On the way home from a trip with my niece to visit her mom (my sister) down in Louisiana in July, we routed back through New Mexico to see the celebrated Anasazi ruins of Chaco Canyon, which has been on my bucket list for some time. Punctuated by wandering cows and bugs languid in the summer heat, the road into the park is a long unpaved bumpy washboard, the result of litigious private landowners unable to reach an agreement with the Park Service on paving. Perhaps this is a blessing, for it keeps visitors to a trickle, limited to those whose curiosity to see the place overcomes worries about the resilience of their vehicle’s suspension.
The Anasazi play a legendary role for their pueblo descendants, the Hopi regarding the canyon as a sacred space populated by spirits of the ancestors, while their rival Navajo supplied the name for this otherwise anonymous people, Anasazi meaning “ancient adversaries” in their language. But herein lies an untold tale.
Eight hundred years ago the arid canyon in northwest New Mexico was Mecca to a broad culture in the region, pilgrims apparently coming to worship (and trade goods) at multistory ceremonial great houses stationed along the canyon (the largest the size of a football field), staffed by around 2,000 permanent inhabitants but able to hold many more during festivals, when thousands filtered in along broad processional avenues radiating outward, running straight up over intervening cliffs via staircases carved in the rock.
Rock falls and curious formations occupy the “back yard” of the oldest and largest of the structures, suggesting the spots may have been chosen because of associations with the spirits of the rock itself. The Navajo believe they emerged from the earth at creation here, meaning Chaco could have played the role of Eden for them.
The living Hopi and other descendants dispute the idea that the sites are “abandoned,” insisting instead that they are inhabited by the spirits of their ancestors. Were the inhabitants of modern Greece or Britain today more in tune with their own heritages’ lapsed religions, an Athenian could imagine much the same about the ruins scattered across the landscape, or a Londoner apropos Stonehenge and the posthole remains of its Woodhenge mate. My atheist’s view cannot help but consider the possibility that the “spirits” inhabiting Chaco Canyon (but not the Acropolis or Stonehenge?) are the product of a natural human imagination to rationalize a past reality when the history leaves them in the lurch.
How much of the Hopi legends about their ancestors are the equivalent of using them as a convenient sock-puppet, incorporating their only vaguely understood migratory history as a grand narrative allowing their current location to be deemed the result of divine planning, not unlike how their modern nearby neighbors the Mormons venerate Temple Square in Salt Lake. Lost in the rationalization of their past may have been much that was complex and problematic, with ball court religions (drifting up culturally from Mesoamerica) giving way to platform rivals, possibly signaling as troubled a transition as the Catholic-to-Protestant back and forthing in revolution-torn 17th century Britain or Germany.
The historian in me feels short-changed by the modern Native American legendary spin on the Ancient Ones. Oh, for some stellae like the Maya, recounting the events of such and so a day, done by whomsoever. For centuries people with names and lives dwelled at Chaco and yet not a single one has come down to us by name — not shamans or warriors or pot makers or architects. Were their lives happy or sad, their leaders respected or feared? Or, as is so often the case in human affairs, a complex mixture of both?
There must have been the occasional brilliant mind of their time, equal to a Newton or Da Vinci, but playing out in a land where the latitudinal climate zones (favoring crop transfer east to west but not so readily north to south) and access to minerals and more varied animals (such as horses and cattle) favored a technical progress in the Old World that was harder in the New. What contribution did bright freethinking minds make in this world of the Anasazi? Were they welcomed or shunned? They have no history so we cannot know.
Admiring today the wonderfully sharp-edged corners of the places they built, I crave to know who constructed it: a single man or woman, or a team of artisans? Did they feel great pride, or were they overworked and under-appreciated? We know much of what New Kingdom tomb builders of Egypt thought and did, for their written scraps were found to speak to us 3000 years later (from lawsuits over a favored pet monkey to scandal and retribution when poverty-plagued craftsmen took to tomb robbing to make ends meet in times of economic stress), but for Chaco (dating more recently from the time of Charlemagne and Genghis Khan) we have only silent stone stacks to whisper along with the wind.
Of the many pilgrims who tramped in and out over the centuries from so many miles distant in the Chaco cultural reach, did any ever have ansty children who complained “are we there yet?” Did cultural conservatives in 12th century New Mexico ever decry the abandonment of the old ball game ways in favor of the rival platform cult, anxious to preserve the “original intent” of the makers? Or even grump at the over-commercialization of the ancient canyon rites, as more of the pilgrims took to trading goods than abiding by the traditional ways?
Given the unity of human nature I can’t help thinking thoughts like that must have crossed some of their minds over the ages, and yet we cannot say it was so. For the people of Chaco Canyon had no written language, just the ambiguous petroglyphs that dot the magic stones and cliffs, symbols of the living past that various tribes claim to be able to interpret today — except differing tribes give them independent meanings, rendering them more a Rorschach blob than a reliable insight into the minds of the carvers.
Anonymity is far too a sad legacy for such a place. However many spirits hover about the ruins in the imagination of their Hopi descendants, none have the names of any specific living being who once called the place home, or trod along their processional ways. The heritage of the human family needs to know what the truth was, for Chaco Canyon as for all the former inhabitants of our fragile little planet. For how else are we to know better how best to move forward, if so much of where we have come from is locked away in the silent past?
