what six toes meant in the belief system of the Anasazi, but i like to think it did indeed represent movement and migration. They may have used it to harken back to a time before the Pueblos and the altepetl when they could move freely across the land. Maybe they believed someone with six toes represented the old ways when the Clovis would winter in Florida and summer at the great lakes during their relentless and never ending pursuit of the mammoths…  Maybe venerating someone with six toes was worshipping the past and the past migrations that they could no longer recreate. Or maybe they were just into weird feet.

I thoroughly enjoyed the Sand Canyon Hike in Canyons of the Ancients. I was the only person there the day I hiked amongst the beautiful ruins and meandering trail although I didn’t hike amongst the Sand Canyon Pueblo itself. The mountain, Sleeping Ute, is always there to the south looking over you as you take in the red and white sandstone and the various camouflaged ruins. It was a reverent place then… and I didn’t even know its history… But it gets worse.

At the besieged Castle Rock Pueblo, mugs have been found to contain the cooked remains of human tissue and muscle. Man Corn. An archaeologist who worked at a site in southern Colorado and found evidence of cannibalism said that the people who were killed were, quote, partially or entirely skinned, segmented, roasted, and defleshed… the crania and post cranial skeletal elements were fractured, with a focus on the larger limb-bone shafts. This fracturing is inferred to result from efforts to recover brain and yellow marrow tissue. End quote. They go on to suggest that the polished bone they found was probably boiled in the famous Anasazi ceramic pots to extract the bone grease… they also suggest the bones may have then been crushed and eaten in bone cakes or brewed in a special man corn stew. There are 19 of these sites discovered as of Plog’s 2008 publishing. It was hard to find if that number has changed in the last 14 years or not online… Pueblo Mystique would rather bury the evidence that man corn was ever indulged in… This study and others that Plog quotes does say that quote, alternative hypotheses that might account for these remains, such as ritual behavior or carnivore disturbance, have been examined and consistently found insufficient to explain all aspects of the skeletal remains. End Quote.

Elsewhere around the beautiful Sleeping Ute Mountain in Southern Colorado, Childs lays out more evidence of man corn in an extended quote.

One crew uncovered human bones scattered all over the place, as if the people had been hacked apart. They also uncovered catacombs stocked with food where they came upon more human skeletons-~-not burials, but people who had been murdered. One of the surveyors told me that his excavations looked like a crime scene- people killed trying to get away, others killed in their hiding places.

This fieldworker explained that he and his colleagues had found a grinding stone that contained crushed human finger bones. At that point they knew that the slaughter had gone beyond the bounds of customary violence. The surveyors had loosened a stone slab in the ground, exposing a deep, teardrop-shaped storage chamber below, its rounded walls lined neatly with stonework. The chamber was conspicuously empty but for a single, bold human defecation laid right in the center. One of the surveyors had done his master's thesis on pre-Columbian human feces, and he identified the material immediately, noting its pumice white color, which indicated that the person had been eating bone marrow. He said, "We shaved it down to a core that we knew would not be contaminated by any of us, and then it was tested, and they found the presence of human DNA. Not only one person’s DNA, but DNA from four different people." Whoever left the excrement had been a cannibal. End quote.

Earlier, I quoted Roberts who talked about the Man Corn author, Christy Turner and his research into the older basketmaker and archaic butchery but Roberts has a conversation with him in In Search of the Old Ones where Turner displays unmistakable evidence of cannibalism for the author:

"You need a microscope to see pot polishing," said Turner. I stared through the lens at the end of a broken tibia. "See the sheen on the outer corners of the tip?" Turner asked. I nodded. "That's the polish caused by bones bouncing around in a pot as they're being stewed.”… He later says, quote:

"The clincher," added Turner, "is that the process is exactly the same as the Anasazi used to butcher and cook antelope and prairie dog, two of their staple foods. What other possible explanation could there be?” End quote.

By a mid 90s tally, the number of cannibalism victims discovered had reached 300.

The term "man corn”, that Christy Turner uses, isn’t actually his own, but is the literal translation of the Nahuatl word tlacatlaolli, which refers to a quote, sacred meal of sacrificed human meat, cooked with corn. End quote. And Christy Turner used that term purposefully. He believes, after searching for cannibalism elsewhere on the continent and not finding any evidence for it nearby, that it came up from Mexico. He also believes, this cannibalism, which flourished from AD 900, all the way up until the end of the Chaco Aztec era, was part of Lekson’s Socialization for Fear. Meaning, the eating of people in the Anasazi world was state sanctioned and often used. Turner has this to say in Man Corn, quote: 

Terrorizing, mutilating, and murdering might be evolutionarily useful behaviors when directed against unrelated competitors. And what better way to amplify opponents' fear than to reduce victims to the subhuman level of cooked meat, especially when they include infants and children from whom no power or prestige could be derived but whose consumption would surely further terrorize, demean, and insult their helpless parents or community? ... The benefits would be threefold: community control, control of reproductive behavior (that is, dominating access to women), and food. From the standpoint of sociobiology, then, cannibalism could well represent useful behavior done by well-adjusted, normal adults acting out their ultimate, evolutionarily channelled behavior. On the other hand, one can easily look upon violence and cannibalism as socially pathological. End quote.

But they weren’t just warring amongst themselves. To the north, the Fremont were changing their entire way of living by building even more precariously and dangerously than the Anasazi in alcoves, caves, and canyon cliff edges. In the Lost World, Roberts cites archaeologist Shannon Boomgarden’s work in a prominent Fremont canyon with hundreds of sites. He explains that her research uncovered that the Fremont built hundreds of small and hidden from the valley floor granaries coupled with large and visible from the valley floor but extremely difficult to get to granaries that would have had a clear line of site from at least 8 different settlements on each valley floor. These people were building highly defensibly and keeping their precious corn as safe as they knew how. Also, an old and extremely intriguing rancher named Waldo Wilcox that Roberts got to know well, he, Waldo, adored the Fremont and knew their world like the back of his hand. He had indeed worked the land for over 50 years. But he would tell Roberts and other archaeologists, many of which didn’t believe him, that almost every strewn about Fremont skeleton he saw was littered with arrow heads and spear points.

Not far from Waldo’s ranch in a hard to reach winding canyon, the Fremont would create an enormous rock art panel depicting what look like staged battles with the Anasazi. It appears to be a type of warfare where only a few instead of the many die or are disabled though. The panels depict warriors hurtling spears and atlatls at each other with shields up and the panels are located in a massive open space, kinda like an arena. When Childs describes the old rock art hunter from Moab who showed him the panel and tells him this theory of staged warfare, I was incredibly intrigued. It reminds me of counting coup among the plains Indians or the big greek battles where only the heroes fought as armies lined up behind them. After the civil war and regional conflicts that erupted as well, the Fremont, who had been interacting with the Anasazi for hundreds of years by this point, straight up abandoned agriculture and headed further north away from these violent man corn eaters.

It’s hard to overstate the violence that erupted as Chaco collapsed and the Civil War ensued. But thankfully, it didn’t last too long. Then again, if you remember, the average age of the skeletons recovered from Chaco was 27… decades of violence could have lasted a person’s entire lifetime. Violence may have been the only thing some of the Anasazi knew.

Eventually though, the people would start to flee for the aforementioned areas like Mesa Verde, the Bears Ears, and down south into Arizona where long standing neighbors, no doubt heavily influenced by Chaco, were trying to avoid its same fate. The people of the Mogollon and Hohokam. It’s also during this time that quite a few peoples and families and clans would have said enough is enough and went to the other side of the Jemez Mountains towards the Rio Grande Pueblos, leaving Chaco and its violent man maize mess behind.

Despite the violence, the people were continuing to congregate and the population was continuing to rise. Meanwhile, a new kind of trouble was brewing. This time, in the form of all natural changes. This all natural change is known to us as the quote unquote great drought of 1277. But by then, the writing was already on the wall and according to Archaeologist Susan Ryan, the people may have been amassing after the violence to disappear together, to move to their next location on that Chaco Meridian as one big safe group.

Ryan also suggest that this ending of the era of Chaco and Aztec, this second phase post civil war was much more peaceful than Chaco’s end may have been. It appears they intentionally burned their homes and kivas, leaving their belongings inside them as the wooden ceilings caved in. In one burned Kiva, Susan found an upturned painted black on white bowl that had two baskets neatly inside them. The first basket had coarsely ground corn while the second had finely ground corn flour. Around the corn baskets inside the upturned bowl were ladles and other artifacts that were seemingly placed there on purpose before setting the place on fire. Archaeologists call this ceremonial burning and the anasazi were big fans of it. I’ve even seen burnt ruins in southeast Utah that I figured had either been set on purpose or in warfare. Which, sure these could have been set on fire as enemies approached but Susan Ryan argues that wasn’t the case. Only three hundred years before when these people left the last time, they’d done the same things then as well. But that wasn’t the first time ceremonial burning took place either. Almost two thousand years ago, there’s evidence for ceremonial burning in the American southwest, specifically this area of the four corners and southern Colorado.

But violence did continue to break out, although not as strong, and fires start to spread from pueblos and kivas wether started intentionally or through combat. That made no difference in the end, the Anasazi were amassing to migrate. The first to leave were the people of Cedar Mesa in the 1270s. Then Mesa Verde by the 1280s. In northern Arizona at Navajo National Monument, the last of the construction stopped in 1285 and by 1290, they too were heading south. The ones that stayed, and there’s evidence for small occupations after the initial mass exodus, but the ones that stayed would eventually join their brothers and sisters in either heading south on that Chaco Meridian Spiral or they would join other Ancestral Puebloan peoples. Some, like the Fremont would probably become the Ute and Hopi, but no researcher knows for certain their fate. This moving out and this migration and abandonment, it may not have been as sudden or extreme as it’s made out to be, although it did happen. Lekson says it would be wise to think of it, quote, not as a sudden last-ditch upheaval but as a series of tricklings out of the homeland stretching across the whole of the thirteenth century, and perhaps beginning in the twelfth. End quote. Regardless of how quickly the abandoment happened, by 1300, the entire Four Corners region would become completely depopulated of all Anasazi.

The old theory to help explain the complete abandon was to blame it on invading marauders like the Navajo and Apache who ran the Anasazi out of town… buuuut that doesn’t hold up to more recent archaeology. Another factor could be the rapid arroyo cutting, which is plausible and still happens today but it isn’t sufficient to explain the complete abandonment of all areas. Some have blamed the abandonment and movement on rain, or the lack thereof, but the pack up and moving began before the rains fluctuated and that period of exceptional plenty in the Southwest that happened totally and completely naturally like all climatic changes began to turn a little sour. Besides that, the evidence of disease and malnutrition at this time, doesn’t show up in the human records. Not yet, at least. As Lekson puts it, the people left in a time of good climate, and bad vibes.

But, the tree ring data does support the lack of rainfall. From 1276 to 1299, the quote unquote great drought rocks the Southwest pretty hard. But, there should have been enough stored up, right? Those Great House Palaces weren’t just for living in remember, but were also for storing the people’s excess corn. And those great house palaces had spread to encompass the whole land. At least for the first part of the drought there certainly would have been enough corn saved up. But beyond saving, Plog points out Carla Van West’s research which states that even during this drought there was quote, enough productive agricultural land to support all of the people living in the northern San Juan. End quote. But again, the moves and changes began before the drought takes hold. No new building occurs in the area starting in the year 1277, only one year after the drought began. They wouldn’t have known it was going to last another 25. So as Plog points out, the drought was probably the straw that broke the camel’s back. The final contributing factor. It only took one year of the rains not falling as they had been for hundreds of years after what was probably a rocky year from the volcano, to make an already unstable situation break out into that post Chaco Civil War and further violence before the abandonment.

I heard and read throughout college and in many of my readings for this series though that it simply just was the climate. The climate forced the Anasazi to move. The climate forced the Anasazi to break out into violence… but I think that’s projecting our own current narrative bias on the past. People don’t always dictate their live’s decisions on the climate. If that were the case, people wouldn’t live on river banks because of floods. I wouldn’t have moved to Southern California because of the current drought. And an ex US president wouldn’t have bought two properties mere feet from the ocean which he claims is going to drown us all. Plog puts it well when he says, quote, it is thus an oversimplification to see climatic change as the primary cause of the abandonment. Such views treat culture change as little more than an automatic human response to environmental stimuli, without recognizing that the people themselves are the central players. End quote.    

Plog also goes on to say something I hinted at last time when he mentions that the people may have forced their own removal from the land by over farming or more likely, deforestation. The large boom in population along with the increase in structures and fuels for fire would have decimated the precarious southwestern groves of trees. Analyzed wood charcoal from the area of Chaco Canyon and the Mimbres valley suggest the people went from the superior piñon and juniper to the inferior for fires ponderosa pine and cottonwood not because they wanted to but because it was all that was left. The decreased trees means decreased animals that depend on the trees which means decreased food for the people. Also the erosion that the deforestation would have caused was detrimental in many cases. And remember when I mentioned those San Juan Red Wares that were the new innovation of the Anasazi? Well again, that form of creating pottery used a whole lot more oxygen which would have required more trees as the oxygen would have made the fires hotter and burn faster. Not to mention the amount of construction in the southwest at this time is astounding. While I do not believe man has the power to change the earth’s environment on a global scale, I certainly believe we can change our immediate surroundings which can influence the area’s environment. There are countless historical and current examples of that all around the world unfortunately. Deforestation being a huge contributing factor to the environment of an area, especially when it comes to desertification. Even something as simple as eliminating wolves and bears from Yellowstone dramatically changed its entire landscape. For more, listen to my episode on the Bison about how the US and Canada are probably an extremely different environment than it was when they roamed.

Besides not knowing the full answer on why the Ancient ones left, the question of if they had to leave at all is brought up by Lekson when he tells David Roberts in Lost World, quote, here's the kicker: our most advanced environmental modeling.. shows us that they didn't all have to leave. Even the worst periods of the Great Drought could have supported numbers of people, and... they could have shifted gears and built canals.

The Hohokam had been doing just that for a thousand years, and the Mimbres for several centuries.

When the last villagers left the Mesa Verde area, sometime after 1280, the homelands were truly empty. If anyone stayed behind, we can't find them archaeologically. The totality and finality of the evacuations suggest to me political rather than environmental processes. Complete depopulation is unusual in history. When it happens, it often follows immense natural calamities, disasters of biblical proportions, not just a drought-"great" but no worse than several the Anasazi had previously weathered. The disaster that ended Chaco and Aztec was at least in part, and I think largely, man-made: failure of the political system.

So to piggyback off of Lekson, a more important landscape for explaining why the people left their homes is the social, cultural, and political landscape. Which… are all a lot harder for us to know since those rarely get preserved… especially in societies which do not have a written language, or at least left no record of one. What we do know is that after centuries of toying around on the Chaco Meridian, the Ancient Ones adopted a southern lifestyle and changed their entire society. They came together from all over the four corners area and built Chaco Canyon, the Great House Outliers, the pueblos, and the multi family structures that abound in the area. There are countless of these homes all over the landscape and we’ve talked all about them but it’s easy to understate just how many there were. But this new southern influenced society created their secondary state that looks a lot like the southern people’s Naual Altepetl that governed the Anasazi and kept the peace through state sanctioned violence and force and probably, maybe some sort of quote unquote religion. This religion was probably also from the south and it eclipsed what the archaic Anasazi had previously been doing with petroglyphs and pictographs. These rotating prince rulers with matrilineal heritage got along in Chaco, and then they moved to Aztec. And Aztec wasn’t anything to baulk at. It was a recreation of Chaco down to the brick. As Lekson puts it, quote, Aztec must have been the largest Ancestral Puebloan center in the Southwest for about 175 years, from A.D. 1125 to 1300-smaller by one order of magnitude than Chaco. End quote But then in the 1200s, something split the Anasazi Chacoan Polity apart… violently… and real migration, separation, and change began. The Anasazi Civil War, or Revolution, had begun and it would engulf the entire area until 1300.

Lekson calls that date, 1300, a Great Divide and says, quote, Almost every aspect of iconography--pottery, rock art, murals, everything-~-changed dramatically,. We don't know the details -we can NEVER know the details--but from its material expression it seems clear that religion changed. It's not obscure or subtle. Every Southwest archaeologist who is paying attention knows of this, as do most interested laymen… he goes on to say, there's abundant evidence for change in cosmology and religion, and to me very clear evidence of political collapse. End quote.

It looks like, to me, that the Civil War had been decided and the winner dictated the future of the Anasazi. And that future included packing up and moving down south… where that ruler or group of rulers was from or at least heavily influenced by. I think it’s entirely possible and feasible that the home team of Mesa Verde Anasazi who had come DOWN to Chaco to create something new with the Mesoamerican newcomers who had come UP to Chaco, eventually lost the war.

Maybe the Mesa Verde Anasazi were killed. Maybe they were eaten. Maybe they were exiled to the Rio Grande Pueblos. Well, the survivors definitely went to the Rio Grande Pueblos. Maybe they became slaves to the Southerners and were forced at spear point to walk the Chaco Meridian down to Paquimé with them. That’s why everything changed. The Mesa Verde Anasazi rulers lost and with it they lost the right to practice their religion, display their art, make their type of pottery, influence the region, and live as free people, so… they left.

Or maybe the Mesa Verde people won and kicked out the Anasazi who headed south and absorbed or got rid of those they came into contact with like the Mogollon and the Hohokam as we’ll discuss next time. Maybe the Mesa Verde were triumphant but felt the area of the four corners was too marred in a history of violence and man corn and terrible mistakes so they made their way east to the Rio Grande Pueblos, which were already there. They certainly would have known about those pueblos.

Shortly after the Civil War was decided, the ones who remained in the area began practicing their new Kachina Culture religion which spread from the Hopi in Arizona to the Rio Grande Pueblos near Santa Fe. But we’ll talk about that later. That religious split could have been one of the key reasons the war began in the first place. Or it could have just been one of many reasons it got so violent.

In the end though, it doesn't matter who won or lost because they both left. Maybe they reached an understanding or a truce and they both decided to vacate the area with the Anasazi going south with their religion, T shaped doors, kivas, and pottery and the Ancestral Puebloan mesa verde group going east with their newly formed Kachina way of life. Or at least, proto Kachina, and their ceremony of forgetting.

As Lekson says, despite all of this evidence for migration and destruction and abandonment, we can NEVER know the full details…

Whatever the reason, the place was abandoned, and I do not care that a 2012 textbook said that word abandoned is offensive. They claim it’s better to use depopulated which… means the same thing! Even Plog has a section titled Denouement in the four corners region which… I mean… I didn’t even have to look up in the dictionary to find the definition of the word denouement, I can clearly tell it’s another, fancier term for abandonment. Plog does use the word abandoned though, and so does Lekson, and so does Childs. Burrillo seems to avoid it, and a lot of articles, especially recent that I read avoid it as well. And yes, as Burrillo points out, the people MAY have eventually returned… maybe. The area of Bears Ears and Cedar Mesa is littered with buried ceramics and baskets filled with seeds and tools that would have been used by returning people decades or centuries later. But because the Spanish arrived and the spiral was interrupted, the Four Corners was abandoned by the Anasazi, for good. The people didn’t vanish off the face of the earth like the dolphins in Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy, but they did vacate the American Southwest. Plog puts it succinctly when he says, quote, the abandonments of many settlements and entire regions were not partial, but complete… he goes on to say… It was inconceivable for some people to leave and others to stay. End quote. In some instances, it may have been crucial for an entire group to leave because each member of the group was an important part of the cosmological glue that kept the world together. Plog again, quote, most native societies of the new world believe today, and almost certainly believed in the past, that there is no separation between culture and nature, and that the actions of their political or religious leaders can affect rainfall, agricultural yields, and virtually any other aspect of their lives. End quote. Of course, we’ve got to be careful projecting modern beliefs onto the past but, in this case, he may be right.   

Speaking of not projecting modern puebloan beliefs onto the Anasazi… I’m going to do it again… sort of. What I’m about to discuss is both a history and a belief system of modern people’s that live in the American Southwest but applies to our story as well.

While it is true that the Anasazi completely and totally abdicate from the areas we’ve been discussing so heavily, the Four Corners Region and the Southwest wasn’t itself totally depopulated. As the Ancient Ones left for the south, or possibly even before, newcomers to the area filled in the spaces they had lived. Those people are the Navajo.

In the past few months I’ve read that some Navajo tradition has them coming from the Red Ground, emerging from a hole in the Four Corners and that they’ve always been there on the lands they inhabit now. I’ve also read that they were latecomers to the area from the north and a few of their own oral traditions support this.. Beyond that, the Navajo’s language is found in northern Canada. Burrillo says this of the Navajo, quote, The Dine and Apache Tribes living in the Southwest today speak languages that are part of the Athabaskan language group, which appears to be historically centered in western Canada. Some of the dialects spoken by Indigenous groups still living in the icy white north retain enough linguistic overlap with Diné that conversation between them is still possible. End quote. When in college, I learned that they arrived mere moments before the Spanish. To back that view up, Plog states that, quote, important though they have been to the life of the region in historic times, they played no part in the story of the ancient southwest. End quote. I’m not totally sure of that anymore… although I’m not convinced it isn’t true…

Lekson says of the year 1300 that the Navajo people, quote, became the sole proprietors and custodians of the old Chacoan polity. Navajo people live in and among its ruins and have names and stories for many key features, natural or built. Those stories are often quite specific. End quote. In the last episode I mentioned how the Navajo say there was a king at Chaco who made everyone their slave. While they could have heard that from Pueblo people’s who fled around 1300, they could have also witnessed it themselves.

Okay, stay with me, I know I’m jumping around a bit and we’re not even talking about the Anasazi anymore, and of course, next year, the Navajo will have their own series starting from this time and going to the time of the Code Talkers… but this story involving the Navajo is important and will help us understand why on earth the Anasazi left and as they did, left a trail of destruction.

To the modern day Acoma, Zia, and several other Keres Pueblos, the traditional history of what’s known as White House, is a powerful story. The White House was a quote unquote notable place to the north where wonderful and terrible things happened. Lekson says some suggest White House was Mesa Verde, while he thinks it’s Chaco Canyon but it may refer to the entire Chaco / Aztec region of the Four Corners in general. Lekson quotes from these traditions when he explains that when the people left this White House of the north, searching for their center place, a place not ruled by the Anasazi, they stopped to perform a ceremony of forgetting where they left their sickness and trouble behind. That sickness and trouble no doubt contained the human sacrifice of Chaco Canyon that occurred, remember the ceremonial heart carving knife of the Mayas and the Turkey feathers that later symbolized to the Maya, human sacrifice that were found in Chaco Canyon. The Chacoan elite actually wore so much Turkey feathers… and there were just so many bones… After Chaco the region was abandoned starting in 1300, very few if any at all, modern puebloan people came back to visit the sites that were once so very important.

But to the Acoma, the White House was a place where people got power over people and the people as Lekson puts it, quote,  lived lives and created societies incorrect or inappropriate for Pueblo philosophies today- men who embraced social-political-religious hierarchy and envisioned control and power over places, resources, and people. End quote. In his retelling he is quoting Rena Switzell’s A Pueblo Woman’s Perspective on Chaco Canyon from the 2004 In Search of Chaco. Some of this information is privileged to Modern Puebloan People so I don’t want you to think I’m stealing knowledge or exploiting it.

More from Lekson, quote, The place, known as White House, was grand and glorious, but became corrupt and ripe for correction. Rather than Old Testament-style destruction, the people--following advice from their spiritual counselors-~- voted with their feet, left rulers and bad guys behind, and moved on to newer places and better behaviors. They rejected the hierarchical social structures of White House and reinvented themselves as Pueblos. End quote.

This reinvention occurred after that aforementioned ceremony of forgetting after they left White House which events to quote Lekson, were never forgotten, but the ceremony of forgetting probably ensured that the full story is remembered (and recounted) only when needed in the present- the bad example with which to correct improper behaviors. End quote.

So the Pueblo People’s who voted with their feet could have told the Navajo about the evil Chacoan government they were actively choosing to never replicate again but, that would suggest the ceremony of forgetting that they performed on their way out wasn’t the most successful. Instead, the Navajos may have been witness to the entire Chocoan fall themselves. Lekson says, quote, Pueblo peoples' traditonal histories of Chaco- and the lessons and principles learned there-~-are central to their heritage; but not perhaps the details. Navajo people know and share details. Navajo people live on that landscape and encounter the ruins every day, constantly refreshing memories through daily life. End quote.

So what do the Navajos say of the White House area that is the four corners land of Chaco and Aztec and Mesa Verde and the rest? Again from Lekson, quote, a central oppressive ruler, Nááhwútbighí, the “winner of people" (who was not a local, neither Pueblo nor Navajo) enslaved everyone (both Pueblo and Navajo) and demanded that they build him a magnificent house (Pueblo Alto) and houses for his cronies and kin (the other Great Houses); after a period of oppressive rule, the people rose up in revolt and dispatched him, either by death or by shooting him straight up to the skies or straight south back to Mexico (where he came from). End quote.

It seems the Navajo and the Anasazi combined together, according to the Navajo, and overthrew the King, sending him back to Mexico where he came from…

Christy Turner who wrote Man Corn, and Lekson, and me, and others, believe without a doubt that Chaco’s start was spurned by Southerners from Mexico. I know I’ve mentioned it before but I’ll quote Turner who states the theory quite well. In an article titled Cannibals of the Canyon for the New Yorker in 1998, Douglas Preston wrote of Turner and the Southern migrants theory, quote:

Turner directed his attention to central Mexico, to the empire of the Toltecs--the precursors of the Aztecs--which lasted from about 800 to 1100 A.D. Central Mexico, he writes, developed a "very powerful, dehumanizing sociopolitical and ideological complex," centered on human sacrifice and cannibalism used as a form of social control. Furthermore, cannibalism spread from central Mexico "into the jungle world of the Mayas and the desert world of Chichimeca" in northern Mexico. Turner concludes, "It takes nearly blind faith in the effectiveness of geographical distance ... to believe that this complex and its adherents failed to reach the American Southwest."

During the Toltec period, Turner hypothesizes, a heavily armed group of "thugs," "tinkers," or perhaps even "Manson party types" (as he put it to me in various conversations) headed north, to the region we refer to as the American Southwest. "They entered the San Juan Basin around A.D. 900," he surmises in "Man Corn," and "found a suspicious but pliant population whom they terrorized into reproducing the theocratic lifestyle they had previously known in Mesoamerica."

In other words, the flowering of Chaco society that we have so long admired--in engineering, astronomy, architecture, art, and culture--was the product of a small, heavily armed gang from Mexico, who marched into the Southwest to conquer and brutalize. End quote.

Preston later says, quote, Turner writes in Man Corn, that Mexicans did in fact make the journey northward. He notes that a skull found in Chaco Canyon had intentionally chipped teeth--a decorative trait thought to be restricted almost entirely to central Mexico. End quote.

So maybe the Navajos are right, and they teamed up with the Mesa Verde Ancestral Puebloans and won the civil war and kicked those hungry Southerners back down to Mexico. It’s also possible that the Navajo and Ancestral Puebloans who left the spiral were actually the losers. Or maybe they made the area untenable for the Anasazi to stay in. This would also help answer why when the Spanish arrived to the Southwest, they saw no Kings, because Modern Puebloan people got rid of em! They were a free people!

Something very similar happened to the Mississippians at almost the exact same time as well. Later Native Americans who were kidnapped and taken to France only to return to the United States, in particular, a man named, Kandiaronk, would tell later missionaries that they did not understand why the French put up with a king because the Indians, long ago, had disposed of theirs and vowed to never return to a time of being ruled again. He was talking about the Mississippian but he could have just as easily been describing the Southwest. Incredibly, these anti ruler, Enlightenment words were written down by these French Catholic missionaries, along with a bunch of other unheard of ideas like freedom of assembly and religion and many other ideas central to us now. These prints were obviously banned in France but some got around and even ended up across the Channel in England. Those ideas in the early 1700s were talked about and expounded upon and eventually made it back across the pond to where they originated and where they were incorporated into our founding father’s ideas which means… these fundamental western ideas like democracy, freedom, no monarchy, no dictator, etc, that we think of as being from Rome and Greece, which if you know their history, is absurd, but these ideas actually sprang forth in the new world by an entire continent of people, except maybe the pacific northwest and a few other holdouts, but these ideas partially originated in the new world by a people who were generally free and carefree. An entire continent of free people. Read any account of native Americans or europeans taken by and adopted into native American tribes and you’ll see the same theme over and over again… absolute and near complete freedom and a lack of desire to return to the white man’s world when rescued… one of the most amazing books I’ve ever read, the dawn of everything, talks about that and it blew me away. But modern pueblo societies also overthrew their leaders at Chaco and Aztec and remade their society in much the same way. Modern Pueblo people’s cultures and ways of life are a reaction AGAINST Chacoan political systems, not a development FROM them, as Lekson puts it. 

We will NEVER know exactly what happened to the Anasazi and Ancestral Puebloans during their war and before the abandonment. We will never know if the Navajo aided them in their plight… but we do know that what happened was shocking. Shocking, violent, and system ending. Neither side of the civil war looked the same after it was over. Sure, both sides retained a lot of Chacoan grandeur but both sides diverged and changed. We know the Anasazi head south and absorb mogollon and hohokam aspects as they head down to Mexico to disappear for real… maybe disappear for real, we’ll see about that… and we do know the Ancestral Puebloans either stick to their mesa tops on the New Mexico, Arizona border or head to the east and to the Rio Grande where they attempt to remake themselves. But in that period of remaking themselves over the course of the next couple hundred years the modern puebloans not only forget how to make the black on white, that all important ancestral puebloan anasazi black on white pottery and its sister iterations, but they also forget how to flintknap arrowheads anywhere near as good as their ancestors. To this day, the modern puebloans cannot recreate the Anasazi pottery. That may be a purposeful decision to forget, since ceramics came north with the cannibalism, but we can’t know for sure. While we DO know the modern puebloan peoples and others are descendants of the ancient ones that inhabited those mesa tops, canyon wall alcoves, and great houses, we cannot always rely on their oral traditions. As one old timer archaeologist put it to Roberts, quote, the Hopi oral traditions aren’t worth the paper their printed on. End quote. I think that’s a bit harsh but it does hint at some truth. Remember, there were multiple world shattering events for these people from the Anasazi Civil War to the Spanish, to the diseases and Jesus, all the way up to the Americans. All of these events and a whole lot more we don’t know about would have profoundly disrupted and altered these people’s way of life, culture, and how they viewed their history.

At the same time the modern day puebloan’s ancestors were finding their center place as they left the Chacoan Lands after the civil war, at the same time as they were forgetting how to fire the pottery and chip away to make arrowheads and spear points nearly as well as their ancestors, at the same time that they were adopting the ceremony of forgetting and the Kachina Culture, for centuries, the modern puebloan’s ancestors lived in a world with much more violence then there had been during the heyday of Chaco. The Civil War’s lasting effects took half a millennia to wear off. This would have also deeply affected how the Ancestral Puebloans viewed their world and their past. It would have altered their oral traditions. After the ancestral puebloans were left to inherit what was left of the southwest, the ancestral puebloans built defensive structures, battled, warred, adopted beleaguered tribes and clans as either refugees or as more fighters, escorted many captives off their pueblo’s front porch, aka, the sheer side of a mesa walls, and even wiped out entire villages of men, women, and children that stood in their way on their journey to their center place. Later Spanish would write about these events and the Puebloans fighting prowess and would comment on their Puebloan communities when they recorded that they were an effective impediment to siege and battling. The ancestral, now puebloan peoples were quite practiced in the arts of defense and warfare, which we will get into next time… don’t fall for that Pueblo Mystique. But at the same time, don’t be insensitive to living people’s histories. It’s a fine line to carefully walk across but for me, I’m interested in the truth of what happened. Or as close to the truth as we’ll find and I am not afraid to say it like it is, or like how I see it.

Okay, I am a little afraid. After David Roberts published his book, in search of the old ones in 1996, he was barred from entering national parks… barred! He wasn’t even offered permits on BLM land! Rangers and staff hated him and would scoff at him and his requests and ticket him. He had to go to the freakin capital and talk with lizard people, I mean politicians about being allowed back onto public lands all because of a book. Some academics reviled him. Other writers, besides Roberts are hated by Puebloans for talking about their history in a light they don't like and are barred from entering their sovereign lands… There are real life consequences to innocent words, sometimes. In a world where you can be sued a billion dollars for talking… I am a little afraid. I don’t want to piss off the wrong people but I do want to search for and tell the best history and story that i can.

As Childs puts it, the archaeological evidence of the southwest paints the picture of an extremely densely populated area where it would have been impossible to avoid encountering another person every half hour yet by the early 1300s one could have walked for hundreds of miles before seeing another living soul. We will never know the exact reason why the Chaco and Aztec polity began to tear itself apart, literally and figuratively but by 1300, the dominoes had fallen, the kivas were burned, and the pueblos were surrounded by ritually smashed pottery as the people, sometimes quickly, left the Four Corners. I say sometimes quickly because at some locations, tools, food, and heavy objects were left behind in the middle of being used. Corn cobs have been found to be half crushed in metates with the mano nearby. The spiral was beginning to turn into itself. By that year, 1300, there are not enough human beings remaining to have left an archaeological impact in the southern Colorado, bears Eras, or Cedar Mesa region. The Four Corners was essentially empty.

On the periphery of the Old Chaco World is where the people that stayed would settle into. Areas like Black Mesa of Arizona where the ancestral Hopis lived, west central New Mexico where the ancient Zuni resided, sections of the little Colorado River, the Mogollon Rim, The Salt and Gila River basins, Northern Mexico, the Rio Grande Valley, and Antelope Mesa in Arizona. We will return to all of those places and the people who stayed in them in the American Southwest but who had left the Chacoan world of the four corners, but first we’re going to follow the faction of Anasazi that headed south into the mountains of northern Mexico. So from here on out, we’re walking, get your sandals on and do some stretching. We’ve got 400 miles of deserts and mountains to cross.

I was not going to end right here, I’m only halfway through the material I had wanted to cover for this episode. I thought it would have been great to listen to the decline of Chaco and Aztec and then follow the fiery migration of the Anasazi to Northern Mexico through the southern American southwest and across the tortilla curtain all in one big adventure but… this seems like an incredibly natural place to take a break. So, you can take them walkin’ sandals off and rest a bit. But next time, we will be heading deeper into the spiral as we track the Anasazi and their trail of destruction and abandonment all the way into the high cliffs of the Sierra Madres where their trail eventually does go cold after the Spanish stumble upon their T shaped doors and their army of tens of thousands of Anasazi soldiers.