The Ancient Ones: Man Corn, Mesoamerica, & The Chacoan Anasazi

“Quetzalcoatl—he was the wind; he was the guide, the roadsweeper of the rain gods, of the masters of the water, of those who brought rain. And when the wind increased, . . . the dust swirled up, it roared, howled, became dark, blew in all directions; there was lightning; [then it was said that he] . . . grew wrathful. —Fray Bernardino de Sahagún (1540–1585), Franciscan priest and historian.”

I would like to paint y’all a picture. At times its a pretty picture. But more often than not, the painting’s got a tinge of darkness to it. Imagine… Francisco Goya’s Saturn Devouring his Son kinda darkness. But at least the picture also includes adventure and travel and many a mystery. The picture I want to paint for you, dear listener, is the story of the Chacoan Anasazi.

It is true, I have done a very exhaustive series over the Ancient Ones or Anasazi already but I’ve learned so much more since then. I’ve read books, articles, papers, I’ve attended lectures, and spoken with researchers and archaeologists. I have since visited so many more sites and gained quite a bit more insight. All of this has helped to better paint this picture of what the heck was happening with the Chacoan Anasazi of the Four Corners region of the American Southwest. 

Only a little bit of this will be a review. I’ve tried to limit quoting from myself from my older eight long and intense episodes over the Ancient Ones of the southwest that spanned from the Ice Age all the way up to the arrival of the Spanish. I read only new sources or books I’d never read before for this one. Most of this episode, rather long episode, will be new and exciting information, I promise. 

I would say this picture or painting I have created, it used to be a lot more controversial than it is now. But this painting is actually gaining some ground as the keepers of the flame retire. That old flame being, the belief in the totality of the tortilla curtain. Or, the belief that the Chacoan Anasazi developed independently and separately, with no influence whatsoever, from the Mesoamericans. This tortilla curtain, the US Mexico border, it was as real back then as it is today, these researchers tend to believe. It seems like a rather absurd belief, but there are plenty of archaeologists who say the Ancestral Puebloans, as they call them, were not influenced by Mesoamericans and to think so is doubting the ability of the people of New Mexico who inhabit the Rio Grande, or the Hopi, or the Zuni. If you believe the Ancient Ones had influence from Mesoamerica, then they posit that you are suggesting the Puebloans have an inability to form a high culture. Again, it’s absurd.

The Spanish, the French, the English, and the Germans all created their own high culture. A culture which would not have been possible without the influence and invasions by Rome. Then, later, these European rulers of high culture sought to justify their own regimes by being recognized by the seat of regional power. Often times this power was foreign. Yet, they still longed for validation. Were the ancient southwesterners any different?

Timothy Pauketat wrote a great book I used a lot in this episode titled Gods of Thunder: How Climate Change, Travel, and Spirituality Reshaped Precolonial America. It is a great read and it ties together a lot of Mesoamerica, the Southwest, and even the Mississippians. His was the last book I read for this episode and it only affirmed the painting I was creating in my mind. In Gods of Thunder though, in relation to what I was just saying about distant polities gaining validation from regional leaders, he wrote, quote: European rulers routinely journeyed to Rome or Jerusalem to have their authority affirmed by the pope. Likewise, Islamic sultans and caliphs traveled to Mecca to pay homage to the powers on which their own authority rested. End quote. Again, I ask would the Anasazi of the American Southwest had been any different? After all, they weren’t that far from massive Empires to their south.

If Rome had no written language to document all of this historical truth about their presence in Europe outside of the Mediterranean, if Cesar hadn’t painstakingly documented his invasion of Gaul and how Rome shaped northwestern Europe, would archaeologists today assume that these places in northern Europe developed similar technology, architecture, and ways of life, even religions… like Christianity. Would researchers today assume that these European places developed independently if Rome were an illiterate society? If they were Southwestern archaeologists, then they probably would.

So there are archaeologists that believe still to this day that the people of the Four Corners, the Anasazi, they developed their Great Houses and art and culture completely separate from the same people who brought them corn and ceramics and chocolate and Macaws and… I’ll be getting into it. Again, it’s absurd. If there is a frontier, it will be conquered. The Spanish themselves, after conquering Mesoamerica, continued further north into the southwest. And they accomplished that on the exact same roadways that the mesoamericans used to travel north on. And the same roadways the southwesterners would travel southwards on towards the kingdoms and empires of Mesoamerica.

I attended a lecture in Santa Fe with Steve Lekson in the summer of 2024 and while this isn’t a direct quote, I am quoting from my notes I hastily wrote while he spoke and he said something to the affect of quote, Was Chaco unique? Unlikely. For 2,000 plus years down south there were states and empires. The Chacoans tried everything. They didn’t come up with something new. Chaco is not unique in north America. They didn’t have to make everything up themselves. They can borrow. End quote.

Lekson and others have also pointed out that Southwestern Archaeology suffers from the Tortilla Curtain and the lack of communication between American and Mexican archaeologists. Not to ruffle too many feathers, but the Puebloans themselves do not help the way archaeology and the study of the Southwest has developed either. American geographer Carl Sauer has even pointed out this fact when he said, quote, The notion of independence and isolation of the Southwest would not have arisen, it seems to me, if, historically, Mexico had been the center from which archaeological studies had spread into North America. End quote.

In other words, we’ve been looking at the development of Chaco and the Anasazi all wrong.

This fact is the imprimatura or bottom layer or underpainting of the canvas that I have been creating of the history of the American Southwest.

Despite my series over the exploration and disappearance of Everett Ruess being an exciting adventure, despite my harrowing and exhaustive history of the Apaches, and despite my thoroughly extensive series over the Civil War in the Southwest, my series over the Ancient Ones, especially over the Anasazi, they have been my most popular and listened to episodes. So I think it’s time to give the people what they want.

My goal though, is to tell the complete tale of the Chacoan Anasazi. While I will be attempting to answer a lot of questions, I will also be asking quite a few and I will straight up theorize out of my own noggin’ a handful of times. I’m also giving y'all new theories I read about. I’m warning you, I could get some stuff wrong, but I believe I am getting a lot of it right. If I am incorrect though, I am not, nor will I ever be afraid to say so. After all… I’m just guessin’.

So gather ‘round, hopefully you’ve worked up an appetite, and let’s explore the Anasazi. Tonight… I’m serving Man Corn.

To paint the picture, we must start at the beginning.

Whenever you place the arrival of the first people to set foot in the new world, whether that be 23,000 years ago or 15,000 thousand years ago, these newcomers travelled great distances to get here. Wether they came from the east and the north Atlantic or from the west on boats or by foot across the bearing straight, the earliest Americans travelled enormous distances to arrive at their new home. A home seemingly devoid of humans. But a land filled with terrifying yet tasty woolly beasts with all manner of claws and teeth. It was a hard life but I tend to imagine it was a glorious one.

Once in the new world, these people hunted the giant bison, the mastodons, and the mammoths. Most likely, they hunted them out of existence. I am now firmly in that camp. Hunting these beasts became a religion to the Clovis, until the beasts were all gone and agriculture had to take their place. But when I say these people hunted the mammoths, I mean they walked from the now submerged flatlands of Florida and the gulf of America across the country to the Rockies. Traveling and distance were no problem to these newcomers.

There’s that recent discovery at White Sands in the land of Enchantment that shows the 22,000 year old drag marks of sticks that would have been pulled behind the people. These long poles, really, they would have been loaded with stuff. The poles were tied together to make an X and the Pre-Clovis people’s accouterment would have been lashed to the X. It’s also very likely that dogs were used to haul what the people needed to survive the harsh Pleistocene and early holocene.

When the giant mammals disappeared, the people used Bison jumps to send thousands of animals crashing to their deaths. Or the people may have followed the billions of birds that frequented the many massive lakes that dotted the land before the altithermal dried them all up.

Then, if you’ll remember from my Mammoth Eaters in the Playground of Giants and Before Chaco Episodes, the American Southwest became uninhabitable by most mammals over the size of a rat. Except of course the heartiest of creatures.

That exceptionally hot and dry period would eventually end after the various American Indian tribes passed a lot of expensive Green New Deal legislation, the land, after costly progressive action, would have then became inhabitable once again and the mammals returned. And that included humans. 

Eventually, to the south though, people began to coalesce into cities and city states who were ruled by the various people like the Olmec and the Maya.

And it’s down here, in Mesoamerica, where we really begin to paint this picture of the Chacoan Anasazi and their quote unquote mystery.

The first known depiction of the Feathered Serpent is from the Olmec site of La Venta on the Gulf. It was carved as a bas relief on Stela 19 and it was produced around 900BC. Nearly three thousand years ago. This feathered serpent on stela 19 would eventually morph into the well known and famous Quetzalcoatl. Now of course, there’s debate about that evolution but it would be silly to assume the later cultures in the same region developed the feathered serpent independently of their mother culture.

800 years later, by around 100BC, the feathered serpent would be the leading religion at one of the most incredible places in the new world. Probably one of the most incredible places in the entire world.

And then, at this most incredible of cities, between 100 and 200 AD, in the grand cultural center that is known as Teotihuacan, the Pyramid of the Sun was completed. Besides being the third largest pyramid in the world, this completion was significant because it marked a huge cultural shift at this massive city that is estimated to have been home to around 125,000 people. Although a few centuries later it would be home to upwards of 250,000. This cultural shift saw the Teotihuacanos switch to… whatever it is they worshiped at this new pyramid of the sun, but they switched to a new religion, FROM the feathered serpent cult. The feathered serpent and its cult with its massive feathered serpent temple, they had been the highlight of Teotihuacan. Right up until the pyramid of the sun’s completion.

In Timothy Pauketat’s very fun book Gods of Thunder, he writes this of the feathered serpent, aka Quetzalcoatl, and his temple at Teotihuacan, quote:

Officially called Quetzalcoatl, this serpent god wraps around each level on the façade of an early construction of the Temple of Quetzalcoatl in bas relief, the tails shown with carved rattles and the heads protruding outward as sculptures with open, fanged mouths. One might reach into the mouths with one’s hand and leave offerings. In between serpent carvings are repeated depictions of Tlaloc, the goggle-eyed god of water, and carved and painted portrayals of marine gastropod and bivalve shells. End quote.

These three motifs, the feathered serpent, the rain god with the goggle eyes, and shells will be a repeated theme throughout this episode which will help strengthen my story of a very connected North and Central America.

At around 300 AD, though, at the imperial city of Teotihuacan, this elaborate temple of the feathered serpent was ransacked and burned. Or at least it appears that way in the archaeological record. And with that destruction, Teotihuacan seems to have abandoned the cult of the feathered serpent. The sculptures were torn down and on top of this pyramid the Teotihuacanos built a new platform.

It’s safe to say that with this change in beliefs, the leaders of this cult, the cult of the feathered serpent, they were probably exiled. But their power did not wane and it would eventually resurge. It wouldn’t even take them very long to stage a comeback either.

In 378AD, at the beautiful but impractically located Mayan Guatemalan City of Tikal, a group of feathered serpent cult leaders and warriors overtook the city, deposed the rulers, and subsequently dominated the region for quite some time. If you’re wondering what the ruins look like, George Lucas used the ruins as the setting for the Rebel Base in a New Hope. They are incredible and tall pyramids that tower over the jungle. So in that year, according to Mexican archaeologist Linda Manzanilla, quote, In 378 a group of Teotihuacanos organized a coup d'etat in Tikal, Guatemala. This was not the Teotihuacan state; it was a group of the Feathered-Serpent people, thrown out of the city. End quote.

This wouldn’t be the only place the exiled feathered serpent cultists and warriors would overtake, either. Around this time, these exiled peoples began to spread around Mesoamerica, just outside of the influence of the great center of Teotihuacan.

Another group of feathered serpent warrior cult members headed northwest of Teotihuacan and became the foundation for what would later be known as the Toltec People or Empire. This empire would eventually stretch from the Yucatan coast and Chichin Itza, to Tula, and then over to a place on the Gulf known as Huastec and even up to a place we call La Quemada and… most likely, even further north.

Archaeologist and author Christy Turner wrote in his 1998 book Man Corn, of the Toltecs and Teotihuancos and he said, quote:

Around 200 B.C. the centralized and stratified Teotihuacan culture developed, with human sacrifice associated minimally with the Pyramid of the Sun. By A.D. 300 Teotihuacan dominated much of central Mexico, but in about 650 it was looted and violently destroyed. The Toltecs then emerged all powerful. End quote.

No one knows why Teotihuacan was destroyed or what that really looked like. It had been for centuries the main base of power and influence in central Mexico. Many archaeologists theorize that Teotihuacan was this democratic and egalitarian city with no defenses… who knows, I’m not here to argue against the merits of that conclusion. But it sure does sound very Pueblo Mystique, doesn't it? Regardless, Teotihuacan fell and the pre-Toltecs swooped in to fill the vacuum.

Central America, after the fall of that great city center, was thrown for a loop as everyone reoriented themselves around whatever power base was nearest. But as I mentioned earlier, the feathered serpent clan had gained quite a foothold in various regions around Teotihuacan. Tim Pauketat in Gods of Thunder writes, quote:

According to the Mexican historian-archaeologist team of Alfredo López Austin and Leonardo López Luján, this was the time of a nascent pre-Toltec horizon, when leaders ruled a series of lesser diasporic communities populated by diverse citizens in which the old Teotihuacan god, Quetzalcoatl, was reimagined in many localities across Mexico. End quote. 

I opened the episode with a description of Quetzalcoatl from the Spanish Priest and Historian Fray Bernardino de Sahagún but he went on to describe Quetzalcoatl further and Tim Pauketat sums him up with, quote: Quetzalcoatl was the wind. He guided the rain gods and spoke with thunder. Besides being seen in storms and heard through thunder, Quetzalcoatl was also seen in the stars. He was identified with the morning star, Venus, by the Aztecs, if not also by Mississippians and their Caddo cousins along the Arkansas and Red Rivers. End quote.

He just mentioned the Caddoans and I will later as well. The Caddoans and Cahokians also fit into this broad picture I am painting for y’all today.

So Teotihuacan falls and once again, the Feathered serpent clan emerges victorious. Maybe it was this growing feathered serpent religion that surrounded Teotihuacan that ultimately led to its downfall. Regardless, the Toltecs, members of this warrior cult, believed they were descendants of the feathered serpent himself, Quetzalcoatl.

Scholars still argue about the influence of the Toltec in Mesoamerica. Some say it was immense and reached chichin itza and Tulum, as I mentioned earlier. Yet others say it was just a regional player and the similarities of the Toltec horizon are just coincidental. A 2003 study by Michael E Smith and Lisa Montiel specifically say that the Toltecs were more of a Kingdom and their influence on other cultures was negligible at best. I definitely disagree with this, but what if Smith and Montiel were looking in the wrong direction. As in to the south and east of Central Mexico. What if the Toltecs and their feathered serpent cult did have influence, enormous influence… but to the north? At a place called… Chaco Canyon. Or at another, even further place known as… Cahokia.

The Toltecs were, besides feathered serpent warriors, they were traders and they had a vast trading network that was centered around a place known as Tula Grande. That is, after La Quemada fell. But Tula Grande, as I have mentioned many times led a trading network that spanned a good chunk of Mexico. Almost the entire country. They traded heavily in obsidian and they had obsidian workshops. They also traded heavily in turquoise. Turquoise they received from the American Southwest.

Some important centers post Teotihuacan, besides Tula, were two places known as La Quemada and Alta Vista. These places were quite significant from about AD 600-900. These weren’t heavily populated areas, mind you, but rather they were according to Tim Pauketat, quote, administrative and ritual centers into which farmers would travel for ceremonies—not unlike Chaco Canyon and many Maya cities of the day. End quote. These were places that people ventured towards to probably pay taxes and tribute, learn some mystery religion, or just visit the city centers of the day. Much like many Americas vacation to DC. These two places were also the precursors to that city I mentioned a few times, Tula. And these sites may have been ancestral homes of the Toltecs themselves.

Pauketat in Gods of Thunder also suggests that at this same time, the six to eight hundreds, this time period saw a group of northern Mexican Indians, the Chichimecs, who lived in the desert, they probably moved south during this period to help build Tula for the Toltecs. When I say help build, I mean they may have been helped along by the point of an obsidian spear. Then again, they may have just wanted to be a part of something larger.

What if though, what if a people just north of the Chichimecs also ventured down well worn roads to witness the construction of the incredible structures at La Quemada? What if word got to a few local leaders or adventurous young men way up in the mustard colored desert of the San Juan Basin?

The people who would later live in the Chaco Phenomenon traded with the Mesoamericans, after all. They knew the Toltecs or broader Mesoamericans were there. They learned how to plant their corn and they’d received quite a bit of technology from them already. And the pre-Chacoans probably heard rumors from wandering priests of the feathered serpent religion or Toltec traders of the unbelievable things happening to their south. One can picture a brave warrior wishing to adventure south with this priest or trader on their journey back down to see what all the hubbub was about. One could even imagine he returned to the Four Corners with incredible knowledge and power… and maybe even a few, what the Americans called during the cold war, military advisors were also accompanying him… Toltec fathered serpent Military advisors… more on that later.

When the trading hub of La Quemada was abandoned, the people most certainly migrated south towards Tula to inhabit that all important kingdom of the Toltecs. This is all supported by Aztec legend which was recorded by that previously mentioned Fray Bernardino Sahagún. Pauketat writes, quote:

Aztec legend supports this idea. The Aztec believed that both their ancestors and those of the Toltecs came from the north, from Chichimeca. In fact, archaeologists studying La Quemada and Alta Vista report the commonplace practice of ancestor veneration and human sacrifice, reminiscent of the later Aztecs. Specifically, parts of people were publicly displayed on the monumental walls at La Quemada until they fell off, accumulating in the rubble at the base of the structure. This practice included the hanging of human legs and arms from ropes down stone façades in the central precinct. It also seems to have involved the political-ritual integration of desert farmers living in some two hundred village settlements around the monumental complex. On special occasions, formal processions of farmers would enter La Quemada, pay homage to the great ancestors and elites, bring in necessary supplies and foodstuffs, look at the rotting human limbs hung on ropes, and then return home. End quote.

Now, there’s a lot to unpack here. First of all, a large ceremonial city center that had political ritual integration of desert farmers living in some two hundred village settlements around the central precinct… that certainly sounds familiar? Then there’s the fact that this central complex took in wealth and food from these neighboring desert farmers who would have been in awe at the grand architecture? Pueblo Bonito, anyone?

But also, the imagery of rotting hanging limbs that would have been seen by outside residents who pilgrimaged on special roads to the city center… it’s gnarly but it would have been a powerful statement. I have no idea if this occurred at Chaco Canyon but it would have been quite the image for these farmers. Imagine the chacoan roads bringing in hard working and poor agriculturalists who had to pay their tax and hanging on the great houses were rotting human limbs. Maybe they even knew who the limbs once belonged to…

As you’ve noticed, I’m trying to tie in Mesoamerican practices with the Chacoan Anasazi, but as I will point out later, the Chacoans don’t absorb and use every aspect of their southern neighbors. But now I need to know if disarticulated bones have been found at the base of the Great Houses at say… Pueblo Bonito.

With Teotihuacan’s downfall and then the abandonment of La Quemada, the Toltecs took over regional trading and distribution at Tula, a city which was curiously made mostly of adobe. Chaco Canyon after all, is partly adobe and partly stone. But very importantly, Paquime, which I will talk about later, is made of adobe or as Lekson puts it, bowling balls covered in mud.

Archaeologist Christy Turner of Man Corn fame, wrote of these Toltecs during this time and said quote, between roughly A.D. 800 and 1000, waves of diverse Mexican traits were carried into the American Southwest by cultists, priests, warriors, pilgrims, traders, miners, farmers, and others fleeing or displaced by the widespread unrest and civil war in central Mexico. In this chaos-driven refugee scenario, a mishmash of Mesoamerican culture and language features would be expected to have reached the Southwest. End quote. Indeed, it would have.

But before we get to the southwest, we should talk about another place that saw an influx of refugees around this same time.

Between 800 and 1300 AD, something that is now known as the Medieval Climate Anomaly or the Medieval Warm Period, ravaged much of Central America. It caused the rains to cease for the Maya which most likely led to the downfall of that great civilization as they knew it. It forced them back into the jungle and to congregate around whatever water sources they could find. Alternatively, it allowed the American Southwest to have more predictable rainfall, but more on that later.

The Maya world was torn upside down by this drought and climate anomaly which forced a group of Maya from the Yucatan peninsula to look for hope elsewhere. It seems they found it at around 900AD at a place called Huasteca which was at the mouth of the Panuco River. The Panuco River drains into the Gulf of America but the river itself begins on the Mexican Plateau and the rivers that merge into it can take you right into the heart of Tula or the heart of the Toltec Empire.

This Huesteca spot is important because the Maya brought a few religious beliefs with them that would spread through the Toltec world and eventually make it to North America. But conversely, it’s very probably that after the Toltec center at Tula chica was burned, that Toltecs came to Huesteca as well. I believe both groups, Maya and Toltec, immigrated to these Huasteca lands.

Huesteca is an important story because it highlights the fact that people moved. Or migrated. Sometimes over great distances. Especially when times get tough. Remember that the entire southwest was abandoned by mammals and humans alike during the altithermal. Lekson has mentioned this long distance movement and Pauketat reiterates it when he wrote, quote, Lekson’s point that distance was no great obstacle in the past is verifiable through archaeology and history. End quote.

I talked at great length in the previous Anasazi series about migrations and how the Puebloans could and did move great distances with ease. The Raramuri or Tarahumara come to mind. The Apaches, although Athabaskan, were also great walkers and runners who were not bothered by the harsh terrain of the Southwest, despite being from the far Northwest. The ability to travel great distances on foot seems to have been passed down from the Clovis themselves as I mentioned earlier.

At this somewhat Maya, somewhat Toltec Huasteca site though, the site’s name in particular is Tamtoc, but at Tamtoc there is evidence of something known as the Voladores. This is a long quote, and it’s from Paukatet but he describes the Voladores acrobatic pole ritual perfectly. And, by the way, Voladores is Spanish for flyers. Pauketat writes, Quote:

The flyers, usually five men, parade out to a vertical, freestanding pole, traditionally planted in a hole (or post pit) in the ground, extending 100 feet or more into the air. Then, in front of the gathered community, blowing conch-shell trumpets and playing the flutes of the Wind-That-Brings-Rain god, the flyers climb to the top of the pole, around which four ropes, attached to the pole, are then wound. The opposite ends of these ropes are attached to four flyers and draped across a rotating, four-sided, wooden framework on which the men sit. The fifth man, high above the crowd, with a breeze in the air, stands on the tiptop of the pole and, risking his life, plays a flute and dances. When ready, the other four men—often costumed as birds—lean back and drop their bodies off the top of the pole, from which the ropes begin to unwind. From that point, centrifugal force flings the bird-men outward as their upside-down bodies spin and rotate around the pole clockwise and slowly descend back down to the ground. In their spiral motion, the voladores reenact the circulatory motions of winds and storms, if not the body of the feathered serpent, Ehecatl-Quetzalcoatl. End quote.

I will mention these voladores again in connection with the mysterious world tree at Pueblo Bonito. But also later with the Mississippians.

On the other side of Mesoamerica, along the Pacific Coast, another group were emerging around this time of 850AD and they were known as the Aztatlan culture. They were centered along the coastal highlands of the Pacific and their leaders were no doubt Toltec nose ring wearing elites that were in the Quetzalcoatl or feathered serpent religion. The Aztatlan people were famous for facilitating trade in cacao and copper bells… two things that will become important when we finally talk about Chaco Canyon.

But in this same area on the Pacific coast of Mexico, long before the Aztatlan tradition, their ancestors were building circular earthen pyramids and putting a giant pole on top. It’s believed these people created the Voladores tradition around 300AD before it spread all the way to the other coast, most likely via the Toltec. And then the Voladores tradition would make its way up into the southwest, before finally reaching Cahokia in modern day Illinois.

300AD is an interesting time for these people to have begun a new tradition… it’s interesting because it coincides with the banishment of the feathered serpent cult from Teotihuacan.

All this is to suggest that the Toltec empire which would rise up after the fall of Teotihuacan, had been forming little satellites which surrounded that enormous center of Teotihuacan. And once that city fell, these places would flourish. And they would spread out in all directions… just like a spiral or like the inside of a shell. They would spread from the Yucatan at Chichen Itza and Tulum, to Guatemala, all the way to El Salvador, over to the pacific coast of Mexico, and up into the American Southwest, before arriving on the Mississippi River. And everywhere they went, they brought similar beliefs and practices.

By around 1000AD, after Chaco had taken off, there were countless examples of Mesoamerican influences in the canyon. Just to name a few, archaeologists have found corn, macaw birds, chocolate, chiles, cylindrical vessels, copper bells, effigy vessels, rattle handled dippers, colonnades like those at la Quemada, massive roof supports that rested on giant stone wheels like at Tula, ceremonial wooden canes or swallowing swords, altar components of wood, T shaped doorways, iron pyrite mosaics, shell trumpets, shell beads, shell bracelets, tower Kivas, tri walled structures, and platform mounds. Not to mention, the heart carving knife or Toltec Tecpatl. 

How did all that stuff get there? How much influence did the Mesoamerican toltecs really have on the Chacoan Anasazi?

Well, before we can talk about that, let’s get up to speed on the Chacoan Anasazi themselves.

Around AD 500, lots of basketmaker sites begin popping up in the incredible and seemingly religiously significant Chaco Canyon. Already by 500, the Canyon was the center of the Chacoan universe. It would only become more so as time went on.

By the late 700s, in the Anasazi lands of the Four Corners region of the American Southwest, small scale battles were beginning to erupt. Settlements were being broken into and walls were being destroyed. Timber barricades were burning and homes were torn down. Bodies were being left unburied where they were killed. It was a violent time.

I’m not actually sure who the perpetrators were. It could have been people from the north. It could have been people from the south. Or it could have been the Hohokam. At this time, the people of the Four Corners were living in pit houses and they were scattered about the land. They had small time farming plots but they were doing a lot of hunting and gathering. They may have begun to encroach on Hohokam lands to take the all important meat near the Mogollon Rim. Or the Hohokam may have had a ritualistic way of boys becoming men by going to war and the backwoods Anasazi were easy prey. I’m really not sure. But what I am sure about is the growing complexity of civilization, farming, and the control of water that the Hohokam were exerting in their region would have been amazing to the Anasazi. Pauketat cites Lekson when he discusses this. He wrote, quote, Lekson, an expert in Mogollon and Pueblo archaeology and a popular figure with his own cult following, suggests that the early Epiclassic (Colonial) growth of the Hohokam shocked and awed the backwater Basketmaker-period and early Pueblo-period farmers to the east and north. Up through the 700s, these proto-Anasazi still lived in small pithouse villages. End quote.

It could have also been, as Lekson suggests violence between individual families or clans, he said the violence was more akin to quote, a lower level of raiding and feuding, comprising sporadic, situational tit for tat conflicts on a family or small group scale. End quote.

The lack of a central form of government or leading body was making life even more difficult than it already was for the scattered people of the Colorado Plateau. These raids, as well as the necessity to farm every single piece of arable land, may have led the people of the Four Corners to consolidate.

Later on in the 700s, most of these proto-Anasazi had congregated together in above ground housing and they were attempting to mass farm. But each locale was different so there was a lot of trade between these various peoples. This wasn’t really trade with their neighbors. After all, their neighbors would have had similar rainfall patterns. No, this was more long distance trade amongst the Four Corners people. 

Curiously, in the late 700s, Chaco Canyon, which had up to this point, plenty of small farmsteads, well those were mostly abandoned. The entire canyon seems to have been abandoned except for three particular places we call Great Houses. These three Great Houses actually began to expand and grow larger in the late 700s.

Lekson suggests the canyon was abandoned for the north at places like Ridges, basin, sacred ridge, and Blue Mesa in Colorado. An extremely interesting fact is that Chaco Canyon before its brief abandonment in the 700s, it had settlements throughout. One large basketmaker 3 site sat at each end of the Canyon and then hundreds of sites laid between them. Then, the entire nearly nine mile line heads north and creates another nine mile line of settlements in southern Colorado. But, that ends poorly, and the people would end up moving back down to Chaco in that same seven to nine mile line on that all important Chaco Meridian.

Also by the late 700s, one very pretty southwestern stone began to be traded extensively in the Southwest and only a few decades later, this stone, turquoise, would be found all the way on the Yucatan peninsula. Something big was taking shape at Chaco Canyon. It’s possible that even by this early date, the southwest had been visited by Southerners from Mesoamerica.

By 830 or 840 AD, many Anasazi areas in the Four Corners were now constructing blocks of masonry. Which is a very Mesoamerican way of building… but a lot of the Four Corners area were using masonry. Although, in the higher up altitudes, the old underground pit houses were still dominant and they would be for quite some time. David Stuart in his seminal work, Anasazi America, makes a great comparison suggesting these people up north in the Mesa Verde region, they didn’t really like the changes that were going on in the south and they were waiting them out. Maybe they didn’t like the people implementing the changes? These southerners? As I’ll make clear shortly, I believe the influence from Mesoamerica had already begun at Chaco Canyon.

I won’t be getting into it very deeply, well, really beyond this statement, but I believe the Fremont culture, in the canyons and mountains of Colorado and Utah, I believe they saw the changes occurring and the influence of the new technology and culture that was beginning to dominate Chaco. They were holding out and resisting against the new power structure which was emerging in the canyon. Much like the Mesa Verdeans were attempting to do. They were probably connected in some ways to the Mesa Verdeans. As you’ll hear, Chaco would become a domineering presence in the lives of the Anasazi and Ancestral Puebloans. 

Eventually, the Fremont either went extinct through starvation or more likely, they so thoroughly mixed with the Shoshone and Utes and maybe even Athabaskans that they were completely absorbed into those encroaching populations. David Roberts briefly mentions the Fremont in Escalante’s Dream over the D&E expedition. I made a note of it years ago and thankfully I’m good at note keeping so I have it here. But he cites a researcher who suggested the Fremont may have even went out on the great plains to become the Kiowa. Regardless, some of them survived up until 1500 way up in northern Utah but that’s the last any archaeologist sees of them.

So the mystery of the Fremont will remain that, a mystery. But I have a feeling that they were people of the area who had been in the land a long time but who wanted no part of the new Chacoan system which was beginning to grow so they went north into even harsher territory until they disappeared with the passing of time.

In the mid 800s, 10 to 20,000 new farmsteads popped up in the American southwest and as archaeologist Linda Cordell pointed out, every possible and arable farmland in the region was being used to plant food. But since rain didn’t always come, they needed to store as much as they could for the rough and dry years, which led to even larger masonry structures. Masonry storehouses or warehouses if you will. Aka Great Houses were beginning to pop up around Chaco, not just within it’s mustard colored walls.

David Stuart in Anasazi America states that by the late 800s, as all the land was being farmed and as some people yielded crops and others didn’t, the people of the Four Corners would trade surplus among each other in pottery vessels. And around the late 800s, pottery vessels and their production soared. So pottery vessels, which technology had come up from Mexico, they began to be more and more important. To help facilitate this trade of pottery vessels stuffed with food, the storage warehouses or Great Houses at Chaco Canyon is where everyone began to take their surplus. Or alternatively, accept surplus grains from those who ruled over the Great Houses. Then again, in a lecture I heard from Lekson in the summer of 2024, he said something to the effect of, Everything comes in and nothing leaves. Nothing except maybe corn for those who had a rough year.

Curiously, these Chacoan Great Houses in the Canyon were actually built on top of older pit houses which meant there was something special about these locations. I think the canyon itself is a special location and these people knew it. The great houses were being built on top of older matrilineal pit houses. The rulers of the great houses were descended from the ones who built the earlier pit houses in the 500s. Except a new father had come into town by the 800s.

Once 900AD hit, change began to accelerate rapidly in the land of the Anasazi.

I’d like to highlight quickly, an important point that David Stuart reiterates quite a bit in Anasazi America. It was not something I really thought of prior to reading his book for this episode. But meat… meat is, has always, and will always be an extremely important staple for humans. But the lowlands like Chaco Canyon didn’t have too much of it. They could farm, all of the San Juan basin could farm but finding the meat was a different story.

The uplands though, they had the meat. The mountain ranges that surrounded Chaco had the meat. Areas like the Chuska Mountains. Areas like Mesa Verde. This could help explain the separation between the two groups early on. Chaco may have depended on Mesa Verde for meat. It was a lot tougher for the mesa Verdeans to grow although they tried in every conceivable piece of arable land. So the Mesa Verdeans, who were waiting out the cultural shifts in Chaco Canyon, they had some power over Chaco in their ability to gather meat from the many beasts of the San Juans and rockies.

But, Stuart points to a study that surprisingly said by AD 900, game was so scarce in the Chaco valley that meat only made up 10% of their diet. And at this same time, the Mesa Verdeans and the people directly below that mesa in the Navajo Reservoir district, they were walling themselves off and refusing to trade with the Chacoans. By that year, 900, no meat at all came to the Chacoans from the Mesa Verde region. Again, this tells me that by 900, the Mesoamericans or their cult had already arrived and the people to the north wanted nothing to do with them. This rift would only grow. And eventually, it would lead to what I called in my previous Ancient Ones series, the Anasazi Civil War. And with that war, came Man Corn.

It was around the year AD 850. It was a year that all Chacoan archaeologists and researchers know very well. It was around that year when the two quote unquote founders of Chaco were buried. Their burial is the most extravagant burial up to that point and since that point in the American Southwest. The two older gentlemen in room 33 of Pueblo Bonito, were buried with ceramics, flutes, wooden sword swallowing sticks, a conch shell trumpet, shell bracelets, a basket encased with turquoise, turquoise effigy pieces, and 40,000 pieces of turquoise. Some of these pieces were so small, archaeologists had to use a magnify glass.

Quick aside, in the spring of 25, my friend and I explored some ruins south of El Malpais. The first thing I did after finding the ruins was head straight for the ant mounds. That’s where the small neat stuff can be found. The ants are great archaeologists. I learned that from a Santa Clara Puebloan on the Puye Cliff Dwellings tour with my wife. Well, visiting the ants paid off. I found, sitting near the opening of the ant hill, an incredibly small perfect circle of turquoise with a tiny hole in the center. I found a turquoise bead. I took a picture of it and ill have it on the page for this episode but dear listener… even though I followed the rules, I deeply regret doing so. I put that tiny piece of turquoise BACK on the ant mound. You know where that incredible bead is now? That’s right, no one does. And no one will ever find that tiny piece again. It washed away with all the rain and snow we got this spring. I am still kicking myself and I don’t care if that’s against the ethics of exploring sites.

So these two individuals, the quote unquote founders of Chaco, they were buried with all of that amazing stuff and put behind a sealed door which archaeologist George Hubbard Pepper broke through in the 1890s. Also included in their loot… were a few elaborately chipped, double edged flint knives from the Edwards Plateau of Texas. These knives could easily be identified as the Toltec Tecpatl heart carving knives used in human sacrifice.

Tim Pauketat summarizes these knives and writes that they were, quote, about 6 to 10 inches long and is made in a distinctive shape: elongate and double-edged in form, and wide at the top, with a needle-like tip. End quote. They’re often carved onto human sacrificial benches called Chacmools that are found deep in Mesoamerica. A very famous chacmool carved into the shape of a man that was used to bend victims over is the one found at Chichin Itza. On that stone man’s arm is a Tecpatl.

These two turquoise gentlemen were no doubt the founders and architects and leaders of early Chaco Canyon. They were the great men of the Great Houses. That area of Pueblo Bonito saw three hundred years of burials and all of them were related through a matrilineal line. These burials would later include Macaws and Mesoamerican cylindrical vessels filled with cacao or chocolate. Both of those items were imported from Mexico.

These burials were from 10 generations and they were all related. These were the rulers of Chaco Canyon. And I propose, that while the women were from Chaco, the men who founded this dynasty were from Mesoamerica.

This dynasty truly had special privileges too. As if the previous grave goods didn’t give that away. They had a birth right. They commanded the Four Corners. Or tried to. Lekson suggests these people were the rain bringers. He also said, quote, The people that lived in the great houses were gods. Semi divine. End quote. And their Great Houses were no doubt temples. As Rob Weiner points out, if these Great Houses had been found anywhere else in the world, that’s exactly what they would have been called. Temples. And the religious and political leaders of Chaco lived in them. And they lived a lot better than the rest of the people in the Four Corners.

The Chacoan elites lived longer, they were taller, and they were far, unbelievably so, far more wealthy in goods than the rest of the Anasazi or Ancestral puebloans. They had goods from all over Mexico, goods from the Hohokam, goods from the Gulf of America, California, Alberta, Canada, the Dakotas…the list goes on. Michael Mathiowetz in his A History of Cacao in West Mexico: Implications for Mesoamerica and U.S. Southwest Connections, he writes, quote, Elite religious power at Chaco Canyon was strongly associated with sociopolitical power and the emergence of social complexity and closely tied to control of Mesoamerican-derived luxury goods, ritual knowledge, and social relationships (Crown and Hurst 2009; Watson et al. 2015). The prestige goods acquired by Chacoan elites (e.g., conch shell trumpets, cacao, scarlet macaws, copper) all indicate that aspects of a nascent solar-oriented Flower World ceremonial complex adopted from Mesoamerica served as a ritual basis for political legitimization after AD 850/900. End quote.

In Gods of Thunder, Tim Pauketat writes of Chaco Canyon and says, quote, Consisting of a dozen multistory great houses and dozens of smaller family units, Chaco Canyon is the largest complex of masonry buildings ever constructed in precolonial America north of Teotihuacan and Tula. End quote.

This massive area may have, at most, housed around 2,000 people. Despite all of the massive architecture, no one but the elites and their entourage lived there. Outside of Chaco there are well over 3,200 sites that may have housed 60 to 70 thousand people, but there were very few people in the Canyon itself. That was reserved for this nobility class of power and religious prestige. And no doubt, everyone outside of the canyon had an obligation to one of the many Great Houses. Almost like the European feudal system.

And to build these Great Houses, great houses that reached five stories tall… it took some 240 thousand timbers. Some of which came in from 75 miles away. Researcher Richard Fisher, whom I will quote a bit from later, he wrote in his The Scarlet Macaw Clan Migration: Chaco Canyon Anasazi - Paquimé that quote, Some of the larger logs weighed up to 1,000 pounds and were estimated to be as much as fourteen feet in length. Tom Windes further detailed that the average log weighed 300 pounds and was carried at waist level by eight porters using cross members for support. Some of the larger logs may have required as many as sixteen porters carrying this load over an eight-to-10-day period. End quote.

The entirety of Chaco Canyon and its great houses, according to David Stuart, took between two million and six million hours of labor to construct and maintain. And the corn that’s been found in the Canyon? All but one cob… just one lowly corn cob were grown outside of the canyon’s mustard colored walls. As Lekson puts it, everything came into Chaco and nothing left.

Pueblo Bonito alone, had thirty three kivas that were built, rebuilt, torn down, and had new foundations put in regularly. Stuart calls this amount of work quote unquote energetically inefficient… but I will talk about why they may have done all of this to the kivas shortly in my most controversial statement of this episode. A statement even I’m not completely sold on.

Pueblo Bonito had a wall that stretched 1,300 feet long, the great house had seven hundred rooms and it took up nearly five acres. David Stuart wrote, quote, no other masonry apartment block of this scale was built in north America until the 1880s, nearly eight hundred years later. End quote. But let me say I don’t believe Bonito was an apartment complex. Still, it’s an incredibly impressive structure that was built by a people who were often starving and ravished with anemia. Something compelled the Chacoans to build this incredible ancient site.

I, and others, believe that the Chaco Canyon great houses were warehouses to store the many goods that were brought into the Canyon at the behest of the elite. The elite especially demanded corn from the surrounding areas that lowly agriculturalists grew. Maybe they distributed it back out, I tend to believe they did but there were other reasons to house that much corn which I will talk about later. 

But beyond being warehouses, the Great Houses were also religious in nature. In Gods of Thunder, Tim Pauketat wrote, quote, The canyon, as it turns out, is naturally aligned to a maximum south moonrise and, in the opposite direction, a maximum north moonset. These are the extreme points on the horizon sometimes called “lunar standstills” or “lunistices” where the full moon will rise and set in succeeding months once every 18.6 years, or about once every human generation. End quote.

This is that incredible lunar standstill phenomenon seen at Chimney Rock where the moon rises between the naturally occurring rock spires at the most northern point of the moonrise or the lunar standstill. Chimney Rock is an incredible place that I suggest everyone visit. My wife and I went there for my birthday in 2024 and even on a cloudy, moody, and cool early summer day, it was breathtaking.

In Chaco though, Pueblo Bonito was built with the sun’s orientation in mind and the great house Chetro Ketl was built with this lunar standstill in mind. I learned that in the incredible hour long film, written on the landscape, mysteries beyond chaco canyon. I also suggest everyone rent that for a dollar on Amazon Prime.

I also learned in that film, that Pueblo Bonito is basically built like a conch shell or a spiral… you have to watch it to see what I mean.

It’s fitting I made the spiral the focus of the previous Anasazi episode about migration. It truly was a very important theme to the Anasazi. And that theme probably came from their religious beliefs about water and the underworld. Beliefs they may have inherited from their southern Mesoamerican neighbors.

And speaking of shells. I mentioned earlier that one of the Founders was buried with a conch shell trumpet. I read an interesting article by Mike Milligan titled Ancient Pueblo Used Conch Shell-trumpets for Communication that talks about exactly that. I’ll quote from the article now:

They, meaning the researchers, They found that if somebody blew a conch-shell trumpet from the great house at the centre of all five Chacoan communities, the sound would have reached almost all of the surrounding settlements. This suggests that ancient Puebloans may have managed their land-use and community structures around the sound of trumpets. The sound was potentially used to signal communal activities, such as religious ceremonies. "This is not unlike the idea of a medieval church bell calling a community to mass" States Professor Van Dyke. It also indicates how Chacoan heritage sites should be managed going forward. "Soundscapes were meaningful dimensions of past experiences, landscapes, and environments and are important facets of social interaction in the ancient world," observes Professor Van Dyke. "Management of archaeological and heritage sites should incorporate consideration of the auditory environment.” End all quotes. Chaco Canyon truly does have an incredible auditory landscape which can only be witnessed by visiting.

I believe that platform mounds and tower kivas would have been used as a place to blow the conch shell. I will talk about both of those structures shortly.

I don’t want to focus too much on the Great Houses because I talked about them at length in the previous series but they are an incredible and beautiful feature of the Anasazi. It’s what they left on the landscape for us to marvel at. They were created for that very purpose too. For people to marvel at. Much like Teotihuacan, La Quemada, and the pyramids throughout Mesoamerica. Or the earthen pyramids at Cahokia in Illinois. As Tim Pauketat writes of the Great Houses, they, quote, mimicked local geology, were aligned to celestial movements, and were the abodes of ancestral spirits. End quote. But of course they were also the seat of regional Chacoan power. A power that may not have been as benevolent as Pueblo Mystique leads one to believe.

What kind of regional power was Chaco? An empire like Rome? It was certainly powerful but no, it wasn’t that. A kingdom like the Toltecs? That’s closer, certainly. It was, as I mentioned in the previous series and as Lekson suggests, quote, altepetl adjacent. End quote. An altepetl is a rotating kingdom that allows these deity kingly class to take turns ruling. At the Southwest Seminar in 2024, Lekson stated something to the effect of Chaco would have quote, known about that form of government. They were not ignorant. The idea of an altepetl was in the zeitgeist. End quote.

We may never know what form of government or really theocracy, the Chacoan Anasazi had but it’s power is in its works. Works, which for three hundred years were constantly updated and expanded upon… right up until the whole thing collapsed in on itself like a crushing wave on a seashell.

Tim Pauketat sums up the Great Houses and their significance well when he wrote, quote, at many of the great houses, every decade (9.3 years) or two (18.6 years) a new wall would be added, a room block expanded, old doorways blocked up, or kivas sealed up and built over. Processions of people would enter the canyon carrying timbers cut from distant mountains, pots made by distant potters, and food to feed the many people who would labor to build the marvelous multistory monuments that grew bigger with each pulse. They would have heard the stories of their own parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles, and they would, in turn, tell their own children of their wonderful works. End quote.

Tell their children and warn them not to resist.

You can’t talk about Chaco without talking about the incredible Chacoan Roads. Roads which tied the entire Anasazi world the size of Ohio together.

Surrounding Chaco Canyon are around 150 known other, lesser, but still impressive, Great Houses. And all of these Great Houses were connected to Chaco through these 30 foot wide avenues that were dug down up to three feet deep into the desert landscape. A feat which is incredibly impressive and took massive amounts of work. They are truly monumental in and of themselves. Up to 400 miles of Chacoan Roads have been discovered so far. But there are more to be discovered through LIDAR.

Every great house had one if not more roads. Some of these roads point towards springs or buttes and other features on the landscapes. Some point to shrines or even to an astronomical event. But all Chacoan roads emanate out of great houses.

Some Chaco Roads point to other disused Great Houses. John Stein and Andrew Fowler call these Time Bridge Roads. They describe them as umbilical cords that link Upper Great Houses to Lesser Great Houses and similarly older Great Houses no longer in use to newer Great Houses.

As I mentioned, the Chaco Roads were around 30 feet weed, a width that seems impractical to a people without wheels or beasts of burden. These roads were scraped to the bedrock and they were lined with what they dug out of the desert floor. If the road went on sandstone though, as was often the case, The Chacoans lined this part of the road with various rocks from the surrounding landscape. And all the roads were all straight. It didn’t matter what was in the way. They built staircases into sandstone going up and down. They built ramps, they built possible bridges, it didn’t matter what the landscape offered in the form of an obstacle, the Chacoans kept that road straight through all terrain.

Lining the roads in many places or at intersections where horseshoe shaped stone structures called quote unquote shrines. Found among the stones are tons of small artifacts like pieces of turquoise and ceramic pot sherds. These are called herraduras or horse shoes in Spanish. I wouldn’t be surprised if these shrines were also a form of toll booth.

Because the main purpose, at least during the Chacoan era, for these Chaco Roads that emanated out of every Great House… their purpose was an avenue for tribute. Of course, they were many things, but first and foremost, this was the sacred avenue with which to bring your wares, your tax, your tribute, to Chaco Canyon. Wether that tribute was corn, turquoise, salt from Nevada, or timbers from the mountains to build and upkeep the Great Houses with, your feet fell on the Chacoan Avenues.

Now of course, not all Roads were purely for depositing tribute. As I mentioned, some went to landscape features. Some even headed to natural springs. Oftentimes along those avenues are petroglyphs with water animals and sandals. Maybe they were literal road signs saying walk this way for water.

There are also parallel roads which I cannot fathom a reason for, honestly.

David Stuart writes about these roads and gives a little interesting tidbit about a possible practical reason for the roads. He wrote, quote, In 1977, E Pierre Morenon, a young archaeologist working on the excavation of a Chacoan outlier called Salmon Ruin, carried out some practical experiments with a respirometer, which measures oxygen usage during exercise. He discovered that walking along the remnants of chacoan roads between any two points reduced caloric expenditures by an average of 38% compared with walking the same distance on the natural desert floor a few feet outside the roadbed. End quote.

As I will talk about soon, saving calories was of upmost importance to a feast or famine population that lived in the American Southwest.

At that Southwest Seminar, Lekson spoke of some eyebrow raising connections of the Chacoan Roads to the Mesoamericans. Again I’m semi quoting from the notes I took, but he said essentially, The Maya built roads. They were raised causeways though. The Chaco Roads were carved. Most Maya roads connect pyramids to each other or to cenotes. End quote.

A quick aside about cenotes. Cenotes are limestone caves were the roof has collapsed and the cave has filled with water. They’re all over the Yucatan and they’re pretty awesome. During my field school in Belize, after a hard days work we’d pack into old beaut up pickups and drive through the jungle and fields to a local cenote that had a tree which hung over the water’s edge. There is no beach. It’s just a massive hole straight down into a cave. You can’t see the bottom. It’s kinda scary. But the local Mennonite young men had hammered a ladder into the tree which you could use to climb up to the high branches and jump into the cenote with. Just watch out for those little gators, the caimans.

Back to Lekson, quote, The Maya built massive raised causeways that connected Pyramids in city centers to cenotes (water) or other settlements. Very similar to the Chacoan Great Houses and their carved straight roads that connected water sources or other Great Houses and settlements to Chaco. End quote.

So the things that make the Chacoan Phenomenon so exciting and memorable are the Great Houses, the Roads, and… the Kiva.

We’ve all seen the kivas. The circular structures that eventually became ceremonial rooms for the later puebloans. Were they always ceremonial? Well, yes they were. Especially to a people whose religion centered around Corn. More on that in a minute.

The kivas really came into their own around AD 1040 but they were being built for two hundred years before that. About the same time the quote unquote founders of Chaco arrived… most likely from Mesoamerica.

These Kivas first appeared in the 800s at the Chacoan Great Houses. David Stuart in Anasazi America sums them up and says of them, quote: It is also important to recall that the first large, highly formalized kivas are found at the great houses. True chacoan kivas are usually masonry lined and have far fewer floor features- hearths, subfloor storage pits, sealing bins, partitioned storage nooks, and so forth, than pit structures do. Great houses and kivas, that is storage and ritual, were chaco canyon’s specialities. End quote. Now, obviously, I agree with great houses as warehouses… what if the kivas weren’t ceremonial in the sense that we’re thinking of but instead were ALSO storehouses. But instead of storing the various things that were brought in like turquoise, they stored and housed and smoked corn. What if kivas were also structures meant to be warehouses but purely for corn.

But what about their ceremonial functions? The Puebloans clearly use them for ceremony. Therefore, the Chacoan Anasazi, from whom they’re descended, they must have also used them for ceremony, right?

If you’ll remember, after the Anasazi Civil War, the Ancestral Puebloans broke from many a tradition of the Anasazi. They purposefully changed their culture so as not to reflect too much of the Anasazi ways. There was a clean break. There was also a lot of tradition and beliefs kept. I will talk about this later but it can not be denied that the Ancestral puebloans rejected much of Anasazi.

It’s also important to remember that for a time, especially in the beginning of the Anasazi era, the time during this medieval climate anomaly, the rains were predictable and steady. Times were good. Corn was growing, everywhere. It was also being brought into Chaco as tribute on those Chacoan Roads. Where did the Great Houses store the corn? Could they have used the kivas as giant corn grain silos?

But then we get back to the question of, iffin they were silos, where did ceremonies take place?

I answer that question with… well its the same answer as the Hohokam, the Mesoamericans, the Caddoans, and the Cahokians. Platform Mounds.

Tim Pauketat writes about kivas, well everyone does, you can’t talk about Chaco without talking about Kivas, but he writes this of them. Quote: By the ninth century, formal kivas appear, though it remains unclear when these became associated with the Mesomericanoid wind and rain god in the form of conch shell trumpet rituals. The earliest great kivas in the canyon’s two Basketmaker III pithouse villages, however, lacked a fundamental characteristic of Ehecatl-Quetzalcoatl shrines in Mesoamerica at the time—verticality. This may have been remedied by later great kivas and “tower kivas”—those with exaggerated vertical walls. Kiva verticality came along during the pulse of monumental construction in 1040, the beginning of the so-called Bonito phase. At that time, several of the best and biggest great kivas were constructed with exterior walls that projected 6 to 10 feet above the ground, giving them massive, elevated, flat roofs that could have doubled as stages in ritual performances. The most singular such vertical great kiva, Casa Rinconada, occupies the very center of Chaco Canyon, opposite Pueblo Bonito. End quote.

Could kivas have been ceremonial platform mounds that were filled with corn on the inside while the ceremonies occurred above them?

Pauketat continues, quote, Tower kivas were even taller, two or three stories. Some of these were not stand-alone towers but aboveground constructions built inside rectangular rooms, perhaps to stabilize their walls. One such tower encased inside the northwestern corner of a late-dating great house in the canyon, Kin Kletso, was built quite intentionally atop a large unmodified boulder of sandstone that had fallen from the canyon wall 100 feet above centuries earlier. The boulder comprises beautiful large mollusk-shell fossils. Constructing the entire great house wall and kiva atop it, Chacoan masons carefully fitted their blocks into every irregularity of the natural boulder in a clear attempt to preserve the fossils on the face of the rock and, presumably, link the building above with the ancient watery realm preserved in the fossilized rock below. End quote.

Clearly, kivas were ceremonial. But for a people who did not separate the spiritual from the day to day, growing and harvesting corn was ceremonial. Corn came from the ground or mother earth. Corn sprang up from the ground when given water. Water sprang up from the ground, well, when it wasn’t falling in lightning charged monsoon storms. Shells came from the water. Heck, the entire structure of Pueblo Bonito may have been in the shape of the inside of a spiraling Conch shell. Again, you’ve got to check out the very beautifully shot written on the landscape film.

So, kivas, especially tower kivas, may have, during the Chacoan era, doubled as wonderfully circular platform mounds. Circular platform mounds like the Aztatlan peoples used in west Mexico. Some of these tower kivas are four stories tall. One of them at Kin Yaa, about 30 miles from Chaco, was about 40 feet off the desert floor.

These ceremonies would have been seen and admired by the people coming into Chaco to deposit their tribute. Instead of the ceremonies being hidden away in dark and smoky kivas, they would have been on display, highlighting the elite’s power as they summoned rain. This would have been needed to be seen. Thanks for the tribute, and look, we’re doing something to help you out in the hinterlands. We’re bringing the rain with our publicly displayed and extravagant cermonies high up on this kiva… or… high up on this platform mound.

John D Pohl cites Lekson, everyone cites Lekson, it turns out, but Pohl wrote, quote, Platform mounds and high- status burials of individuals with extraordinary amounts of wealth objects, conversely, suggest the existence of paramount nobles — essentially kings and queens. End quote. And these kings and queens would have needed to justify their existence. And they did that by elaborate and public displays of ceremonies atop the kivas or platform mounds.

And speaking of platform mounds, I now believe every Great House had a platform mound.

Every archaeologist and every write up of a site says something to the effect of theres some pit houses, there’s some kivas, there’s a multistory great house, and there’s a trash midden in front of the Great House. Trash midden is what archaeologists call a dump. Essentially, the Anasazi built these incredible masonry structures and then hid them behind their own trash. A heaping pile of trash right outside their Great House.

I reject this interpretation of the trash middens and I suggest they’re eroded and dilapidated purposefully built platform mounds or pyramids. Like the ones the Mississippians built or the Hohokam built or the Mesoamericans built.

They had to use trash. All they had was sand. So you built the mound with what you have and you cover it with sand and soil and now you have an elevated structure to even further show off your power and prestige. You have an even more prestigious way to show off that you’re doing something. You’re communicating with the gods to bring that rain.

I found a recent paper which also suggests this view of the trash heaps being platform mounds. It’s not something I came up with. No, not at all, other, smarter more intelligent researchers have been putting this forward and I believe it’s gaining traction. I say that because in that film, Writing on the landscape and in another video my Southwest Seminar friend Matt sent me titled, Room 33, Chaco Canyon’s Room with a View into the Past, both of these videos show a digital reconstruction of Pueblo Bonito and both of them prominently show two platform mounds that rise above the Pueblo.

Room 33 and Written on the Landscape share a lot of the same researchers and even the same Hopi man. A man named Philip Tuwaletstiwa. A man I will talk about at the end. They’re both beautifully shot and well narrated. I learned a good amount from both and I will quote from the short Room 33 again later.

But an article I read by five researchers titled The Pueblo Bonito Mounds: Formation history, architectural context, and representational fields, it says, quote, Refuse mounds at residential sites are common in the Ancestral Pueblo region of the northern US Southwest but only two have been interpreted as possible platform mounds, both at Pueblo Bonito in Chaco Canyon. It goes on to say, quote, Mound formation at Chaco Canyon great houses created formal features in public spaces during a period of rapid, unprecedented change in social relations and should be seen as elements in representational fields, but mounds were not an institutionalized part of the Chaco experience in the way that platform mounds were in other parts of the Americas. End quote.

My only qualm is that I don’t believe that last part is correct. I think the Great Houses built during the Chacoan era, especially towards the end, were all built with Platform Mounds in front of them.

Researcher and adventurer Richard Fisher talks a lot about these platform mounds and tower kivas in his The Scarlet Macaw Clan Migration: Chaco Canyon Anasazi - Paquimé. Fisher must talk about these platform mounds because he posits that the kivas were grain silos therefore, The Anasazi had to use platform mounds for ceremonies.

He writes, quote, “Noted archaeologist Thomas C. Windes records extensive mounds at the McPhee Pueblo (C.E. 860) which, quoting Windes, quote, had an abnormally large outside midden, reaching more than three feet in height. At Casa del Rio, located along the Chaco River, the multiple midden (platform mound) is more impressive: it reaches 16 feet above the surrounding terrain, and makes up an estimated 2230 cubic yards of material and is visible for miles around… end all quotes. 

Richard Fisher records 11 Great Houses with large mounds. Wupatki also has platform mounds, although they’re formed during the end of the Chacoan ear. As just mentioned one of these platform mounds is 16 feet tall, others are ten, and others are even smaller. He does a good job of citing quite a few archaeologists on this as well. He says the same thing I said earlier, actually I cribbed what I said earlier from Richard Fisher but he asserts that all these Great Houses had trash middens in front of them. That’s even what I was taught in school. But they’re more likely than not to be platform mounds. If these people are heavily influenced by the Mesoamericans, which I believe they were, the Anasazi rulers probably would have been insistent that a platform mound be built. Fisher writes further, quote, I note that most archaeologists whom I have interviewed agree that Great Houses from this time period were built to be seen from a distance. Many, if not most, of these Great Houses have what has been identified as a large “trash midden” in front. I question the Anasazi would build a Great House that was meant “to be seen from a distance” and then put a trash mound right outside the front door. I suggest that these are platform mounds. Since the predominant material in this region is sand, the platform mounds have eroded into rounded hillocks. End quote.

He further argues his point by saying no one is buried in kivas. But burials are common in these trash midden platform mounds. He writes essentially, people bury their dead in religious structures, not where their food is stored and made. Because again, he argues that kivas are for storing and preparing corn, not religious ceremonies. Not yet at least. Not until the dissolution of the Chacoan Anasazi system.

Fisher writes of this kivas as storage and platform mounds as religious structures and he says that he believes, quote, religious ceremonies took place on platform mounds that have been identified as trash middens, which are prominently displayed in front of many Great Houses. At Chaco Canyon and elsewhere C.E. 850-1275, approximately 40-60 percent of the space is in round rooms, causing Chaco Canyon to be interpreted as a major religious center. My counter argument is that the Tarahumaras report that 90 percent of the meaning of life surrounds food and is totally integrated into their religious belief system. I say that with 40-60 percent of the architectural space in Pueblo Bonito and other Chacoan Great Houses dedicated to food storage and preparation, this control of the food supply would have given tremendous political power and been a major draw for religious ceremonies. This proposal is completely consistent with all of the accepted archaeological evidence. End quote.

The Tarahumara or Raramuri, remember, are most likely Anasazi descendants who took to the Sierra Madre after the destruction of Paquime. Although, they’re not the only descendants.

What do you think? Could kivas have been corn silos? An archaeologist mutual friend on X certainly disagreed with me when I posited Richard Fishers theory to my followers on social media. His reaction was, has this Fisher fella excavated a kiva? I have and it ain’t a corn silo, my archaeologist friend essentially said.

So there are certainly detractors and some push back. I emailed Lekson to get his opinion but I have not heard back from him as of this recording. I imagine that is because he too is aghast at that possibility. I am not personally 100% convinced. But the more I think about it and read and do a little studying of my own, the more I am coming around to it. I don’t have an academic career so I won’t get in any institutional trouble. I don’t publish archaeology books either so I’m safe there. I get to talk about all the crazy stuff I want to since this is my show. People get insane amount of views on giants being in the new world so I figure I can suggest a little subversion by theorizing with Fisher that the kivas were grain silos. Again, I’m not totally sold but it’s a very interesting idea. And after all, I’m just guessin.

Fisher writes of all of this, quote, Anasazi scholar Ian Thompson observes, “There is no Pueblo word for religion, no word distinguishing religion from every moment of life from conception to death. Life and religion are the same.” In my view, herein lies the fundamental conundrum. The large banks of Anasazi silos stored tons of corn. This is not inconsistent with religion. In fact, as the most important thing in life, these silos were the center of religious life for the Chaco Canyon Anasazi. To confound the issue, there are two types of round rooms, small and large, at Chaco Canyon. My research has found that the small round rooms are for long-term storage of grain and the large round rooms are essentially community ceremonial kitchens. The Chacoan religious structures were the platform mounds, which was what might be expected across North America during that time period. End all quotes.

Fisher believes that sometime in the 1200s, when the kivas were emptied of their stored corn, and when the kachina culture took over, kivas did in fact evolve into religious ceremonial structures. Especially when the Anasazi world crumbled and the Mesa Verdeans re-inhabited the Canyon. I will discuss that later.

It’s also worthy to point out that all religious artifacts have been found in square rooms not round kivas. And again, no one is buried in round rooms at Pueblo Bonito or many other large Anasazi sites. They are buried in square rooms.

I have seen pictures of racks in kivas. Could they have been drying racks? Could the benches have been places to store corn? Could the kivas have been plugged to build up carbon monoxide which would kill the pests that ravages massive stores of food? Fisher think so. He writes, quote, the Anasazi used live coals in the hearth below the humidity control box to manage environmental conditions in the storage chamber above. The smoke and tannins released from the charcoal helped flavor, preserve and protect the stored grain from mold, insect and rodent pests. Robert M. Adams, the archaeologist who proposed this very ingenious theory, also observes that carbon monoxide from a sealed chamber is a very effective pesticide that has no harmful effect on grain as a food product. End quote.

Corn was grown everywhere in the Chaco world. Everywhere except Chaco Canyon itself. But corn fields stretched for 50 miles in some places. Again, as Stuart points out, every arable piece of land was being farmed. But how did they farm? Did they leave fields fallow? Did the burn the fallow fields to get rid of pests? Probably. So not all of the arable land was being farmed at the same time. But still, a ton of corn was grown all over the Southwest and brought to Chaco.

Fisher suggests, quote, The Anasazi must, for survival, have successfully produced and stored as much as 30-50% more than they actually used each year, considering the need for seed corn as well. End quote. And they no doubt did produce a surplus. And this surplus was brought to Chaco and stored… somewhere. It isn’t a stretch to imagine the great round ceremonial kivas as great round ceremonial corn storehouses.

We all agree that the Great Houses were ceremonial centers to show off the elite’s power and also they were warehouses to store the constant flow of tribute into the canyon. It would seem logical that with nearly every single piece of arable land being farmed in this massive Chacoan horizon, that these elites would need a good place to store all this corn that was coming in. But they wouldn’t just store it. They’d manufacture it into edible and drinkable, products that would have been used in the ceremonies. 

Every culture that has elites, so every culture, but in every culture with elites, these elites must bread and circus their population. When Lekson says everything comes into Chaco but nothing leaves, he’s mostly correct. I’ll suggest what may have left soon but, what was done with all this corn coming in? Well, It was no doubt used for feasts during ceremonies the elites put on for the commoners.

So Fisher believes the kivas were corn silos that stored the nearly never ending flow of tribute from the Chacoan hinterlands. But they didn’t just store the corn. The kivas were also a place to smoke it, keep it clean of insects and pests, and… the kivas were a place to make corn beer. Or Tesquino.

Hear me out… or hear Fisher out…   

This is just one small paragraph but it is also extremely plausible. Fisher writes, quote, Tesquino is a very simple alcoholic beverage made from corn and various additives of herbs and sometimes mineral soils. End quote. Did Anasazi make corn beer? There’s zero evidence of it. But they certainly had enough corn to do so. Fisher makes a great point when he writes, quote, I do not know of any grain-producing society on earth that did not at one time or another produce some type of alcoholic beverage. End quote.

Heck, even the Apaches brewed tiswin or corn beer and the Apache weren’t necessarily agriculturalists. As a matter of fact, they detested that work and quipped, why would we farm when the Mexicans farm for us and we just take it.

So the Anasazi may or may not have brewed corn beer which they would have distributed during festivals and ceremonies at various times of the year. Fisher writes, quote, The making of corn beer on a large scale for religious ceremonies would have given the Chaco “elites” tremendous power over distribution of this “sacrament” to surrounding populations. End quote. It’s a great point. But again, I’m pretty sure there’s zero archaeological evidence for this. It’s purely speculation.

One place these corn beer drinking ceremonies could have taken place?

Well, the day I began recording this, I was sent a video. It’s by the same people who did Room 33, they’re the awesome Chaco Canyon Project group. The video is called The Chaco Sessions Building Pyramids with Rich Friedman. Friedman features heavily in both Room 33 and written on the landscape, as well as a lot of the videos the Chaco Canyon Project put out. In this video, Friedman not only discusses the newly discovered honest to goodness pyramids they found IN THE CANYON ITSELF, but the videos also show a digital reconstruction and let me tell you… my eyes lit up bright. Right there on the screen was a legit mesoamerican pyramid… and it was perfectly aligned with Pueblo Bonito’s front wall. I’ll put a screenshot of the pyramid on the site. Y'all will be amazed. I’ll also put a link to the video. But y’all should watch all the videos. Rich Friendman, Lekson, Craig Childs, Rob Weiner and others are in them and they’re great.

They’ve also found these pyramids outside of the canyon as well… how had I never heard of these?

I mentioned earlier that Lekson states that everything flowed into the Chacoan Great Houses but nothing flowed out. Chaco Canyon, it turns out, wasn’t really a redistribution center. After all, each little agriculturalist would have had their own storage units for corn out in the hinterlands. Although, they better not store too much. Tribute, after all, was owed to your regional Great House. But researcher and adventurer Richard Fisher wrote in The Scarlet Macaw Clan Migration: Chaco Canyon Anasazi - Paquimé about a theory I’d never heard before but a theory I am now quite on board with. I don’t believe all that he wrote, but I thought his theory was brilliant, plausible, and exciting.

What does every agricultural society need in order to grow their food successfully? Fertilizer. The Zuni have been recorded as using dead fish to fertilize their fields. The Maya used dried algae… what if a group of Mesoamericans entered the Southwest in the mid 800s with an incredible wealth of knowledge in regards to fertilizer that could transform the four corners into a breadbasket? They would no doubt be considered divine and they would have a three hundred year dynasty which they used to extract every resource they could out of the people.

So what Fisher and I are asserting is that the agricultural Ancestral puebloans brought in their corn tribute, celebrated a little festival that was put on by the elites, witnessed a sacred rain bringing ceremony, maybe had a little corn beer, and then left with ceramics filled with pulverized and dried fertilizer. Fertilizer made from blue green algae that they would then sprinkle on their fields and wait for the rain. Then they’d do it all again the following year.

Fisher writes, quote, As the archaeologists frequently reminded me, “Remember they were agriculturalists first,” and fertilizer, according to the Tarahumara, is the “most important thing” in agriculture.” End all quotes.

Fisher spent a lot of time in the Sierra Madres living among the Tarahumara. He also spent a lot of time with archaeoglists who excavated the quote unquote post Paquime anasazi ruins in those rough and rugged mountains. He’s not an armchair archaeologist or theorizer, he’s seen and one things. He’s spoken to hundreds of archaeologists and researchers. He’s travelled and spoken with locals. He’s an adventurer and a brilliant man. Even if not everything he theorizes he’s correct. At least he’s furthering the field! He’s asking questions! He’s painting a picture.

One of these archaeologists he spoke with was named Vorsila Bohrer and she pointed him in the direction of this fertilizer. He writes, quote, Vorsila Bohrer reported to me she had found a strange black material like “curls of old paint” in a natural depression in New Mexico. She had the material analyzed and it turned out to be dried blue-green algae. End quote.

Fisher then connected the many depressions and the so called Chetro Ketl grid garden in Chaco Canyon to a way to manufacture blue green algae fertilizer. He calls these plastered depressions in the Canyon, fertilizer dehydration basins. He argues that the many depressions in the Anasazi land were actually to mix with waste and dead animals to create a fertilizer that would have been used on special corn to make them very sweet. Again, there’s no evidence for this but this sweet corn would then have been brewed to make corn beer. But what’s more important is that these fertilizer dehydration basins would have made plenty of fertilizer which would have been given to the Chacoan farmers to use in their own fields in the hinterlands. He argues that the Maya used fertilizer and that’s well documented and the Aztecs had their fertilizer producing chinampas. Why wouldn’t the corn dependent Anasazi not have fertilizer as well? Especially if they got their information from the mesoamericans who may have ruled over them since the mid 800s.

In Chaco Canyon there is something known as the Chetro Ketl field or as fisher calls it the Chetro Ketl Grid Gardens. As I have mentioned before, the Chacoan Anasazi elite in the canyon didn’t farm. They didn’t produce the corn they consumed. They had it brought in as tribute. But for years, this Chetro Ketl field was believed to be for agricultural purposes. They were only partially correct.

In Using ground-penetrating radar to re-evaluate the Chetro Ketl field area in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico by Jennie O Sturm from 2016, the researcher suggests that in fact, this Chetro Ketl field may not have actually been used for agriculture. She also states, quote, locating definitive features related to agriculture during the Bonito Phase (CE 850–1150), and especially agricultural fields, has been extremely difficult. End quote. Again, that’s because the elites in the Great Houses didn’t farm. That was for the peasants.

Sturm continues, quote, Currently, the only location interpreted as a prehistoric agricultural field on the basis of visible patterns is the “Chetro Ketl field,” a large rectangular area a few hundred meters southeast of the Chetro Ketl great house. End quote. But now there are doubts. Quote, A number of researchers, however, have been skeptical that the Chetro Ketl field area was in fact an agricultural feature (Love, 1980, Morain et al., 1981, Stein et al., 2007, Stein and Fowler, 1996). Part of the uncertainty surrounding the function of this gridded area is that no similar features have been identified in Chaco Canyon, despite decades of intensive remote sensing and archaeological research. To date, several alternative explanations for this gridded area have been proposed, from ceremonial performance areas (Stein et al., 2007: 210), to the foundation of a great house that was never built (Stein and Fowler, 1996: 120), to frog ponds. End quote. 

Everything unexplainable in archaeology is always, it was ceremonial. While I love the idea of a frog pond, what if instead, these were areas to produce dried blue green algae fertilizer?

This field is plastered and walled. Plastered and walled in small squares with which to keep in the water they’d pour into the grids. Fisher argues that these grids were, quote, specifically designed to catch monsoonal rainfall that was chemically altered by lightning, splitting nitrogen into nitrates that are usable by plants. Organic plant material, charcoal, human and animal waste, and blue-green algae were added to the nitrate rich water to produce, under the hot summer sun, an organic gray water solution that was used to fertilize the corn at the specific C4 genetic growth spurt characteristic inherent in the corn maturation cycle. End quote.

I’m telling y’all, he goes deep into every subject I’ve broached. It’s very scientific stuff. And it’s quite believable. But maybe that’s because I’m just easily distracted by figures and numbers and equations I don’t understand… or want to.

Fisher further points out that the quote unquote Chetro Ketl moat, a strange feature that lines a wall at the site, it may have been a place to store human waste which would be turned into fertilizer in the Chetro ketl grid gardens.

Fisher again, quote, After thinking about the Chetro Ketl field for 30 years, I am not at all convinced that it was an agricultural garden. The entire field was a series of basins approximately 15 by 20 meters each, comprising 11 acres in all. The soil is horrible, choked with calcium carbonate and sodium sulphate which created an impermeable water barrier (preventing any root systems from developing). These basins were sculpted or excavated out of the basement strata between the levies. The basins were coated with a clay layer that may have been from a flood event or the clay may have been hauled in and layered. Chaco Canyon was singled out as very poor farmland by the U.S. Soil Conservation Service in 1936” (Loose).

I believe as the clay plastering was so finely bedded and evenly applied that this would not have been a natural overbank or flood event. The entire central section of Chaco appears to have been plastered and this field does not seem to be an exception. Many ceramic artifacts are found along the berms of the Chetro Ketl field” (Stein). End quote.

We pretty much know that almost no agriculture was practiced in the Chaco Canyon during the Anasazi Great House phase when the Mesoamericans influenced the region. To back that up, I’ll quote archaeologist John Stein from the 2024 video titled *** he said, quote, there are no irrigation ditches in Chaco Canyon. None. Zero. Nil. Nothing. Nothing that eve looks like an irrigation ditch. End quote. Instead of corn, the elites oversaw the production of fertilizer from knowledge they carried up from Central America. Corn came in, fertilizer left. Repeat until the whole thing fell apart.

Fisher writes, quote, at Chaco Canyon the Scarlet Macaw Clan of the Anasazi collected the run off from the cliffs immediately north of "Great Houses" and dehydrated the nitrate rich blue green algae particles in shallow plastered basins incorrectly identified as "grid gardens." We can know they were not gardens as they were plastered. The plastering allows the algae to grow or 'bloom" in the shallow catchments, other fertilizers were added such as human night soil, and the resulting mix was a very powerful fertilizer that was dried and then transported up to 60 miles or 100 km to the Chuska Mountains where the corn, beans and squash was actually grown. End quote.

Fisher goes into very deep, like, exceptionally deep detail about this process of creating fertilizer and how it was used all over the world from Egypt to Cambodia to the Maya and the Anasazi. I will spare you these details but again, this is all indeed quite convincing.

To finish with the fertilizer theory, I’ll quote Fisher one last time… one last time about fertilizer. I’m not done with him yet. Quote:

While it has been very exhilarating to me personally to make a strong, persuasive and comprehensive argument that the vast system of Chacoan “kivas” are actually a system of granaries and communal kitchens, it was even more deeply satisfying to have identified, with the help of Bohrer, that’s Vorsila Bohrer, the basic mechanism with which fertilizer was produced from Mesa Verde to Guatemala in the pre-Columbian era. End quote.

What do y’all think? It’s certainly plausible, right? 

We’ve been talking about all this corn. Corn corn corn. I think I mentioned how obsessed with corn the Anasazi were in my previous series but I won’t quote myself since I said I wouldn’t at the outset.

What does a diet dependent on corn do to a person, though? Besides possibly make them cannibalistic…

Without iron, a corn based or plant based diet in general, creates anemia. And anemia is deadly. Especially to a vulnerable population of feast or famine people. And especially to pregnant women and infants. 

Chaco Canyon has the highest rates of anemia in the Anasazi world. They weren’t getting iron from animals because there simply weren't enough animals in the San Juan Basin to feed the population explosion that the fertilizer produced corn created. David Stuart in Anasazi America writes, quote, 83% of children under the age of 10 had anemia in the Chaco Canyon area in the 11th century. Contrast that to just a few hundred years before the Chaco Era when only 16% of people had anemia. Towards the end of the Chaco phenomena the Chacoans were eating kangaroo rats, rabbits, and ground hogs. Long gone were the large mammals. End quote.

Fisher also points out that, quote, The archaeological record demonstrates that during the founding phases of any of the Oasis America city-states, he uses Oasis America to denote the various cultures in the American Southwest and Mexican Northwest, The archaeological record demonstrates that during the founding phases of any of the Oasis America city-states the inhabitants were dining on deer, antelope, big horn sheep and, in the case of Paquimé, bison. In the final stages just prior to abandonment, the people were eating mice, rats, and rabbits to fulfill their red meat needs. End quote.

A corn heavy diet is severely lacking in iron. The Anasazi were pretty much all anemic. Especially women and even more so pregnant women. Many a woman died in childbirth due to anemia. Children were often born with anemia and it made life harsh. Upwards of half of the infants that were born died, which is unbelievably tragic. Especially now that I have a newborn. Life was just harsh in the desert when all you ate was corn. Even up at mesa verde, anemia was high, meaning they too were running out of game. But it wasn’t just anemia. Most Chacoan era adults had arthritis and spinal degeneration from carrying very heavy loads. There were also parasites and lice and helminths. Which is a gross parasitic worm.

But anemia may have been one of the most common ailments. And that came from the lack of protein from red meat. In some areas, studied skeletons report an 87.7% rate of anemia. At first, the Chacoans had low rates, as was mentioned, but as the centuries wore on, the rates of anemia skyrocketed and the people’s health began to greatly suffer. Fisher writes, quote, Collected evidence suggests that when the large mammals were eliminated within a three days’ run (the time it takes meat to rot), the “elite” in the major centers had an unresolvable problem obtaining dietary iron from animal sources. End quote.

The Anasazi survived many drought periods with their grain silos but eventually, the lack of animal protein may have done them in and may have precipitated the abandonment of the canyon. They’d simply hunted the area out. Just like their Clovis ancestors had hunted out all the megafauna.

Interestingly, the DNA recovered from the two founding members of Chaco had Central Asian roots. Meaning, these men were descendants of the Clovis. The apple did not fall far from the hunting tree. And once that hunting tree had withered and the people were suffering from severe anemia, faith in the elites may have faltered. Anemia was just one of many reasons why the Anasazi Empire may have spun itself apart.

I keep mentioning that the rulers of the Chacoan Anasazi may have been Mesoamerican. That’s pretty much the reason for this whole episode. That’s the bulk of the picture I’m trying to paint for y’ll. But where’s my evidence?

In Gods of Thunder Tim Pauketat writes, quote, Everywhere one looks, there were active, if intermittent, physical and communicative connections across the southwestern landscape into North Mexico and, from there, West Mexico and the rest of Mesoamerica. End quote.

It isn’t just the goods, although that’s a large part of it, but it isn’t just the goods that signal a connection to the south. There’s also the simple and amazing Anasazi Masonry that we still see today that points to a Mesoamerican foundation.

Tim Pauketat again writes, quote, construction, Mesoamerican-style colonnades were added to the public façade of Chetro Ketl, one of the largest and most central of Chaco Canyon’s great houses. The façade has a rectilinear Chacoan feel, but nothing like it had ever been built before, at least not this far north of Alta Vista. And that Chalchihuites site, 900 miles to the south, is the likely inspiration. Of course, by the 1120s, Alta Vista was already abandoned, so we aren’t talking about a Mesoamerican-based colonial enterprise, trading mission, or outreach program moving from south to north. Rather, this would have been a Puebloan-centered effort to incorporate the places or things of mythical pasts or powerful far-off gods into the masonry constructions back home on the Colorado Plateau. End quote.

I don’t quite agree with him there. I believe, like Turner, Fisher, Lekson, and others, that an actual physical group of Mesoamericans did in fact come up in the 800s and take advantage of and rule over the local Four Corners Ancestral Puebloans. They had knowledge and power and the specter of the foreigner that elevated them over the people.

It’s interesting to remember that the Slavs in Russia, long ago, when they had various localized tribal leaders and warlords, it’s interesting to note that they got together and asked a Viking king to come rule them. Could something similar have happened in the American Southwest?

There are other masonry hints at a southern origin for the Anasazi elite. Bertha Dutton in 1964 noted that the Chaco style masonry, a rubble core with the veneer of well laid stone, is found at La Quemada. And she also noted that the Great Kivas at Chaco had massive roof supports resting on thick circular stone wheels which is a Toltec masonry feature found at the aforementioned Tula.

Pauketat again writes, quote, Archaeologists and astronomers have discovered that the central monumental features of Mesoamerican cities are oriented with respect to various landmarks (mountains or rivers) and celestial events (especially sunrise, moonrise, and the rising of particular stars). End quote. That certainly sounds like the monumental architecture of not just the Anasazi, but also of the later Puebloans themselves. The Great Houses, the Chacoan Roads, the kivas, the Great Houses walls, they are all oriented towards something larger than the people who occupied the sites. Now of course, that is found all over the world and especially in the New World, but it’s still worth mentioning.

Michael Mathiowetz writes in his article titled A History of Cacao in West Mexico: Implications for Mesoamerica and U.S. Southwest Connections, quote, Robert H. Lister and Florence C. Lister (1981:174-175) reviewed Chaco archaeology for Mesoamerican ties. They proposed that the following features had their origins in Mexico: rubble-cored masonry, square columns used in colonnades, circular structures in the form of tower kivas and tri-walled units, the practice of seating discs beneath roof support posts, T-shaped doorways, cylinder jars, effigy vessels, incense burners, stamps or seals, alien design motifs, copper bells, iron pyrite mosaics, shell trumpets, shell beads, shell bracelets, macaws and parrots, turkey burials, bone pins, ceremonial wooden canes, altar components of wood, turquoise beads and pendants, turquoise mosaic sets, decorative techniques of cloisonné and mosaics, water control means such as dams, canals, and reservoirs, the roads and signal stations, and alignments of architectural and other features for the purpose of observing and recording astronomical data (on the last point see Sofaer, Mar-shall, and Sinclair 1989). End quote. He continues though, with quote, Chacoan colonnades are imitations that were the result of long-distance interaction or perhaps visitation by elite Mesoamerican (west Mexican) families, a suggestion that also may apply to Paquimé. End quote.

It isn’t just Mesoamerican Masonry that is prevalent during the Chacoan era. Mesoamerican gods and rituals also appear. Richard E. W. Adams states that quote, Murals from Awatowi [sic] in the Hopi area seem to show regional versions of Tlaloc, Quetzalcoatl appears in several areas, and Chaco Canyon in far-off northwestern New Mexico shows impressive architectural parallels with Toltec building. End quote.

So now we’re back to Quetzalcoatl, that mighty and much feared feathered serpent.

The Southwesterners adopted the feathered serpent cult rather easily but that isn’t surprising since the horned serpent had been a known entity and had been depicted on canyon walls for thousands of years. At least since 6,000BC in the southwest and greater west like northern Utah and California. A great follow on X is Old European Culture at Serbia Ireland. He also runs a blog and on that blog he painstakingly details the old horned serpent pictographs from the Archaic period. So thousands of years before the Anasazi. He posits that the horned serpent of the Southwest, before heavy influence from the Mesoamericans, thousands of years before their cultural influence, he posits that the horned serpents are quote, complex animal calendar markers for Monsoon season in the Southwest. End quote. The horned serpent of the archaic period is often depicted above dry washes that fill during the monsoon season. The monsoon season begins when the big horned sheep begin to bash their heads together to compete for mates. And the rattlesnake, most often found in these rocky, sandy, dry washes and at the base of these canyon walls that surround them, they are most likely to bite the local humans during the monsoon season since that’s when they’re most active. Eventually, these two markers combined to become the horned serpent or bringer of rain. It wasn’t difficult for the Southwesterners to eventually adopt the feathered serpent of Mesoamerican culture. And I would argue, the feathered serpent got it’s start the same way in Mesoamerica. Quetzalcoatl is associated with rain and Venus, which is most notable during the rainy season. And the Quetzal bird is most active during the breeding season which ends right when the monsoons begin.

It’s also notable though that Uto Aztecans, beginning in the Coso Range of California, have been depicting snakes as the beings of both the heavens and the earth. Later Uto Aztecans will eventually give the heaven snakes feathers to say they can fly through time and space.

A lot of archaic pictographs in the Southwest actually depict beings holding snakes which represents that these beings have dominion or have control over the all powerful snake thus they have control over time and space. And probably water. And definitely control over other creatures. In essence, he is a god. I got this and a lot of other incredibly interesting information from another X mutual, Koivupia at h u h l a k a t.

So archaic hunter gatherers in the southwest used these iconic symbols of snakes and horned snakes and being holding the snakes, they used them to tell a story of when the rain comes which they continued to use once maize and corn came up from Mesoamerica. The serpent then transformed into a symbol of power. And then when the Feathered Serpent Cult came up with similar iconography, it was easy for the native Southwesterners to adopt this new feathered serpent cult from their southern cousins.

The zig zag patterns that are so ubiquitous with the various peoples of the Southwest also feature heavily in Mesoamerica and probably depict a mix of water and the serpent, which, in their beliefs, were the same thing since the serpent deity brought water.
Now it makes sense why the Aztecs, being Uto Aztecan and having connections with the Southwesterners, as I will mention later, it’s no surprise why they set up shop in a lake after seeing an eagle holding a snake within its talons.

Late in 2024, as the weather was turning towards winter, I was invited to go on a hike through the Galisteo Basin with some archeologists and southwestern archaeology enthusiasts. I was invited by my very good friend here and brother to The Paranormalist, whom I interviewed earlier in 2025. We set out just after sunrise through the basin with the Ortiz mountains to our west and the old Zorro Ranch to the south. If you don’t know what that is, good.

On this trek, we walked through the ruins of Pueblo Blanco which aren’t really ruins at all but rather mounds of desert with depressions where the rooms once stood. It was excavated a hundred years ago before being filled in again. From the ruins we hiked to the nearby cliffsides and examined the petroglyphs that depicted the usual. Masks, creatures, and one that depicted the very Unusual… I will talk about that particular petroglyph later. But from those rocks we then headed to the long sandstone cliffside that held the true highlight of that adventure.

On the mustard colored sandstone cropping of rocks near the pueblo is the largest Awanyu in the American Southwest. I will have a picture of this puebloan horned serpent up at the site for this episode. There were actually three horned serpent Awanyus on this sandstone wall and all of them were very impressive. This largest one though, had a cloud for a tail which may represent the pueblo itself or possibly rain. And beneath one of the bends of the horned serpent was a water droplet which I was told represented some strong magic. Now, there’s no doubt in my mind that Awanyu and the Feathered Serpent Quetzalcoatl are related.

Christy Turner in Man Corn writes that quote, scholars have remarked on southwestern rock art, scenes on mimbres pottery, religious paraphernalia and practices, and kiva paintings that appear to represent aspects of two ancient Mesoamerican deities, Quetzalcoatl and Xipe Totec. End quote. He goes on to suggest that Maasaw, may be the Southwestern Version of Xipe Totec. Maasaw is the Hopi Death Kachina or the god of the underworld, fire, and the earth. He’s a rather important, and scary kachina. And its pretty obvious he was borrowed from the Toltecs and Teotihuacanos before them. Eventually the Aztecs would morph him into Huitzilopochtli.

Also at Walpi in the Hopi lands, J W Fewkes, in 1914 wrote, quote, the horned serpent cult at Walpi is said to have been introduced from the south. End quote.

Christy Tuner elaborates on this Hopi Feathered serpent cult when he wrote that there is a, quote, legendary linkage between the feathered serpent and human sacrifice. The legend of the great snake who causes a momentous flood has the snake telling a village chief that he will eliminate the flood if the chief will, quote, sacrifice to me your son, end quote, which the chief did. Buried beneath the feathered serpent temple at Teotihuacan were many sacrificial victims. End all quotes.

Xipe Totec though, if he made his way north to the Anasazi, and I believe he probably did, he was the much more gnarly of the two Mesoamerican deities. Xipe Totec or, our lord the flayed one, was associated with war and fertility and he, or his priests would wear the flayed skins of sacrificial victims. Turner writes, quote, victims to Xipe Totec were killed by having their hearts torn out, then, after being flayed, their skins were worn by Xipe impersonators for a period of days or weeks. The victim’s flesh was eaten. End quote. More on that Man Corn in a minute. But there does seem to be some depictions of Xipe Totec in the Southwest. The depiction is usually a simple and smooth face with three holes on it. Two for the eyes and one for the mouth. A flayed head.

I will have pictures of petroglyphs I took at Pueblo Blanco in the Galisteo Basin which clearly show this smooth three holed face. There were multiple petroglyphs at the site that were haunting but these quote unquote masks are believed to be a puebloan, not anasazi, but later puebloan depiction of Xipe Totec, our Lord the Flayed one, or at least, one of his victims.

At Petrified Forest National Park there are two known depictions of Xipe Totec or, Maasaw. Actually, Petrified Forest has a ton of incredibly interesting designs. Including the design I mentioned in the Apache series with the giant bird holding a human in its jaws.

Two researchers, Ekkehart Malotki and Michael Lomatuwayma describe Maasaw, aka Xipe Totec thusly, quote, his head was of a colossal size and his face was covered with blood. Sores infested his head, from which sprouted only a sparse covering of hair…. His body was clearly in a state of putrefaction, so offensive was the stench he emitted. His shins were clearly visible, spotted with boils from which dripped pus. End quote. He sounds lovely.

In that same 1987 book, the two researchers state that Maasaw is always stoking a big fire which causes immense heat but he never gets burned. And thats on account of him always wearing the blood of his hunted animals. And people. But especially the blood of the jack rabbit. This blood gets baked and his head just gets larger and larger with more layers of caked on baked blood. They also state his mouth is round and his eyes are hollow. Oh and he wears the dead. He also wears a belt of corn since he is the corn fertility deity. This corresponds with Xipe Totec and his sacrificial victims being killed for crops. Especially maize or corn. Maasaw keeps the earth alive by sacrificing human life. He uses the grease from human victims to fan his fire that is the sun. I’m paraphrasing a bit here, by the way. In one story he commands a chief kill to his niece and rub her grease on an animal hide which Maasaw then throws at the sun to keep it spinning… sacrifice to keep the world alive… Aztecs, anyone?

In another story, Maasaw sneaks into a Navajo hogan, interesting, but he sneaks into a Navajo hogan, kills a man of fright at his hideous being, and then skins the Navajo man and leaves the rest of him in a bloody heap.

Then there’s site Houck K in northeastern Arizona which shows, according to Turner, some pretty clear evidence of victims being flayed… more on that in a bit. Maasaw didn’t appear in rock art until AD 1,000 and he didn’t really appear outside of the Anasazi cultural area. Although, I would argue, I have seen some petroglyphs to indicate he may have travelled quite far to the east.

Quetzalcoatl and Xipe Totec aren’t the only beings who came north though. John D Pohl in Ritual Objects as Cultural Capital A Comparison between the Mixtec- Zapotec, Aztatlán, and Casas Grandes Cultural Co- traditions writes, quote, The Hopi Palatkwapi tradition, consistently documented over the past century, that describes the far southern origin of Hopi clans who brought with them a new form of solar worship. End quote.

Along with the Mesoamerican gods and the platform mounds to celebrate them on, came that curious voladores ceremony I mentioned in the beginning. Pauketat writes, quote, most likely during the 1120s, a large ponderosa pine log, estimated at 60 feet tall down to its roots, was carried in from the Chuska Mountains and set vertically in the open plaza of Pueblo Bonito. We can presume that it was used in great central rituals, perhaps as a gnomon or solar observation post, or perhaps as a great world tree that was climbed in Chaco’s very own pole-climbing ceremonies. End quote.

While that’s really all the evidence I have for the pole flying ceremony which celebrated Quetzalcoatl being used in the southwest, as you’ll hear later, it was absolutely used in Cahokia and there was dialogue between Cahokia and the Anasazi, of that I have no doubt. Just like there was dialogue between the Anasazi and the Mesoamericans.

Besides the masonry and the religious creatures and the pole flying ceremony, there are the famous prestigious goods from Mexico that appear in the Southwest as well.

One interesting artifact I discovered while researching this episode is the shield. It’s an often overlooked Mesoamerican trait that appears in the Southwest but it indeed originated in Mesoamerica.

John D Pohl writes of the shield and talks about the very famous petroglyph expert Polly Schaafsma. Quote:

Later, she (Schaafsma) suggested that certain shield figures found in the Southwestern United States are a variant of Huizilopochtli, the Aztec god of war. The influence of this symbolism is thought not to have impacted the Southwest until around 1428 (Schaafsma 1980:298). However, she adds that shield bearers and war symbolism might have occurred prior to this date in the Jordana region, which is commonly associated archaeologically with the Mogollon Culture. If this is true, it suggests that the motif moved north through the rest of the Southwest. End quote.

And remember, Huizilopochtli was originally the Toltec Xipe Totec.

So curiously, Southwesterners appear to be the first to own shields in North America before they spread out throughout the rest of the land. And it appears they got the idea of them from the south.

Then there’s of course, cacao. Or chocolate.

Michael Mathiowetz writes that Chocolate was had at Pueblo Bonito between 1000 and 1125. Quote, Scholars long have noted the occurrence of locally made cylinder-shaped vessels in Chacoan material culture that date after AD 1050 (Nelson 2006; Pepper 1920; Toll 1990, 2001; Washburn 1980), a vessel form commonly used for cacao consumption in Mesoamerica.

He continues, quote, Cacao ( Theobroma cacao ) is a nonnative species in the  U.S. Southwest, and its existence in northern New Mexico far outside its place of its origin in tropical habitats signifies increased connectivity with Mesoamerican societies.

He further continues, quote, Culinary expertise for the preparation, service, and consumption practices of cacao beverages and the attendant Mesoamerican ritualism likely accompanied the acquisition of cacao seeds by AD 1000 among Chacoan elites. End quote.

As the next few items highlight, it wasn’t just that a group of Mesoamericans came in, intermarried, and ruled, but rather, while they ruled, they continued their connection to their southern brethren. It wasn’t a one time excursion and hostile take-over. It was a longterm relationship that didn’t actually end after the Anasazi were kicked out. It continued for some time. Although it does appear to have ceased prior to the Spanish arrival. At least, in large part. The trade, by then, had probably been taken over by the Jumanos. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

You can’t talk about the southwest though, without talking about that all important and beautiful stone, turquoise.

Prize winning author Ellen Meloy in her book The Anthropology of Turquoise writes about the beautiful stones in relation to the New World quite a bit. How could she not? She writes this though of turquoise’ significance, quote, Ancient southwesterners gave turquoise, the greatest wealth, as offerings to water, the desert's greatest gift. They left tokens of turquoise at canyon seeps and springs amid emerald mosses, maidenhair ferns, creamy blooms of columbine, crimson monkey flowers, dragonflies the color of flame, and heron-blue damselfies with bodies as thin as a vein. From turquoise they carved tadpoles a quarter-inch long and set raised turquoise eyes in toads of black jet. With turquoise they traded for copper bells, macaw feathers, the skins and plumes of parrots, and pearlescent shells from the Pacific and the Sea of Cortez-the stone of the desert for the glories of sea and forest. End quote.

The aforementioned, Fray Bernardino de Sahagún actually wrote down the Mexican’s descriptions of turquoise. He wrote, quote:

Some are quite smooth, some roughened, some pitted, some like volcanic rock. It becomes round, it becomes pale. It smokes. The fine turquoise smokes. It becomes rough, it becomes perforated, it becomes pale. End quote.

During the Maya Classical Period, the elite stone was Jade, but… once Chaco took off, the elite stone of Maya and Central America became Turquoise. But not just any turquoise. Turquoise specifically from The Four Corners Region. Turquoise from Cerillos in the Galisteo Basin of New Mexico, not far from my home, turquoise from there has been found at Chichen Itza and Tulum. Two sites in the Maya heartland that are heavily influenced if not ran by the Toltec.

Ellen Meloy writes of these mines just down the road from me, quote:

From mines that dated back more than twelve centuries, the Cerrillos Hills fed turquoise to the known world. Cerrillos turquoise adorned the pendants and prayer sticks of people in the nearby Rio Grande pueblos. It turned up in California and on the masks of the Aztecs and the wrists and throats of the Maya. It was mined with bone tools, stone hammers, mauls, adzes, and plant-fiber baskets used to carry tons of rock debris away from the mountain to reach the veins of blue stone. One of the mines, on the flanks of Mt. Chalchihuitl, produced turquoise of a quality and quantity incomparable to any other. End quote.

Ellen Meloy continues, quote, The bulk of the turquoise in Mexico came from Pueblo Indian mines in the Southwest along trade routes that extended from Arizona and New Mexico to Chichén Itzá in the Yucatán. For the cultures of Mexico, turquoise acquired the status of divinity, elaborately manifested by turquoise-encrusted skulls, masks, bones, beast figures, and other religious objects. True to their on-the-edge, wigged-out, possibly exaggerated reputation (penis skin-cutting, hearts ripped out of chests, etc.), some ancient Mexicans reshaped their teeth and inlaid them with bits of turquoise. In 15I9, the Spanish conqueror Hernán Cortés is said to have encountered a group of Indians "rather aloofe" from the rest, "higher" and of "differing habit." These people wore rings of jet and amber in their noses and, in their pierced lower lips, gold and turquoise rings so heavy, their lips hung over their chins, baring their teeth. End quote.

John D Pohl writes of my favorite stone, quote, Phil Weigand proposed that demand for turquoise as a rare gem stone had been fundamental to the establishment of an early Postclassic exchange system integrally linking the Toltecs of Tula with the Ancestral Pueblo peoples of Chaco Canyon (Harbottle and Weigand 1992). Subsequent research has shown that turquoise was actually being used as early as the ninth century as a form of ritual and social currency circulating around the entire U.S. Southwest (Hull et al. 2014). Elite burials like those found at Chaco Canyon are testament to the importance of conspicuous display of turquoise as a visual symbol of paramount rank at Pueblo Bonito. End quote.

He’s of course talking about the Turquoise shrouded Chaco founders.

Turquoise was being brought into the Great Houses in enormous quantities. Not only were the Chacoan elites using it for themselves, but they also used it to trade and possibly even give tribute to their neighbors to the south, the Toltecs.

What could they have been trading the Turquoise for?

Macaws. Those beautiful birds that flourish far from the American Southwest.

At Pueblo Bonito, 30 scarlet Macaws of Mesoamerican origin have been found and they dated from AD 900 to 1150… 1150 is right when Chaco collapses.

These Macaws were physically brought up from Mexico by hand and probably paid for in vast amounts of turquoise. The Anasazi elite knew the power of these birds and their colorful feathers. These were highly prized goods and the elites had to get their hands on them.

Robert Fisher talks extensively about these beautiful birds and their journey to the American Southwest. Quote:

Charmion McKusick reports that the Scarlet Macaws were sacrificed C.E. 900-1200 and that later the macaw feathers were harvested, but the birds were not sacrificed after C.E. 1275. McKusick further states, quote, While macaws can be handled without injury by their keepers, they are vicious birds which could not be traded hand to hand. It would be necessary for an experienced courier to transport marketable macaws. End quote.

Lekson also talks about Macaws and their appearance in the Southwest. He states there is a tendency to, quote, minimize rare things. Only a few macaws, therefore, macaws are not important. That logic escapes me. Rare stuff is supposed to be rare. If we found a jade mask at Pueblo Bonito, would we belittle it because there was only one? Macaws are the moral equivalent of jade masks. Highly specialized knowledge needed to transport and maintain Macaws makes the 1,000 km (621 mile) trip (one way) to obtain those cantankerous birds a very big deal, fully comparable to jade-working. This was no (down- the-line) exchange; the idea of a macaw being passed up and over the Sierra Madres, from hill tribe to hill tribe, is absurd. Instead of minimizing the 30 macaws and two dozen copper bells recovered at Chaco, wishing them away, we should dance jigs of joy that the archaeology gods have given us these astonishing data. End quote.

Scarlet Macaws are from the humid tropical lowlands of way southern Mexico. They were hatched there and then moved all the way up to the American Southwest by a single courier. A brave man who knew how to handle the birds. Fisher says of the birds, quote:

Young macaws, which hatch in March, must be removed from the nest at 7 weeks old, carried in baskets, protected from chilling and fed chewed hominy, often directly from the keeper’s mouth, every few hours, day and night. Once fledged, they can eat about anything a human can eat and have a moderate tolerance for cold. This early feeding relationship results in human-imprinted birds that are attached to their keeper, but often vicious to strangers. It is easier to capture new young birds than to breed adult macaws, because human-imprinted birds seldom recognize other parrots as potential mates. End quote.

This truly was a monumentous journey and a very rare prestigious good for the Anasazi to acquire.

Fisher continues, quote: Mimbres pottery motifs and the age of skeletal remains suggest that juvenile macaws were carried to the Mimbres sites, raised there for almost a year, and then traded north just in time for religious ceremonies at the spring equinox, which is March 21-22. From 1150 to about 1200 the trade in Scarlet Macaws branched west, probably at Zuni, to the Sinagua area (53 macaws). More Scarlet Macaws were recovered at Wupatki than at any other site north of Mexico. This sudden shift of ceremonial activity probably was precipitated by the repeated eruptions of Sunset Crater. End quote.

So these birds weren’t just at Chaco. They were at other Great Houses as well. Especially after the Anasazi Civil War and their migration westward, to Wupatki and then southward towards Paquime. Paquime also has an enormous amount of the birds. 504 have been discovered so far. Paquime definitely became a Macaw hub after Chaco. Which makes sense because the Anasazi ended up there… before they continued south.

Macaws disappear from the archaeological record in the Southwest around 1200 but they do reappear with the Kachina cult around 1275. You can see this with the incredible Macaw petroglyph at Petroglyph national monument just west of Albuquerque. Macaws then disappear again in 1375.

How important were Macaws? One study from 1995 by Jonathon Reyman suggested that Macaw feathers were as valuable as a modern diamond or if we’re talking about other Central and South American goods, Macaw feathers were equal to a load of 80s cocaine in south Florida. Southwest Turquoise may have also been as valuable in Mesoamerica as Macaw feathers were in the Southwest. Which is probably what the Anasazi traded the birds for in the first place.

Now, right before I recorded this episode I was sent an article from 2018 that was in the Smithsonian Magazine that refutes this bringing up of the birds from Mexico. Southwestern Archaeologist Stephen Plog and other researchers discovered that 14 Macaws that were recovered from the Chacoan area were genetically similar and 71% of them may have shared a matrilineal lineage. Plog and the others think they’re may have been a Macaw breeding center somewhere between Chaco and Paquime. They haven’t discovered the site yet but they posit that it’s out there… somewhere.

There are just a couple more Mesoamerican attributes that made their way north with the founding of Chaco. These next examples aren’t as pretty as turquoise or colorful birds though.

An important Mesoamerican trait found throughout the entirety of that world, is dental modification. Or as Christy Turner calls it, Dental Transfigurement. He created the term to explain the very Mesoamerican dental records that have been recovered in The Chacoan Anasazi landscape. Dental Transfigurement is the, according to Turner, quote, intentional chipping, notching, filing, inlaying, ablating, coloring, and other nontherapeautic alteration of the labial and occlusal surfaces of anterior teeth. End quote. Think turquoise stones in the middle of teeth or the intentional filing of teeth into points. Turner suggests that this sort of mutilation of ones teeth was to signal that you were a part of something. Quote, the signaling of membership. End quote. Destroying your teeth for appearances sake is a very mesoamerican trait, although, the way in which it was done throughout central America varies by region and by time period.

The teeth modification we’re interested in is one adult male between the age of 45 and 60 who was buried at Pueblo Bonito in the early years of the Great House after the year 900. He was buried in room 330 with twenty two other individuals of both sexes. His upper anterior teeth were discovered to have according to Turner, quote, Mesoamerican like transfigurement. End quote.

He further suggests that when this possibly Mesoamerican lineaged big man died, he took with him, the twenty two other individuals he’s buried with in what would have been a mass sacrifice ritual. Quote, the death of this unique individual may have been the stimulus for the burial of the others. Adding to speculation, we cannot help but wonder whether his motherland more likely had been in Mexico than in chaco canyon because of the episodic burial context and extreme rarity of intentionally modified teeth in the southwest, whereas such teeth were relatively common in prehistoric Mesoamerica. End quote.

There have also been some individuals at Hohokam with modified teeth. Not very many though. Turner, and I agree, believes that these individuals came up from Mexico and were in fact important rulers in the Southwest. Turner writes, quote, we propose that not only did the idea of transfigurement originate in Mexico but so did the treated individuals found in Arizona and New Mexico. End quote.

So about those sacrificed victims in the tomb with him…

With Mesoamerican deities, goods, and rituals, come ritualistic sacrifice and the proliferation of violence.

To maintain the vast agricultural fields, to protect the agriculturalists, and to force continuing agriculture and tribute giving, I believe the Chacoan Anasazi state, whatever form it took, had a standing group of warriors or an army to keep the society together and functioning. Maybe not the whole time, but certainly one was formed later. Maybe at first, just the intimidation factor and the fact that the rains came, was enough. But if someone didn’t give enough tribute, if someone was practicing a form of witchcraft which brought a lack of rain or death upon someone, or if someone was simply being subversive, the Chacoan Anasazi state would send out their army of cultist warriors to take care of the problem. Unfortunately, as anemia and the lack of meat began to compound the problems at Chaco, this army of warrior cultists were sent out more and more frequently. And it probably grew larger and larger. And the Anasazi used more and more barbarity until the system collapsed.

Carroll L Riley in 1987 said that quote, large increments of Mesoamerican religion including specific deities were brought to the southwest at various times through what were fundamentally trade contacts. End quote. We’ve gone over that in detail already but interestedly, she goes on to say that with these connections, quote, there is a strong possibility that human sacrifice was practiced at Chaco Canyon as late as the eleventh or twelfth century. End quote.

Christy Turner quotes archaeologist J J Brody when he wrote about this human sacrifice and its ties to the aforementioned Feathered Serpent. He wrote, quote, J J Brody illustrated a prehistoric Mimbres bowl depicting a man wearing a plumed serpent outfit and cutting off the head of a sacrificed victim. He wrote, now quoting Brody, quote, on examining this painting, the Hopi artist, Fred Kabotie, recalled that his people traditionally practiced human sacrifice as supplication on very rare occasions, under extreme stress of famine due to drought. End all quotes.

As Lekson said at the Southwest Seminar presentation, quote, Chaco was not a nice place. Not flute music and spiritual. It was rough on commoners. End quote.

One thing I learned during researching my podcast over the years is that Marcos de Niza, on his way north, spoke with some gulf of California coastal Indians who had buffalo hides and turquoise. Which are interesting things for those Gulf of California Indians to have. But Marcos de Niza asked them where they got such things and they replied that they went way up north to Zuni aka Cibola aka town in Zuni but Buffalo to the Spanish. Well this coastal Indian, probably of the Seri tribe, he told the spaniards he got the goods by going up north and trading with the puebloans. Trading in what you may ask? Well this Seri Indian told Marcos de niza that he traded the sweat of his brow for the things. Apparently, the Indians would go up and work the fields in exchange for goods. And.. I cannot help but think about the Zuni’s ancestors, the Chacoan Anasazis and if maybe they worked in a similar manner… except maybe less voluntarism.

David Stuart in Anasazi America tells the very sad story of two women, three infants, and quite a few small puppies who all died in the year 1030 from asphyxiation in their pit house in Chaco Canyon. Apparently, as they lay sleeping on a cold night, the ventilator shaft was plugged, the fire filled the room with carbon monoxide, and they all died in their sleep. When the men returned to the scene, they no doubt wept, grieved, and eventually burned the pit house. It was never reoccupied.

This sad story raises a few questions though. Where were the men? At a ceremony at one of the Great Houses? Possibly. Were they out hunting? And if so, hunting what? There were no more beasts in the canyon by then.

The women’s bodies that suffocated in the pit house may answer that.

One of the women had two arrowheads still lodged in her when she died. She also had a broken arm which seems to have been broken when she was protecting herself from being beaten by a club. Now, one of those arrow wounds was already healing so this attack may not have happened when they died but instead, earlier. Maybe the men were out hunting the heathen who beat their women.

Another question is, was the ventilator shaft intentionally plugged? That answer is probably no since they all died peacefully in their sleep… including the puppies, which certainly would have awoken to an intruder prowling around above the pit house. Although… who knows. It’s more likely, snow may have plugged the hole and killed these women and children.

Regardless, the wounds on the woman’s body shows that even at the height of Chaco, before the troubles began, life in Chaco was rough.

Pauketat remarks, quote, mistreatment and physical abuse seem to have been a part of ordinary life for some Puebloan women, possibly captives or other low-status members of the community. In certain times and places, some captive foreigners were treated little better than slaves. Their crania show repeated evidence of having been struck in the head with a blunt instrument. Such gendered labor and abuse developed over the course of the eighth century, depending on where a person lived and who they were. End quote.

Okay, I AM going to quote myself just this once. This is from the previous Anasazi series.

Kirker was James Kirker, an Irishman employed by the governor of Chihuahua to do questionable things to the Mexican Indians but that’s not important right now. What’s important is how fascinating Bourke is to learn about. And as I mentioned in my Buffalo Soldiers episodes, I will be doing a series, one day in the future, over the Apache Wars, and Bourke will feature heavily in it… huh… he sure did… anyways, I bring up Bourke in this episode though, because in 1881, while on tour in the American Southwest, the intelligent and curious man was invited to the Zuni Pueblo to witness the Zuni Clown known as Newekwe. Later, after the wars, he would come home and publish his experience under the title… I kid you not, The use of human odure and human urine in rites of a religious or semi religious character among various nations. 3 years after that, he would go on to publish his magnum opus: Scatalogic Rites of All Nations: A Dissertation upon the Employment of Excrementicious Remedial Agents in Religion, Therapeutics, Divination, Witch-Craft, Love-Philters, etc. in all part of the Globe. So yeah, Bourke was into some weird poop and pee stuff, but whatever, let’s move past that. More importantly for this story of ours, he was able to, while he was visiting the Zunis, talk to the governor… who, in Spanish told him this, which he judiciously wrote down for posterity… probably the one and only time an Anglo has been told this story:

In the days of long ago (en el tiempo de cuanto hay) all the Pueblos, Moquis [Hopis], Zuni, Acoma, Laguna, Jemez, and others had the religion of human sacrifice (el oficio de matar los hombres) at the time of the Feast of Fire, when the days are shortest. The victim had his throat cut and his breast opened, and his heart taken out by one of the Cochinos (priests); this was their" oficio" (religion), their method of asking good fortune (pedir la suerte). End. Quote.”

I believe i have personally seen evidence of this on a petroglyph at that site in the Galisteo Basin I mentioned earlier with the giant Awanyu. I will post pictures on the page for this episode.

Now, this would have been after Chacoan Anasazi times but it’s still significant. I am not going to go too deep into the violence in this section because I did a lot of it in the other series. I will go deep into Man Corn but only after I talk a little bit more on this subject. 

So on the rocks that overlook the Galisteo Basin which have a nice view of the Ortiz Mountains was drawn a human figure with a giant hole in the center of him. Quoting the Zuni governor, the victim had his throat cut and his breast opened. Below the carving was a large protruding rock that had been worn in the center of it. It was probably worn by the scraping off of the flesh on animal skins but I could not help but think it was also a perfect rock to bend someone over on, cut their throat, and tear out their heart.

Also, the petroglyph’s face was a flat face with three circles… a flayed face.

The entire petroglyph had been pecked over as if to erase it or to destroy its magic. Probably by later Puebloans or even possibly Apache.

For all I know, the victim on the rock was himself an Apache. The Navajos are known to peck over cursed petroglyphs in Dinetah, after all.

Also, all along that sandstone rock near the Avanyus and sometimes using natural holes in the rock, were a dozen other masks, demons, and flayed faces. I will put them all up on the site so you can see em.

Even the archaeologist with us suspected these were not very nice petroglyphs and representations. He declined to comment on them further than that.

At Houck K a site in northeastern Arizona which dates to between 1150 and 1200, Christy Turner has seen a very clear picture of human sacrifice emerges. Sacrifice that involved flaying of the skin, and cannibalism. One of the victims had their tongue cut out. Most of them had bone breakage, to get the marrow and grease out. Especially the rib grease. 30 percent of the bones had cut marks, there was pot polishing, and scalping. Pot polishing of course is from the cooking of bones in boiling water. Most of the vertebrae were crushed and then boiled. But worst of all, it appears the face of at least one individual was completely removed. Cut marks on the skull and mandible pretty much prove it.

At Chaco, as Lekson said, quote, bad things happened here. End quote. And that included Man Corn.

Archaeologist Shane Baker in 1990 proposed that Anasazi cannibalism might have been used as a form of social control. Turner writes of this form of social control quite well, quote, we find it quite plausible that a few score or hundred well organized and fanatical warrior-cultists using rule breaking but example setting cannibalism and human sacrifice as conspicuous elements of terrorism might quickly and easily dominate small farming communities. End quote. No wonder the northern Mesa Verdeans wanted nothing to do with Chaco. Iffin this is true, of course. Which I believe it is. There’s also the anemia aspect, which I believe is very valid as well.

One David Carrasco in 1987 wrote about Aztec human sacrifice rituals and its use against neighboring peoples. He wrote, quote, at these ceremonies of massive human sacrifice, the kings and lords from allied and enemy city states were invited to the ceremonial center to witness the spectacular festival. The ritual extravaganza was carried out with maximum theatrical tension, paraphernalia, and terror in order to amaze and intimidate the visiting dignitaries, who returned to their kingdoms trembling with fear and convinced that cooperation, and not rebellion, was the best response to aztec imperialism. End quote.

Now remember La Quemada and her roads and the hanging and rotting limbs of those who did not submit to the pre-Toltec peoples that were displayed on La Quemada’s walls. People from La Quemada, I am suggesting, are the same people who came up to lord over Chaco Canyon in the mid 800s. Massive human sacrifice and the subsequent displays of said sacrificial victims was something the Mesoamericans did in Central and Northern Mexico. This is something later Aztecs, who came from the north… and who claim to be related to those at La Quemada, it is something the Aztecs did. Could it not be something the leaders of the Chacoan Anasazi did? I again speculate that there very well may have been something to this effect in the Canyon and the farmers from around the Four Corners would have seen these gruesome displays, or something similar, as they brought in their tribute on those famous Chachoan Roads before leaving with fertilizer to repeat the process. And if you failed to bring tribute that year wether through disobedience or bad luck, well… The Chacoan Committee for Public Safety was sent out to eat you and your entire family.

Turner continues his hypothesis on why this cannibalism occurred in the Southwest, 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. End quote.

How widespread was cannibalism during the Chacoan Anasazi era? At least three… hundred individuals THAT HAVE BEEN FOUND have the tell-tale marks of being eaten. That’s almost one a year. But of course, there could be quite a few more that have yet to be discovered or are in a box somewhere in a museum warehouse waiting to be studied.

I am now going to read pretty extensively from a great article by Douglas Preston titled Cannibals of the Canyon. In the article, Preston interviews and hangs out with Turner. It’s a great piece. I won’t read it in its entirety but I will read a good amount of it.

“As a test to see how widespread cannibalism might have been, Turner also examined a collection of eight hundred and seventy Anasazi skeletons in the Museum of Northern Arizona. He found that eight per cent--one skeleton in twelve--showed clear evidence of having been cannibalized.”

“"All the makings of cannibalism are here," he said enthusiastically, pointing to the charnel heap. He lifted a plastic bag holding a piece of skull, and slid the piece into his hand, cradling it gently. "This is a good one to illustrate the roasting of the head. A lot of the heads have this burning pattern on the back." He indicated a patch on the skull where the bone was crumbling and flaking off. He handed it to me, and I took it gingerly. "Clearly," he continued, "they were decapitating the heads and putting them in the fire face up."

"Why?" I asked. "To cook the brain?"

"It would have cooked the brain, yes," he said, rather dryly.

"What happens when a brain is cooked?"

"Thinking stops. Except among some of my students."

Turner pointed to the broken edge of the skull, which showed several places where sharp blows had opened the brainpan: small pieces of broken skull were still adhering to the edges. "These are perimortern breaks. This cannot happen except in fresh bone," he said. "Perimortem" refers to events at the time of death. Most of the bones, he said, showed numerous perimortem breaks; the crushing, splintering, and breaking of the bones had thus occurred just before, at, or just after death.”

“He rummaged through the pile and showed me other bones. Some had cuts and marks of sawing near the joints, caused by dismemberment with stone tools. He pointed out similar cuts where the muscles had been attached to the bone--evidence that meat had been stripped off. He showed me percussion marks from stone choppers used to break open bones for marrow and to hack through the skulls.” End all quotes.

I learned while studying for this episode that eating someone takes a lot of work. A lot of hard physical work. First, you’ve got to kill someone. Which… is not easy with stone tools. Not that I would know personally. But you’ve got to bash them over the head repeatedly. The person may not die immediately and they may moan and grown and fight back. It’s awful to imagine. So I suggest you don’t imagine it. But you’ve got to do the murder. Then you’ve got to saw off the head, deflesh the face, tear off limbs once you’ve reached the bones because you can’t easily saw through those. The cannibal killers wanted more than simple flesh though. They wanted the fat and the marrow in the vertebrae so they took out the spine and crushed each vertebrae. They broke rib bones and sucked out the marrow. They had to start a fire and pour in some water into a ceramic vessel. Maybe they brought the vessel with them but more likely they were using ceramic bowls the people they tearing apart had made with their own hands. Then you throw in some spices as the water boils before tossing in the fingers and joints and skulls you want to cook. I’ll stop there. But I’ll continue reading Douglas Preston’s piece. He briefly talks about another researcher, a Tim D. White, a quote unquote well-known paleoanthropologist. The article continues, quote:

“To learn more about what cannibalism does to bones, White turned his attention to the American Southwest. In 1973, in Mancos Canyon, Colorado an archaeological team had found the broken and burned remains of approximately thirty people scattered on the floors of a small ruined pueblo. White borrowed the bones in the summer of 1985 and studied them intensively for the next five years. He found all five of the indications of cannibalism that Turner had identified. But he also noticed another peculiar trait: a faint polishing and bevelling on many of the broken tips of bones. White wondered if this polishing might have been caused by the bones' being boiled and stirred in a rough ceramic pot, to render their fat. To test the idea, White and his team performed an experiment. They broke up several mule-deer bones and put the pieces in a replica of an Anasazi corrugated clay cooking pot, partly filled with water, and then heated the mixture on a Coleman stove for three hours, stirring it occasionally with a wooden stick. The fat from the bones rose to the surface and coagulated around the waterline, forming a ring of grease about half an inch thick. They decanted the contents, and White took a bone piece and scraped off the ring of fat around the inside of the pot. Under magnification, the deer bones showed the same microscopic polishing that White had observed on the Mancos bones. Furthermore, the bone used to scrape out the ring of fat showed a pattern of scratches that exactly matched that of one Mancos bone. White called this "Pot Polish.”” End all quotes.

So again, at least three hundred individuals of the late 90s, so that number may have increased by now, honestly. But three hundred separate individuals are known to have been killed and eaten by the Anasazi killer cannibals.

I’m going to continue to read from the article.

“In the early nineteen-nineties, a firm called Soil Systems won a contract to excavate a group of archeological sites at the base of Sleeping Ute Mountain, in Colorado, on the Ute Mountain Ute Indian Reservation. The Ute planned to irrigate and farm seventy-six hundred acres of land, and the law required them to excavate any archeological sites that would be disturbed. The project director at Soil Systems was a young man named Brian Billman, who is now an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

He and his team began work in 1992, and at one unremarkable site along Cowboy Wash, called 5MT 10010, he and two colleagues, Patricia Lambert and Banks Leonard, made a grotesque discovery. The results have not yet been published, but Billman was willing to talk to me about them--up to a point. We spoke by telephone the day before he was to go off to Peru to do fieldwork. Billman spoke slowly and carefully, weighing every word, and this is the story he told:

When the team began excavating, they uncovered what seemed at first a typical Anasazi site--some rooms, a trash mound, and, lined up in a row, three kivas. As the team dug out the first kiva, they found a pile of chopped up, boiled, and burned human bones at the base of a vent shaft leading up and out of the kiva. It looked as though the bones had been chopped up and cooked outside, on the surface, and then dumped down the shaft. There were cut marks on the bones made by stone tools, and the long bones had been systematically broken up for marrow extraction.

In the second kiva, they found the remains of five individuals. In this case, it appeared that the bones had been processed inside the kiva itself "Instead of boiling," Billman recalled, "it looked more like roasting going on." Here cut marks at muscle attachments suggested that the bones had been defleshed, and again they had been split open for marrow. The skulls of at least two of the individuals had been placed upside down on the fire, roasted, and broken open, and the cooked brains presumably scooped out. In that same kiva, the team found a stone tool kit, such as was typically used in butchering a midsized mammal. The kit contained an axe, hammerstones, and two large flakes with razor-thin cutting edges. Billman submitted the tool kit to a lab, and the two flakes tested positive for human blood.

The third kiva contained only two small pieces of bone, which had apparently been washed down from the surface. In the dead ashes of the central hearth, however, the team made an "extremely unusual" find. It was a nondescript lump of some material, which was field-classified as a "macrobotanical remain"--a piece of an unidentified plant. A worker put it in a bag, and when the team had a chance to examine it more closely, back in the laboratory, they realized that it was a desiccated human turd, or coprolite. "After the fire had gone cold," Billman said, "someone had squatted over this hearth and defecated into it."

Billman sent the coprolite off to a lab at the University of Nebraska for analysis. The first oddity the lab noted was that it contained no plant remains; other tests indicated that the coprolite had formed from digested meat. From a pollen analysis, the lab could tell that the coprolite had been deposited in the late spring or early summer, at the same time of year that the site was abandoned.

In three nearby ruined sites, another group of excavators also found chopped up, boiled, and burned bones scattered about. The four sites, which seemed to constitute a small community, contained a total of twenty-eight butchered individuals. Mysteriously, all four sites were filled with valuable, portable items, such as baskets, a rabbit blanket, pots, and ground-stone tools. Little, if anything, seemed to have been taken.

"This site has a frozen instant of time in it," Billman said. "You could almost read it." What he read was: The year was approximately 1150. Times were hard. The area was in the grip of a severe drought. Pollen samples showed that a crop failure had probably occurred the previous year. One late-spring day, the community was attacked. The people were killed, cooked, and eaten. Then, in an ultimate act of contempt, one of the killers defecated in a hearth, the symbolic center of the family and the household. Instead of looting the site, the invaders left it and its many valuables for all to see.

"When I excavated it," Billman told me, "I got the sense that it may have been taboo. We are proposing that this may have been a political strategy. One or several communities in this area may have used raiding and cannibalism to drive off people from a village and prevent other people from settling there. If you raided a village, consumed some of the residents, and left the remains there for everyone to see, you would gain the reputation of being a community to stay away from.” End all quotes.

The article goes on to say that after presenting those findings, Billman had a researcher come up to him and tell him, I can definitively prove if there was human flesh in that turd. And… well, this researcher, Richard Marler, well, he was asked by the Ute tribe not to publish his findings. BUT Preston, the article writer tracked down the results independently and confirmed that yes, all of the fossilized poops, the coprolites, contained the quote, presence of human myoglobin protein. End quote.

Chaco had sent out killer cannibals, at the behest of the state, to a group of people who had probably not given tribute that year because as the article mentions, they had a bad crop the year before. They couldn’t spare any corn to bring to the Great Houses and their rulers at Chaco by way of her many roads. So, the Chacoan Committee of Public Safety murdered them, tore them to pieces, ate them, and shat them out in the middle of the kiva. A kiva which as I mentioned earlier, may have been the place where they stored corn. A very symbolic move.

The article continues and I will read from it a little bit more.

Preston finishes the article talking about the last chapter of Man Corn, the chapter I have already quoted from quite a bit. This is the chapter where Turner suggests that Mesoamericans ruled Chaco. Which is a suggestion he takes almost as much flak for as he does his suggestion of rather widespread cannibalism. At the end of the article though, Preston and Turner visit a site in southeast Utah which… well, I’ll talk about it after I read this last little bit. 

Turner tells Preston that he doesn’t think this is starvation cannibalism, although, while not starving, the Anasazi were certainly hungry for iron as I mentioned in detail earlier, so eating flesh may indeed have had some nutritional value. But here’s the last little bit of the story, quote:

For this was not, he says, starvation cannibalism, such as befell the Donner party. Starvation cannibalism did not explain the extreme mutilation of the bodies before they were consumed, or the huge charnel deposits, consisting of as many as thirty-five people (that's almost a ton of edible human meat), or the bones discarded as trash. Furthermore, there was no evidence of starvation cannibalism (or any other kind of cannibalism) among the Anasazi's immediate neighbors, the Hohokam and the Mogollon. who lived in equally harsh environments and endured the same droughts.”

Turner decided that the civilization centered in Chaco Canyon was probably the locus of Anasazi cannibalism.”

“The eating of human flesh seems to have begun as the Chaco civilization began, around 900; peaked at the time of the Chaco collapse and abandonment, around 1150; and then all but disappeared (Polacca Wash being a notable exception).” End quote. Quick recap on the Polacca Wash. I talked about that in detail in the Spanish series but the Hopi, not the Anasazi, the Hopi around the year 1700, massacred the entire Awatovi mesa and mutilated a bunch of people for practicing Catholicism or witchcraft in their mind, and a lot of unfortunate people got at. Turner got in trouble with the Hopi for this. Which he was baffled by. The hopi admit to massacring 800 men, women, and children, but as soon as he suggested cannibalism he was universally condemned. Quote, Why is it that the Hopi can admit killing eight hundred at Awatovi as if it were nothing, but then the whole universe falls apart when they are accused of cannibalism?” End quote.

So the article ends with the Preston and Turner going to a site near Monument Valley. There is a large great house in a beautiful and fantastically steep red sandstone cliff face. The site has a name that I will not mention but I may or may not have been here. On accident of course. Because you need permission to be there which I may or may not have received. But there is this site with incredible views of Monument Valley that my wife and I may or may not have scrambled down to explore. Years later, when I read this article for this episode, I wished I had not theoretically visited this site. Quote:

Turner lurched off the road to follow a track in the bottom of a dry wash. We skirted the base of a large mesa, stopped, backtracked, and stopped again. Turner finally got out, squinting in the brilliant sunlight and clutching the photograph. "This is it," he said. "This is it, exactly."

We scrambled up the sandy rise above the wash. The site lay about twenty feet above the valley floor, on the talus slope of Thunderbird Mesa. It was a small patch of sand sheltered among giant plates of stone that had spalled from the cliff behind--a sheer wall of red sandstone four hundred feet high and streaked with glossy desert varnish. It was a breathtaking spot, commanding a sweeping view of Tse Biyi Flats, Rain God Mesa, the Three Sisters, Spearhead Mesa, and dozens of other buttes and mesas layered one against another, receding into vast distances. The afternoon sun was invading the valley, sculpting and modeling the buttes in crisp yellow light.

The site itself was covered with windblown sand and clumps of Indian rice grass and snakeweed. In the center lay a large, exquisite piece of a painted Anasazi pot, white with a black geometric design. Near the pot, the edge of a slab-lined hearth stuck up from the sand. The smashed, chopped, and burned bones of seven people had been found piled in this hearth. They were the remains of an old man and an old woman, a younger man, two teen-age girls, a third adolescent, of undetermined sex, and an infant. Turner believed that they had been ambushed, killed, mutilated, dismembered, and cooked right there, for the hearth seemed to have been custom-built for that purpose. After it had been used, the cracked and burned bones were left there in the fire pit and the site was abandoned.

Turner poked around the site, scowling and squinting, with two cameras swinging from his neck. "Dogoszhi black-on-white," he said, glancing at the potsherd and referring to a common Anasazi pottery type. He took a careful series of photographs of the site and its surroundings.

"Do you think that potsherd was left at the time of the massacre?"

"Yes, he replied.

"Why here?"

"That's a bit of a mystery. It's not at anything. But I wouldn't be surprised if there was a Great House near here, and somebody got waylaid." He pointed to a wedge of green growth nearby. "There must be an intermittent spring there. That would be part of the story--perhaps this was a hunting camp for deer or antelope. Perhaps it was in wintertime. This is a nice place in the winter."

As we were tramping around the site, an old Navajo man came by in a pickup truck, which had two dazed, dust-covered tourists in the back. He was wearing a straw cowboy hat and was missing his front teeth. He stopped the truck.

"Any Anasazi ruins around here?" Turner called out.

"Over there," the man said, his hand waving obscurely across thousands of desolate acres. He seemed reluctant to talk more about the Anasazi, and drove on.

"That fellow was vague about ruins," Turner said to me. "But there must be some nearby. This is a chindi place"--a place of ghosts. He continued to move restlessly around the site--a skinny man with a pot belly and sticklike arms and legs--staring into every recess. Only the occasional click of his camera broke the stillness. I remembered my first interview with Turner, when I had asked him why he was investigating cannibalism. He had replied breezily, "I think it's interesting. It's fun. Here's an unsolved problem." As I looked at his face, I could see that he was indeed having a marvelous time.

Turner moved back to the car. I remained at the spot and looked around, trying to arrive at an understanding of what had happened here. The age and sex of the remains suggested that they might have been an extended family--two parents, three teen-age children, a son-in-law, and a little grandchild, perhaps. I thought of my own family. The light deepened. A grasshopper began scratching among the dry stones, and a faint breeze brought with it the scent of sun-warmed sand. End all quotes.

Having a newborn myself, I can’t imagine… doing those things to his precious little body. It’s horrible. Turner may be correct that learning about cannibalism is interesting and fun, but when you really start to think about it, it gets unbearable pretty fast. And it happened over three hundred times in three hundred years in the American Southwest under the dominion of the Chacoan Anasazi.

The site the Navajo is referring to is very large and beautiful… or so I’ve heard. But I wouldn’t go there if I were you. The Navajo are onto something. It’s certainly haunted.

I cannot remember where I read this but I sure did make a note at some point over the years since the last Anasazi series. This note simply states, there are portions of Gary Paul Nabhan’s book Coming Home to Eat, that talk about how eating amaranth was considered sinful by arriving Catholic priests to the American Southwest desert areas. It was considered sinful because the local population associated amaranth with cannibalism and bone cakes. Apparently when humans were eaten, they’d grind amaranth and mix it with the fat, the blood, and the pulverized and roasted bones of the victims.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is Man Corn. A phenomenon that doesn’t appear on the great plains or in California or in the great basin at this time. As Turner says, quote, where is it? It’s in Mexico. End quote.

The last thing I’ll say about Cannibalism is that Man Corn is a very apt term. Of course, it’s borrowed from the Nahuatl or Aztec word tlacatlaolli, which translates into a quote, sacred meal of sacrificed human meat, cooked with corn. End quote. The corn portion of that may explain why Mesoamericans and the Anasazi were more okay with eating each other than most other people on the entire planet. A study from 2017 showed that Eurasian hamsters, who are disappearing from France, well these hamster were given a diet of only corn. The results… well, they won’t shock you after what I just talked about but the results may help explain why hamster populations are declining in France.

Sarah Zielinski wrote for Science News and said, quote:

A typical corn field is some seven times larger than the home range for a female hamster, so the animals that live in these agricultural areas eat mostly corn — or whatever other crop is growing in that field. But not all crops provide the same level of nutrition, and Tissier (the researcher), Tissier and her colleagues were curious about how that might affect the hamsters. Perhaps there would be differences in litter size or pup growth, they surmised. So they began an experiment, feeding hamsters wheat or corn in the lab, with either clover or earthworms to better reflect the animals’ normal, omnivorous diets.

“We thought [the diets] would create some [nutritional] deficiencies,” Tissier says. But instead, Tissier and her colleagues saw something very different. All the female hamsters were able to successfully reproduce, but those fed corn showed abnormal behaviors before giving birth. They then gave birth outside their nests and most ate their young on the first day after birth. Only one female weaned her pups, though that didn’t have a happy ending either — the two brothers ate their female siblings. End quote.

Of course, the Mesoamericans and Southwesterners were aware of this problem of a corn only diet, which is why they grew the beans with it and they had a process of adding niacin to the corn. But what if something went wrong? Could corn, the thing that essentially amounted to their religion, could corn be a factor in the widespread cannibalism of the Americas?

Either way, regardless of WHY people ate other people, the fact still remains that it occurred in the first place. And at an alarmingly high rate in the Anasazi world.

It’s hard to know if actual physical Mesoamericans, Toltec traders or warrior cultists actually physically showed up or not but what is undeniable is that Mesoamerican influence absolutely did appear in the American Southwest as I have exhaustively gone over.

Tim Pauketat believes that Chacoan Anasazi went down south and collected the necessary mystery religion aspects and brought them back. Other archaeologists believe that influence arrived through trade. Turner, Fisher, Lekson, and myself believe that actual physical Mesoamerican, probably Toltecs or early Toltecs did in fact send an emissary up, who then married into the Native people, before exerting a large amount of influence through the gathering of ritual objects, ritual knowledge, and agricultural knowledge of fertilizer and masonry construction. Sending an emissary may not be the correct way to put it though. I tend to agree with Turner when he wrote, quote, we propose that these southerners were practitioners of the Xipe Totec and the Tezcatlipoca Quetzalcoatl cults. They enter the san juan Basin around AD 900 and found a suspicious but pliant population whom they terrorized into reproducing the theocratic lifestyle they had previously known in mesoamerica. This involved heavy payments of tribute, constructing the chaco system of great houses, and roads, and providing victims for ceremonial sacrifice. End quote.

There is precedence for this. The FSC went and took Tikal. The FSC formed the Aztatlan societies. The FSC corralled the Chichimecs to La Quemada and then Tula. And the FSC took over Chichin Itza.

Lekson calls them thugs. Turner describes these Mexicans as quote, cultists and warriors of the Quetzalcoatl- Xipe Totec- Tezcatlipoca deity complex who overwhelmed the local residents, such the way the soldiers led by Cortes fell upon Mexico. End quote.

Tim Pauketat writes, quote, Sometime shortly after 1150 ce, at the crest of the medieval climatic wave, Tula collapsed, and shortly thereafter so did Chichen Itza. End quote. Which is the same time that Chaco itself collapsed. It seems, something happened in the Toltec empire which sent ripples throughout their sphere of influence.

Chaco was being depopulated by the mid 1100s. At which point, it appears many of them moved north to Aztec. Although there is a strong possibility that the elites of the elites stayed put in Chaco Canyon. And they still gathered resources from the Chacoan sphere despite the world around them crumbling.  

Pauketat writes, quote, They were abandoning the canyon, they say, because the political power of the priests and leaders of this great social experiment had gotten out of control. End quote. That is no doubt part of it but they may have gotten out of control because by 1150, firewood, well there was never wood in the canyon to begin, as in there had been no wood in Chaco since the altithermal but by 1150, there was no more wood being brought in, wild game had been hunted out, wild plants had been over gathered, and clean water was becoming non existent in the Chaco Canyon area. And on top of that, the reliable and plentiful rains that helped fuel Chaco’s explosion began to taper off and by 1090, the rains were less reliable. They came less frequently and with less quantity of water. But then… rains returned. The people could be fed again and this no doubt bolstered the Elite’s claims over the weather and the heavens and earth. But it was short lived. And again, by 1150, Chaco’s influence was practically non-existent.

Chaco’s growth, spurred by the knowledge of agriculture that came with the Mesoamericans, had grown the population to an unsustainable number. The desire to continue to grow in perpetuity led to collapse and the violent Chacoan Anasazi government couldn’t keep it going. Even with their threat of Man Corn. Eventually, they lost control. An elite warrior class seems to have been established in the 1100s though, and the elite became more violent to force the control that was slipping through their grasp. They closed and walled off great houses. They built more towers. They erected fortified citadel great houses to the north of Chaco Canyon in the 1130s, just as another drought hit. The Chacoan Anasazi had to do something. So, they moved north where there was more water at the San Juan River, they were closer to the mountains of the Mesa Verdeans… maybe they even made a deal with them.

For things weren’t going swimmingly with the Mesa Verdeans either. But now was the time for them to shine.

I’ve highlighted that the Mesa Verdeans and the Chacoans were at odds but the truth is, a massive influx of Mesa Verdeans actually caused the growth of Chaco in the first place. Many of them came down from the highlands and farmed and interacted with Chaco Canyon. Many of them probably profited from this engagement as well. A few of them probably built Great Houses in and around the Canyon to signify their importance to the system. But eventually, when these northerners saw the writing on the wall, a lot of them, starting in the mid 10 hundreds, began to move back to Mesa Verde. And they did it just in time, too, as the previous violence I highlighted showed.

But the people weren’t just leaving the canyon for Mesa Verde, as Stuart points out, they were heading to every single upland area. They were heading for, quote, the Chuska and Lukachukai mountains on the west, the Mesa Verde and San Juan ranges on the north, the Gallina highlands on the east, the foothills of Albuquerque’s Sandia and Manzano mountains on the southeast, and Cebolleta Mesa, the El Morro district, and the Zuni Mountains to the south. End quote. 

But all of this resettlement led to fierce competition. Life didn’t simply get easier because they migrated. And in some areas, like Gallina and Taos, people were already living there. People who didn’t want to share their homeland with these corn obsessed newcomers.

In March of 2024, the Paranormalist and his brother, took me on a spooky adventure to Nogales Cliff House and Rattlesnake Point. This is the heartland of the Gallina culture.

It was a cold, windy, and storm threatening day. Snow laid in the patches of shadow beneath the tall trees. The ground was wet. On our approach at the mouth of the steep canyon, we noticed the hide of an elk, which had been detached from the Elk that once owned it. We found it curious and we wondered what had happened. That is until only a few feet away, we saw the prints in the soft yellow dirt. They were lion prints. We found the cause of the hide’s separation from its owner. I was armed so I kept my hand ready in case the beast pounced.

As we approached the climb up to the Nogales Cliff House ruins my friend noticed more prints in the soft ground. These prints were from an elk. The elk prints went the entire trail up to the ruins. We followed in this ghost Elk’s hooves. He meandered around the ruins just as we did. And then at the southern end of the ruins where the cliff gets too steep, the hoof prints disappeared.

It was a very eerie place. Thunder rumbled a few times.

We then checked out the string of once tall and imposing towers that the Gallina built in the 1100s, just as the Chacoan sphere seems to have spiraled out in all directions. At the same time the Anasazi people began to seek higher ground. One of these towers on Rattlesnake point had at one time been 35 feet tall. Another one nearby was 27 feet tall and still in good shape when it had been excavated 80 years prior to our arrival.

One thing the Gallina area has is a ton of elk. It’s one of the busiest natural corridors for the creatures in the nation. The large animals cross highway 550 near Cuba and then meander through the sheer north south running mountains before the herds of Elk head north into the San Juans near Chama and Pagosa Springs. The Gallina had meat. But little else. For even their river was not of good quality and was full of silt and metals… that is, when it ran at all.

They were a simple people who were purposefully avoiding the Chacoans much like the Fremont had done. It seems they were from the San Juan area but had left during the 800s, right when the Mesoamericans had arrived and took over. It seems the Gallina wanted nothing to do with the newcomers.

The Gallina kept to themselves and built elaborate pit houses. Fancy ones as Lekson calls them. They did not trade with Chaco. No Chacoan ceramics are found there. They also built not a single kiva. None exist. But curiously, there have been many tunnels excavated at Gallina sites. Tunnels that lead from their fancy pit houses to the giant towers they built. And besides being tall, these towers were just enormous. They were incredibly thick by the standards of the day. Some of them were five times thicker than the average 12th century wall. So that thickness, paired with the tunnels, and the heights of the towers which were connected by said tunnels… it tells a story of a people who were extremely oriented towards the defense of themselves and their loved ones.

It seems, with these defensive measures, that the Gallina people were pretty successful at avoiding the Chacoan Anasazi… that is, right up until they weren’t. And then they met a horrific end right as Chaco fell apart. It seems the Gallina’s mammal rich lands were sought after by a hungry migrant population. A population that would most likely become the Jemez people.

In a story by Frank Hibben from 1944 titled, The Mystery of the Stone Towers for American Antiquity, Hibben lays out what was discovered over 80 years ago. Quote:

The first towers they examined were the first ones they spotted. They were rectangular structures 25-30-feet high. They were well-made structures constructed with sandstone blocks with adobe mortar. There were no external ladders or doorways, but on the inside of the towers they found ladders and the remains of collapsed and burned roofs. The interior walls were brightly painted with illustrations of plants, symbols, animals, and what they interpreted as "flags." At the bottom strewn around on stone slab floors they found unbroken pottery, leather articles, clothing, feathers, benches, masks, horns and more. In the very first tower they explored, they were stunned when they found the occupants at the bottom. Hibben wrote, "What fairly made us gasp as we carefully uncovered them was the occupants of the tower itself. They were still here, and their story was with them. In all, scattered about the tower in various positions and attitudes, were sixteen people! End quote.

Examination revealed that they had been killed. The wood roof had been set on fire and collapsed, and the bodies had been mummified in near perfect condition. A woman at the bottom had been crushed by falling stones but she had carried 16 arrows with her and had the remains of a bow in her hand. Two men were lying in the center, one with three bows in his hand and the other holding 27 arrows. Another man was found with an axe in his skull. Another woman had an arrow in her shoulder. They also found a small boy who apparently died after falling from the roof area.

Hibben cleared 17 towers during their explorations and all showed the same result. All of the towers had been attacked and burned and all of them had the remains of the defenders in them. Analysis of the wood showed that the towers were probably made around AD 1143-1245. End all quotes.

Hibben wrote another article titled Murder in the Gallina Country which goes into even more detail. I’m not sure why the Gallina fascinates myself and so many others. It’s probably that same feeling of being drawn to the macabre that true crime aficionados have. I really can’t say. To me it’s the mystery. As gruesome as it may be. These people had lived here and had wanted to be left alone, as is evidenced by their lack of trade with Chaco but that just wasn’t going to fly for some people who needed them removed from the scene for whatever reason. It’s a lesson we can learn from, I believe. No matter how much you want to just live your life and grill, there are always people that want you and your way of life destroyed. If you wait too long to do anything about it, you may end up like the Gallina.

Here’s Hibben from Murder in the Gallina Country, quote:

THE FEET of the skeleton had quite definitely been cut off. Ragged slivers of bone showed where some ancient flint weapon had cleaved through the flesh and tendons of the ankles. Nor was this all. In the skull, an arrowhead had carried away the upper border of one eye and another had

buried itself in the side of the neck.

Before us lay a mound of ten skeletons. Off to one side by the fire pit was the collection of small bones that had been a baby of six months or so. The body showed no visible wound or weapon, but the thin skull bones were crushed. The skeletons on the main pile had been men and women ranging from a boy in his teens to a man of some sixty years. All of these lay in a common heap, from which arms and legs radiated at all angles. There had been no reverent placement of these dead. Heads and bodies lay twisted and contorted on belly and back just as they had fallen together.

He continues, quote: Another feminine body, lying among the charcoal beams, was that of a young girl. Her hair, which remained almost whole, was dressed in three braids with small pieces of colored buckskin worked into the strands. The body of one man showed even the eyeballs preserved, and the blackened skin of his features was contorted into a grimace of pain, as if from the arrows in his belly or the heat of the burning roof.

He continues, quote: The remains of a young lad of seven- teen or eighteen especially attracted our attention. This boy had evidently at- tempted to crawl into a ventilator shaft which had been built in the thickness of the wall to conduct fresh air into the lower part of the tower. But the aperture was too small for his whole body, and he had been able to thrust only his head and one shoulder into the opening. Two arrows

had struck him in the hip from behind. Although the blackened flesh had been burned to a dark froth by the heat, we could still see how the skin had been sucked inward around the wooden arrow- shafts. His skull, in the recess of the ventilator shaft, was whitened and untouched. The lower part of his body, lying on the stone floor of the tower, was darkened by the fire and flattened by the fall of the roof and stones from above.

He continues, quote: One skeleton had a rough spear point lodged in the ribs. Another had received an arrow in the lower abdomen. The shaft had plunged clear through, and the arrowhead was embedded in the sacrum. This point was not made of the usual flint or obsidian but was fashioned from a fossil shark's tooth, a relic of a geologic age even more ancient than the Gallina. Another skeleton, that of a mature woman, had an arrow embedded in the bone at the back of the skull. Still another had been shot at close range in the forehead so that the flint arrowhead had broken completely through the frontal bone.

One individual, a man of thirty-five years or so, must have clung tenaciously to life. He lay on his back on top of several of the others, with his head and neck hanging grotesquely downward. The top of his skull was completely bashed in as though by a stone club. A flint arrowhead was embedded in his face and another in his neck. A spear point had been plunged into his chest. His jaw had sagged open in death and still remained gaping in a macabre grimace as we cleaned the dirt from the white teeth.

Finally, on top of the pile of skeletons several large blocks of sandstone lay as though they had been thrown down by an enemy upon some corpse that yet twitched a little.

One final quote from Hibben: 

This seemed at first to be the last of the evidences of violent death. But more appeared as we cleaned the skeletons to take photographs. Every one of the skeletons lacked both feet. The bones were well pre-served, but the legs ended at the ankles. As we looked more closely, we could see the jagged ends of bone which showed where the feet of two of the skeletons had been hacked off with a flint instrument. The left hands of two other skeletons were also missing, having been severed at the lower arm in the same fashion. End quote.

In a later paper by James Mackey and R C Green titled, LARGO-GALLINA TOWERS: AN EXPLANATION, the two archaeologists found evidence for… you guessed it, Man Corn. Quote, Of the 10 skeletons found on the floor of the Bg 20 pithouse, four show evidence consistent with an interpretation of cannibalism. End quote.

Of the dozens of bodies recovered at Gallina sites, not a single one was in tact, meaning, they were all killed and disarticulated. They didn’t die peacefully in their sleep. Stuart writes of Gallina and says, quote, that they had been purposely dismembered is certain- flint knives had left deep striations on long bones where limbs were separated from the torso. Many had had their skulls crushed, probably by stone axes and mauls. Others had been decapitated- even children. End quote. Stuart concludes that an estimated 60% of adults and 38% of children died violently at Gallinas. And some of those who died were subsequently eaten by their attackers.

The Gallinas region is yet another one of those places I’ve been to that had blood in its soil and evil baked into the rocks by a devouring fire set by attackers.

It’s kind of incredible how many places I’ve now been to in the American Southwest where long ago a few psychopaths murdered, mutilated, and man corned entire families. Is it interesting? Sure. Is it haunting? Absolutely.

So as the Chacoan world fell apart and flung itself in every direction in an act that was as violent as a hurricane, a new capitol emerged.

That capitol would be at Aztec. And it sits directly on the Chaco Meridian.

Whoever ran Aztec, it seems they were trying to recreate Chaco. That seems certain. And at this time, Mesa Verdean or Aztec style pottery seems to take over. Beautiful murals of landscapes appear here at Aztec. The people began to paint the exterior of their bowls. Aztec also begins to build roads.

For a hundred years, the people had been heading back up to the highlands of Mesa Verde, Chaco needed to make a connection with them. Keep their tribute flowing. And also, finally get those Mesa Verdeans within the Chacoan sphere. At least the ones that had never made their way to the Canyon in the first place.

The Chacoans who took over Aztec and the area of the San Juan River, according to Lekson, they bullied and coerced, possibly even enslaved the local people. That sounds a lot like Chacoan Anasazi from Mesoamerica, or at least their distant descendants, doesn’t it?

For instance, the cool green stone at Aztec is from around 4 miles away. Someone had to carry it. The stone discs they put under the tall trees at the kivas came from upwards of 20 miles away. The trees came from 18 miles away.

Aztec took off in the mid 1100s, right in time for a massive and debilitating drought. And this drought brought even more violence. As the Gallina story tells. But most of the violence centered in the Aztec core area. The Chacoans were continuing to try to exert their influence over a people who’d had enough.

Lekson calls the time terrible and violent. He said at the seminar that stress related to extreme drought AND political and personal boundaries fomented more violence.

There’s the massacre at Cowboy wash I talked about in the first Anasazi series. It was a large scale and coordinated attack. Chuska farmers were slaughtered. People in the La Plata Valley got murdered. There was a lot of Man Corn. Cannibalism spiked. This was ideological. This was an attempt by the Chacoan Aztecan Anasazi to enforce dominance. Lekson said, quote, resist Aztec? Goodbye. End quote.

By the mid 1200s, the Mesa Verdeans begin to rebel. There’s more turmoil. The rain only comes once a year now. The deities were losing control. And eventually, all hell breaks loose.

Chacoan Aztec Anasazi are burned alive at Salmon Tower Kiva at 1270. Rooms of founding Great House members are burned to the ground. Aztecs massive tri-walled structures are dismantled. The floor at Aztec is gouged out. Aztec west burns. Places in Chaco Canyon are taken apart.

1270 was the end of the Chacoan Anasazi Era. It was the end of Chaco and Aztec being ruled by the Mesoamericans.

The Anasazi didn’t completely disappear though. The ones that didn’t head south stayed behind to become the Hopi and the Zuni. The ones that did leave headed first to Wupatki and the canyons around Flagstaff. Then they went further south below the Mogollon Rim and in the Gilla Wilderness before finally reaching Paquime. Paquime is on Lekson’s Chaco Meridian after all.

I discussed the incredible facts of the Meridian in the previous series so I won’t go over it again here but it truly is incredibly interesting that every major center for the Anasazi over hundreds of years popped up on this very specific line.

Richard Fisher, though, brings up the Chaco meridian and he believes that this straight line was there for a reason. He calls it the Monsoon Meridian. He writes, quote, The “Chaco Meridian” is a natural rainfall event where summer monsoon storms associated with lightning flow north along the continental divide from central Mexico to southwestern Colorado. These thunder storms are filled with measurable fertility originating in the tropics. End quote. He further points out that, quote, virtually all of the Chacoan as well as Paquimé Anasazi political systems are geographically located within this Monsoon Meridian. He proposes that this natural phenomenon is the basis of the “step fret” lightning pattern that dominates ceramic design of those eras and is one of the fundamental foundations for Chaco-Paquimé religion. End quote. Additionally he points out that, quote, it appears that fertilizer is the driver of these cultures. One aspect of naturally occurring fertilizer is rainfall associated with lightning which has an easily observable and strong positive effect on crops and agricultural production. End quote. He then shows a pretty awesome satellite photo which shows that the Chaco Paquime people were spot on with their monsoon dominated living patterns. Quote, Perhaps as the longitude 107.57 falls right in the center of this “Monsoon Meridian” this is the reason for the alignment of Aztec, Chaco and Paquimé. End quote.

I think that’s excellent reasoning but the line itself was in fact very important and as time went on during the Anasazi era, the settlements got closer and closer to that actual straight line on the map.

I really want to talk about Paquime, but I’m going to save it for the very end. First, I’d like to talk about what on earth was going on in the east and how were they connected to the Southwest and Mesoamerica.

Over a thousand years ago, and actually well into the Spanish era, there were roads that connected Mesoamerica not only to the southwest but also to the Mississippi River. Although, Pauketat writes, quote, no smoking-gun evidence has been found, and perhaps none will be. End quote.

I have extensively covered how the ancient once’s in north and central America used to walk and even run. From the Anasazi to the Tarahumara to the Apache, the people of the Americas could cover great distances on foot. They had no beasts of burden so walking and running was the modus operandi for the people.

And if you listened to my episode over the Jumanos, they may have had a great influence in moving goods from MesoAmerica to the southwest and even the east.

What is known is that corn grown in the east came from the American Southwest. And that corn came from Mesoamerica. But growing corn in the east wasn’t something traditionally done. They had plenty of crops they were already growing and the eastern Indians were rather adverse to growing the crop… that is until around AD900. Pauketat writes, quote, the earliest corn in the Mississippi valley was adopted at just about the time that Chaco Canyon was coalescing out in northwestern New Mexico, and soon thereafter appears at the other end of the Santa Fe Trail and south a bit—on the Arkansas River. End quote. And the Arkansas river is where a people known as the Caddoans appear.

The Caddoans built circular mounds and had their own culture which was astonishing and which had a lot of ties to Mesoamerica but what the Caddoans did that was amazing, was head north to the Missouri Illinois border and create a sprawling metropolis known as Cahokia on the Mississippi River. There were people living there, sure. But the Caddoans saw an opportunity and they took it. They then built the massive and impressive Cahokian Mississippian center. Sound familiar?

The Cahokians, you’ll be shocked to learn, built according to celestial alignments, they grew corn, and they had abundant human sacrifices. Oh and some of the elite had dental modifications similar to the Mesoamericans. These were notched incisors and curiously, mostly women had them.

Cahokias reach was grand, too. After they took off, their artifacts appeared as far away as Florida. Pauketat writes, quote, one such possession is a Cahokian redstone smoking pipe bowl, found on Dauphine Island off Mobile Bay in the Gulf of Mexico. Cahokians had carved it to look like a crayfish. End quote. The Cahokians also travelled very far north into Wisconsin to make religious shrines. Kinda like how the Anasazi built chimney rock.

In Cahokia, the practice of human sacrifice which had started with the Caddoans, who in turn had got it from Mesoamerica, well at Cahokia, human sacrifice occurred on a regular basis. And it began at the same time that Chaco was taking off. As a matter of fact, Caddoan arrows have been found in sacrificial pits with the victims. Not in the victims, just lain next to them.

One sacrifice at Cahokia involved one of these enormous Cyprus trees that were brought in and placed into the ground all over the site. I’ll talk about these poles in a minute. But one of these cypress trees had been removed from the hole where it had been placed, water had then filled the hole, probably from a recent storm, and then a 19 year old girl, her arms and legs bound, was thrown into this enormous cylindrical hole and then covered with earth. This happened quite a bit in the pole holes at Cahokia.

These enormous trees though, Puaketat writes, quote, When originally standing, these large poles would have been highly visible markers, allowing priests to make visual alignments between the earth on which they stood and celestial events above their heads, such as the rising and setting of full moons. The poles themselves might have been viewed as living beings.

He continues, quote, But the size of Cahokia’s poles, and the frequency with which they seem to have been emplaced and then removed, over and over again, suggests something more. That “something more” likely involved a Mesoamerican-style pole-climbing ritual. After all, the Cahokian poles measured from 1 to 3 feet in diameter and may have projected skyward as much as do voladore poles in Mexico today—100 or more feet. At that height, some of the great posts on top of platform mounds were subject to being struck by lightning, much as archaeologists experienced when they experimented with a telephone pole atop the summit of Monks Mound. Twice that summer it was struck and shattered by lightning. End quote.

And these poles have hints in iconography from Cahokia, and also from Caddo, but these poles were more than likely used in the Mesoamerican style pole flying Quetzalcoatl worshipping ceremonies. Pauketat writes, quote, Turning to Cahokian and Caddo artwork, we see similar depictions of Thunder Gods or their disembodied, raptor-mask-wearing heads arranged around a striped pole. In the case of one fragmentary Cahokian sandstone tablet, the disembodied heads of men wearing raptor masks are arranged around pole-and-rope motifs on one side, and the heads of ivory-billed or pileated woodpeckers—birds that chisel into poles—are similarly depicted on the reverse side. The pole’s diagonal stripes, more than likely, are a simplified wind motif, much like that seen on Cahokian pots. They might also be rope motifs, connecting the raptor men of the Mississippi valley with some version of a Mesoamerican-derived pole-flying ritual. Either way, it seems unlikely that Cahokian poles were merely passive marker posts that simply stood like an obelisk in one place for multiple seasons or years. Rather, these were active ritual monuments around which Cahokians performed, either on the ground or as flyers hanging from ropes. That’s probably why they were so massive, so tall, and so frequently put in and pulled out. The Cahokian pole ceremony was transplanted from Mesoamerica, and later morphed into some early version of the Plains Sun Dance. End quote.

The Caddoans built both circular and rectangular pyramids at Cahokia. They also had many shrines devoted to water. Or surrounding springs and water sources. These shrines also occasionally doubled as steam baths. Cahokia also had raised causeways or roads. And these raised roads were straight. They also linked the pyramids or mounds and the water shrines that dotted the area. The roads also aligned with cosmic and celestial events. The similarities are starting to pile up.

Circular flat top mounds appear at Caddo around the same time great circular kivas start appearing at Chaco. Around the 900s. Around the same time they appeared at Huasteca. That place I talked about where the water worshipping Maya moved up to the mouth of the river on the Gulf. Then ciriclar topped pyramids arrived from Caddo to Cahokia around 1050. And those circular topped pyramids probably originated in that Huastec region when Mesoamericans from that area introduced the Caddoans to them.

Cahokians drank the black drink in circular Caddoan vessels, reminiscent of Mesoamerican vessels. It was just the black drink instead of chocolate. Even the plant to make the black drink came from the Caddo regions. Pauketat writes, quote, Cahokian objects are buried with the Caddo dead in Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Louisiana. End quote.

So clearly, Caddoans built Cahokia and Caddoans had connections to the Southwesterners and the Mesoamericans. Particularly those Huastec Maya like people from the Gulf.

But there’s more. The Cahokians wore masks that originated in MesoAmerica. These masks have been found from Minnesota and Wisconsin all the way down to Florida. Pauketat again, quote, the idea of wearing “long-nosed-god” maskettes as ear ornaments was a Mesoamerican derivative. They could be Cahokian-made renditions of a rain god—Tlaloc or Chahk—but are more likely derived from the good and bad creator deities who bring rain: the Thunderers, aka Quetzalcoatl and Tezcatlipoca. End quote.

This hooked nose on the mask was most likely a bird’s beak. They could have represented the men who flew on the poles. The poles found in MesoAmerica, Pueblo bonito, and Cahokia. Pauketat says of artifacts found at Cahokia, quote, man heads are arranged around a pole motif. The conjunction of ghostly faces, pole imagery, and bird-man symbolism may indicate the presence of pole flyer or voladore ceremonialism imported from Mesoamerica. The same character would seem to hint at a thunderbird-turned-human. End quote.

But also found at Cahokia… human sacrifice daggers. The tecpatl. Quoting Pauketat again, my only source over this part of the episode, he wrote, quote: Archaeologists have long puzzled over these chipped-stone daggers, 6 to 10 inches in length, narrow at the bottom, and wide at the top. In size and shape, they are dead ringers for Toltec- and Aztec-style tecpatl from Central Mexico, such as those buried at Tlatelolco and Tenochtitlan as offerings at the base of Aztec temples to Ehecatl-Quetzalcoatl. Even the flint-knapping technology used to chip out the Cahokia artifacts is similar to Mesoamerica’s dagger-chipping technology. End quote.

There are hundreds of examples of tecpatl style knives made at Cahokia after the year 1050. Almost all of them are identical in size and form to mesoamerican knives. Pauketat writes of the tecpatl and says, quote, In the art of the Toltecs, whether at Tula or Chichen Itza, the daggers are depicted on chacmools as worn in an arm strap, presumably associated with the killing and carving up of human sacrifices. The Toltec and Aztec gods Quetzalcoatl and Tezcatlipoca (and, later, Huitzilopochtli), the dual Wind-That-Brings-Rain gods, are invoked in myths of earlier episodes of creation in which the gods themselves are killed. End quote.

So at Cahokia, the Caddoans brought bird masks, daggers, circular water shrines, circular mounds, circular steam baths, monumental roads, and freestanding vertical poles all at the same time. And all of this has origins in Mesoamerica. Specifically that Huastec region I mentioned in the beginning of the episode.

But then in 1170, right after the fall of Chaco, a good portion, the elite portion, of Cahokia was burned with everything in it. No one reoccupied that area. There were no more circular mounds built, no more circular bath houses constructed, and no more poles were placed. Also at this time, the southern Caddoans and the Cahokians whom they coerced into building Cahokia, broke ties.

To me, it’s a near identical story to Chaco and the Mesoamericans. A group comes up from the south with mesoamerican magic, turns the area into a powerhouse but uses a lot of violence to do it, and then locals kick out the foreigners. Then the southerners go back down south and create a massive complex that lasts for a couple hundred years longer. For the Caddoans, they go down to Spiro Oklahoma. And there, they began to use even more Mesoamerican features. They even began depicting speech bubbles like the Mesoamericans on their art. And a very specific serpentine earth monster begins to dominate the art of Caddoan Spiro: Quetzalcoatl.

For the Anasazi, they head down to Paquime.

But I have one more group of people to talk about that helps paint the picture of the Anasazi’s migration to Paquime while also finishing the painting of the people who stayed in the four corners… at least for a time.

I doubted that Athabaskans were present during the Chacoan Phenomenon during my last series over the Ancient Ones. But I have since changed my mind. I’m not sure they were in the area in great numbers but I do believe now that they witnessed… something. They certainly learned a few things from it, if not from the anasazi, then certainly from the Ancestral Puebloans, like the Mesa Verdeans.

I have since the last series some two and a half years ago, spent significant, I mean, a lot of time, studying the Apaches. I believe their ancestors burnt out the people at Montezuma’s castle. I believe they were hanging around the Mesa Verdeans. I believe they, or a few of them, witnessed the brutality of the Mesoamerican influenced Anasazi. There are just too many stories. I believe their practice of avoiding anasazi sites and its ghost sickness is quite telling enough.

Contrarily the Athabaskans may have run into the Mesa Verdeans after the Mesa Verdeans moved back into the Great Houses at Chaco during the cold spell known as the Little Ice Age. This cold spell may have been the very catalyst of the Athabaskans leaving the northern fringes.

I was recently texting a listener, who became a dear friend in real life here in New Mexico. We have grabbed lunch and dinners together and he is my Southwest Seminar attending partner… we were texting about this episode and about the Athabaskans who may or may not have been in the Southwest during the Mesoamerican occupation of the Chacoan Anasazi world. And this is eventually, more or less, its a little edited, but this is what I sent him after some contemplation by both of us. Quote:

If I’m a migrant population that has been traveling for decades on the western edge of the Rocky Mountains looking for a place to settle down and I run into a people (the Fremont maybe) who purposely left the Chaco region centuries before and these people say the Chacoans down there have a lot of corn, sure, but they’re mean and evil, I’m not sure I run down to the Chacoans and ask to join. I think I meander on the outskirts until I notice them unraveling. And then I swoop in and fill the vacuum.

The Athabaskans are incredibly interesting. There were clearly two migrating peoples. One on the east of the front range and one on the west of the Rockies. I’m not sure if they were in contact with each other or if they arrived at the same time or if they were even friendly towards one another. Certainly their descendants weren’t friendly towards one another. But it seems the Athabaskans took advantage of a deteriorating Anasazi situation and as the Anasazi migrated out, the Nabajo de Apache swooped in. And when some of the Ancestral puebloans or Anasazi stayed a bit longer than the Athabaskans wanted them to, they burned them out or killed them like at Montezuma’s Castle and then they took the Anasazi’s desert oasis mountains. For all we know, the Mesa verdeans or ancestral puebloans left the four corners after the Anasazi left because they made a deal with the Athabaskans. Y’all take this land we don’t want anymore and we’ll move if you’ll help us kick out these Mesoamericans. End quote.

That was just pure spitballing with my friend Matt but there could be some truth to it. It’s certainly not the only plausible scenario. They may have bypassed the Fremont and stepped right into the western Anasazi’s homeland where they immediately got taken prisoner and enslaved. Some may have been sacrificed. Certainly something happened to build later hostility.

Maybe word got back to the rest of the Athabaskan migrants and when they arrived, they sought revenge. They burned out the Mogollon Rim people and forced them further south to Paquime. Athabaskans certainly raided and looted the eastern Ancestral Puebloans after the Anasazi civil war. These eastern Athabaskans seem to have arrived later and I tend to think they became the Apache as they slowly took over every desert mountain oasis.

Meanwhile in the west, the ancestors of the Navajo were the ones to force the remainder of the Anasazi south to Mexico at Paquime. And remember, even the Paquime were forced out and went even further south. Who knows, maybe the Apache and Navajo, the Athabaskans had a hand in that as well. I have no idea.

I do know that the Ancestral Puebloan culture and the Athabaskan culture did not get along. But there may have been a time when they teamed up to fight the Mesoamerican heart carving and human sacrifice demanding Chacoan Anasazi leaders. Or maybe the Athabaskans, like I mentioned, ran into the remnants of the Mesa Verde people who didn’t treat them too well. Certainly, the Mesa Verdeans before abandoning the Chaco area altogether, they were building very defensively. I wouldn’t doubt that this defensive posture was in response to the newly arrived Athabaskans. Or… alternatively, maybe the Navajos were forced to work for the Anasazi and the Anasazi leader the Navajos have called the Great Gambler.

I’ll briefly summarize something Lekson said at the Southwest Seminar.

He essentially said, sorta quote, the Navajo have so many stories about the great gambler. He was the king. He’s not Pueblo or Navajo and he enslaves everyone from Ute to Navajo and you build houses for him and you give him tribute. AT CHACO. The Great gambler was really bad so the Navajos didn’t have casinos for a very long time. End semi quote.

According to Navajo legend, as told by Lekson, the Ancestral Puebloans, I assume with Navajo help, they eventually turn this great gambler at Chaco Canyon into an arrow and shoot him south where he came from.

Hmmm… south where he came from. Hmmm he wasn’t Navajo nor Puebloan.

Interestingly, archaeologist George Hubbard Pepper in the late 1890s, when he was excavating Room 33 at Pueblo Bonito, the room with all that turquoise and the two quote unquote founders of Pueblo Bonito, when this archaeologist asked his Navajo field hands to help him excavate that room, they flat out refused. Pepper was insistent but the Navajo still said no. He offered them more money. Still, the Navajo excavators, despite having already dug up rooms with buried individuals and having qualms doing it, they still said no to excavating this particular room 33. The room with the founders of Chaco. Why would they say that if the Navajo had no knowledge of what was going on at Chaco? Clearly, the Navajo do have knowledge… I’m just not sure where it came from. And different Navajo will tell you a different story.

Also, about the Athabaskans being in the area by at least the 1200s, David Stuart says this in Anasazi America, quote, dental remains typical of Navajo Athabaskan people were uncovered a few years ago at Trinidad Lake, Colorado, and they were laboratory dated to approximately 1175. If these data are confirmed by additional finds, it could suggest that Navajos moved into their final homeland just after the Chaco Anasazi world spilled out of the San Juan basin in the mid 1100s. End quote.

I would suggest those eastern teeth at Lake Trinidad, just below the Spanish Peaks or the Breasts of the World, I would suggest they were more akin to Apache than Navajo, but what do I know. I’m just guessin.

Lastly, Salmon ruins, and yes, it’s pronounced like that. The owner of the land was a jewish immigrant who pronounced his name like that. But Salmon ruins near Farmington and Bloomfield in northwest New Mexico, it had an impressive tower and the site was seemingly reoccupied after some abandonment. But unfortunately for the people who reoccupied it, pretty late into the 1200s, the pueblo was attacked and burned to the ground. Rather importantly for our story, more than thirty OLDER women and young children perished in this fire. I spoke earlier during the Aztec segment that maybe it was Chacoan Aztec Anasazi but this legend may tell a different story.

Navajo legend states that essentially, they did it. An old beggar woman came by the pueblo to ask for food and the inhabitants turned her away. Or worse. So the son of this old Navajo beggar in the 1200s sought revenge. Stuart says, quote, a party went there and took wives. In keeping with that oral history, no young women or teenage girls of reproductive age were found with the other inhabitants burned in the Salmon Ruins elevated kiva. End quote.

For more on the history of the Athabaskans in the region, sign up to be a paid subscriber and listen to my episodes over the Apache Kid, the Jumanos who were eventually overran by the Apaches, Tom Jeffords, Cochise’s only white friend, and Cass Hite, who learned from the Navajo and lived near them. And then listen to my very long series over the Apache if you haven’t already.

Finally, we have the end of the Anasazi migration for this episode. Because make no mistake, they continue after Paquime to head further south. Listen to my previous series for that information.

Paquime or Casas Grandes in Chihuahua sits right on the Chaco Meridian. It also is the site of a five thousand pound iron meteorite which crashed to the ground. The people of Paquime would eventually wrap it in linen and wall it up. If it crashed there on that spot and was never transported… that is amazing because Paquime is truly directly south of Chaco and Aztec on the Chaco meridian.

Paquime had been around for a while but it really took off in AD 1300 after the Anasazi Civil War and Migration from the north. The city probably also included many people from the south. Once the Anasazi moved to Paquime they began to take on even more Mesoamerican cultural ways like even more elaborate platform mounds, a giant snake effigy, polychrome ceramics, typical Mesoamerican jewelry forms like ear spools, nose ornaments, and pectorals, and also, curiously, they had a lot of bison.

Pauketat writes of the site, quote, The Horned Serpent figured prominently on the thousands of beautifully painted Ramos Polychrome pots buried on the floors of Paquime, this most urban of Mogollon complexes. There’s a stone-faced rubble mound in the shape of a horned serpent pointing north toward a major spring from which Paquime’s people obtained water. There are canals that bring water into the city. There is a two-tiered, 10-foot-tall circular masonry building on a nearby mountaintop, Cerro de Moctezuma, apparently dedicated to the local water, rain, and Wind-That-Brings-Rain gods. And there are four circular masonry platforms, one at the end of each arm of a cross-shaped platform, down in Paquime proper. These may have elevated temples to the four directions or winds. End quote.

It was a truly happening place. Pauketat elaborates further and says archaeologists found, quote, almost four million mollusk shells or pieces of shells that had been imported from the sea. Most of these shells covered the floors of two rooms or were found in a series of offertory deposits associated with water. That’s an astonishing number of mollusk-shell artifacts for a place in the middle of a desert 250 miles from the ocean waters of the Gulf of California. Many were imported whole, strung on ropes, simply to be left as offerings. Some are the remains of the cutting and shaping of whole shells into trumpets, smaller ornaments, and fetishes. End quote.

John D Pohl wrote about Paquime’s relationship to Mesoamerica when he wrote, quote, Charles Di Peso excavated over 650 copper artifacts at Paquimé, more than the total recovered from all other sites between northwest Mexico and the U.S. Southwest combined. Among these were hammered copper disks on which designs were engraved, reminding Di Peso of the back “shields” on the monumental Toltec warriors from Building B at Tula, Hidalgo” “The Toltec “back- shield” is a specific artifact type that has been excavated both at Tula and Chichén Itzá. It consists of a wooden disk upon which an elaborate rendition of the sacred directional scheme has been applied using intricate turquoise mosaic. The fact that the center is composed of a reflective surface of pyrite indicates it functioned as a divining mirror for consulting supernatural entities, and it is notable that the face of an ancestor appears within the center of the back shields as they are on the Tula warriors. End quote.

Paquime’s got the same story as Chaco when it comes to farming as well. Every conceivable piece of arable land, some farmlands as far as 100 miles up into the mountains, were being farmed.

And also… Paquime has its fair share of human sacrifice and plenty of evidence of dismemberment, defleshing, and Man Corn.

Something happened towards its end though and around 1450, a lot of it burned, and just like everywhere else the Anasazi lived, it was abandoned.

The people of Paquime it seemed went further south into the mountains. Some became Raramuri, some became the Acaxee and Xiximec, and others… just may have gone south to a place known as Tenochtitlan.

Tim Pauketat has a nice summary I’ll use now, quote:

Beginning in the ninth century, the wave of interlinked religious movements spread, stretching from the Yucatan Peninsula up into the widely separated, surprisingly coeval cultural expansions of the early Puebloan, Formative Caddo, and early Cahokia-Mississippian realms. The wave, we now know from actual climate data, happened when farming conditions were more ideal in the north and while portions of Mesoamerica were drying out. In other words, the same global climatic changes that were leading to the Terminal Classic collapse of Maya cities and the early Epiclassic to Postclassic rise of a Toltec-infused ideology were having very different and positive impacts outside Mesoamerica. At this time, after 900 ce, many of the northern regions of the continent witnessed the appearance of some form of Thunderer god or gods—one or more manifestations of the Wind-That-Brings-Rain deity Ehecatl-Quetzalcoatl and, more than likely, his diabolical alter ego Ehecatl-Tezcatlipoca. Of course, other Mesoamerican gods were entangled in the cults, most importantly a Corn Mother or creator goddess, and the resulting cults of Thunderers happened a little differently in every region because the climatic conditions and historical traditions of each location were dissimilar. But all regions, it now seems apparent, were historically connected, judging by the fact that the various cults happened domino-like within a century and a half of each other, between 900 and 1050 ce, first in the south and last in the north. And they were unified by an emphasis on circular cult buildings, pole-climbing or flying rituals, large chipped-stone daggers, spiral-shaped mollusk shells, and water, especially the kind that fell from the sky. End quote.

And with that, the final brush struck of the painting is complete. The picture is all there. Migration, Man Corn, and Mesoamerica all helped to create and keep Chaco Canyon running. At least until the spiral flung itself too far and it all burned down.

Wether physical Mesoamericans came to the southwest in the form of Toltec Feathered serpent cultist warriors, or the early Anasazi ventured themselves down to the Toltec world and brought it back after years of being in the mystery schools, there is no denying the connection between the Chacoan Anasazi world and the world of the Mesoamericans in Central America. But that connection would spread eastward too.

The corn the puebloans grew would reach the Caddoans and the Cahokians of the Mississippian culture and eventually that corn would even reach the Cherokee and Iroquois who would also adopt similar Mesoamerican beliefs. It seems you can’t separate the corn from the Mesoamerican ritual world.

Of course, the Ancestral Puebloans gave up the four corners and headed to the Rio Grande to remake themselves in opposition to the Anasazi who had ruled over them for three hundred years. Although they didn’t get rid of it all…

The Hopi decided not to continue southward with the rest of them and they would end up keeping a lot more Anasazi tradition, including the pole flying voladores and many other aspects of the Mesoamerican belief system, like the kachinas. Which is probably why they call the Anasazi the ancient ones or Hisatsinom. For the Hopi, the Anasazi are not the Enemy but instead, they’re their ancestors.

But in the end, the corn obsessed experiment of the Chacoan Anasazi eventually withered away and they retreated back south like an arrow being shot towards the horizon.

Selected Sources:

Anasazi America by David E Stuart

Man Corn by Christy Turner

Gods of Thunder: How Climate Change, Travel, and Spirituality Reshaped Precolonial America by Timothy Pauketat

The Scarlet Macaw Clan Migration: Chaco Canyon Anasazi - Paquimé by Richard Fisher

The Anthropology of Turquoise by Ellen Meloy

Southwest Seminars Lectures by Steve Lekson, Robert Weiner, Donna Glowacki, & others

Parallel roads, solstice and sacred geography at the Gasco Site: a Chacoan ritual landscape by Robert S. Weiner, Richard A. Friedman & John R. Stein

Ritual Objects as Cultural Capital A Comparison between the Mixtec- Zapotec, Aztatlán, and Casas Grandes Cultural Co- traditions by John M. D. Pohl

A Case of Mistaken Identity: Shield Bearing Warriors On the Northwestern Plains by David Moyer

Ancient Pueblo Used Conch Shell-trumpets for Communication by Mike Milligan

The Mystery of the Stone Towers, "Saturday Evening Post." By Hibben (1949) "American Antiquity.”

Murder in the Gallina Country by Hibben

A History of Cacao in West Mexico: Implications for Mesoamerica and U.S. Southwest Connections [in Journal of Archaeological Research] By Michael Mathiowetz

Written on the Landscape Film

Chaco Canyon Project Films

Using ground-penetrating radar to re-evaluate the Chetro Ketl field area in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico by Jennie O Sturm

A Macaw Breeding Center Supplied Prehistoric Americans With Prized Plumage by Katherine J. Wu for Smithsonian Mag

LARGO-GALLINA TOWERS: AN EXPLANATION by James Mackey and R. C. Green

https://oldeuropeanculture.blogspot.com/2023/03/horned-serpent.html

With help from dear friend, Matt Fooks