it wasn’t until about the time a prophet named Jesus was born in another Holy Land on the other side of the globe that people started settling down permanently in the Durango area and farming the fertile soil. These ancestors of today’s Hopi, Zuni, and Rio Grande Pueblo people built and lived in dwellings scattered around on the mesas of current-day Durango, in Ridges Basin, and at Talus Village and the Dark-mold site on the red-dirt hillside above where my grandparents would one day set up their Animas Valley farm. They also lived in rock shelters that they constructed under a vast, overhanging layer of sandstone in Falls Creek, just west of the Animas Valley.
The Basketmaker II, as these people are known in archaeological parlance, lived here for five hundred years or more. They grew corn and squash, but not beans; they used their atlatls to hunt deer and rabbits for protein. They ate wild plants, such as amaranth. They wove baskets, sandals, and other items, but did not have pottery.
During the fifth century temperatures cooled, and farming at these relatively high altitudes must have gotten even tougher. People began bailing on the Animas Valley, and by the sixth century AD, the population of the area had shrunk almost to zero. It may have been the first natural resource bust to hit this terminally boom-bust region. Or perhaps the people who lived here just decided it was time to move on, to let this particular place rest for a while and recover from a half-millennium of human occupation.
If you want to understand Place, with a capital P, in the Four Corners country, it makes sense to begin with the Pueblo people. They’ve been in this region for thousands of years, interacting with the landscape, adapting to vagaries of climate, creating cultures and religions, developing languages. They’ve moved around, but have never abandoned, or been displaced from, their ancestral homeland. Their cultures continue to flourish in the Place from which they emerged.
During the summer of 2016, in hopes of getting a better understanding of the Pueblo sense of Place, I embarked on a trip around the Four Corners, visiting Hovenweep, Cedar Mesa, Chaco, Tsegi Canyon. On Pueblo Revolt Day, the 336th anniversary of the uprising against the Spanish colonizers, I drove my tiny 1989 Nissan Sentra across the high northern Arizona desert from Tuba City to Hopi’s Second Mesa. There, I sat down with Leigh Kuwanwisiwma in the living room of his small home.
Kuwanwisiwma has been the Hopi tribe’s cultural preservation officer for nearly three decades. When an oil company wants to drill public lands that overlap Pueblo ancestral lands, Kuwanwisiwma is called in during the “consultation” process. He fought to get Hopi ritual objects back from a Paris auction house. And he continues to search for leads on the theft, years ago, of a crucial ceremonial altar—he thinks maybe it’s serving as a headboard for some Aspen millionaire’s bed.
We talked about growing corn and about his tribe’s connections to the lands farther north. He let me taste salt he had gathered from deposits down near where the turquoise-hued waters of the Little Colorado merge with the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon, and also gave me a sample of chili pepper he had grown on a dryland field nearby.
He told me that when his ancestors emerged from the Third World into the Fourth World, the holy people instructed them to “place their footprints” across the region’s landscape. Each clan was sent on its own multi-generational migratory path—the Parrot, Badger, and Greasewood clans settled at Mesa Verde, he said, and the Rattlesnake, Fire, and Coyote clans at Kawestima in Tsegi Canyon. All paths ultimately converged on the northern Arizona mesas, reaching like fingers off of Black Mesa, where the clans reside today. The other pueblos have similar migration narratives, with common themes of movement, rest, and renewal.6 After emerging from the “Sandy Place Lake,” in the mountains north of their current homeland, the Tewa people were directed to take twelve “steps” in each direction, live in each place until it is time to move on, and finally settle for good along the Rio Grande in New Mexico, writes Alfonso Ortiz, a renowned anthropologist from Ohkay Owingeh (San Juan Pueblo).7
A footprint was placed in the Durango area in Basketmaker times, then another beginning right around the turn of the eighth century, during the early part of the Pueblo I period. Humanity trickled in at first, a few families making their way to Ridges Basin or, about a mile away, Blue Mesa. Word that this was a desirable place must have gotten out, because right around 750 AD, the migratory trickle turned into a human flash flood, and by the turn of the ninth century 200 people lived in Ridges Basin and another 250 at Blue Mesa. Considered on their own, each complex would have been the largest community of its time in the Four Corners region; taken together they blew every other Pueblo I settlement away.8
THE SMELL OF CIGARETTE SMOKE, OF THE PAGES OF OLD BOOKS, OF SAGE. They mingle together in my memories of my father, of his tiny home in Cortez, Colorado, of the beaten-down old cars he drove. He was a writer, a journalist, an intellectual jack of all trades. But for the last couple decades of his life—he died in 1998—his focus was on archaeology, on the Pueblo culture, past and present.
My father was particularly interested in something called AWUF, or architecture with unknown function, such as big earthen berms that arced around prehistoric structures or alignments of huge boulders with no apparent utility. The most famous AWUF of the Southwest are the Chacoan “roads,” which are not roads nor are they exclusively connected to the pueblos at Chaco Culture National Historical Park in northern New Mexico. The Great North Road stretches at least thirty-five miles directly north from the rim of Chaco Canyon out across the plateau toward the San Juan River. This was no ordinary foot path, beaten into the earth by repeated use. It was deliberately constructed to a degree that segments are still clearly visible more than one thousand years later. Rather than ebbing and flowing with the contours of the land, or veering around canyons and buttes, as a path would, it never deviates from a nearly straight, northward course. No one knows its purpose.
When I was in my late teens and early twenties I’d accompany my father on his journeys. We’d get up early, drink some instant coffee, and drive west from Cortez on some washboarded road that rattled dashboard screws free and caused dust to rise like smoke from the car’s floorboards. We ambled through sage, piñon, and juniper to the site, typically a structure from the Pueblo III period, which usually revealed itself as no more than a pile of hewn stones covered with lichen. In the heat of summer, cicadas screeched in the trees. In the winter, the silence was overlain by the distant hum of infrastructure sucking carbon dioxide from the McElmo Dome. As jays and magpies eyed us curiously we’d walk in circles or a rough grid-like pattern until we found the AWUF. It’s subtle but, to the practiced eye, unmistakable.
For most of my life I’ve been surrounded by archaeology and archaeologists—my brother’s one, my stepfather was an archaeologist working around the West for the federal government for decades, and my mom wanted to study archaeology in college but was shot down because she was a woman. As a young man, though, the field left me cold (an ailment of which I’ve since been cured). I couldn’t see how excavating the tangible remains of material culture could ever get at the juiciness of what life was really like—what people felt, thought, how they interacted, and what philosophical or religious forces motivated them. Nor could it answer the question that always gnawed at me: Why here? Why did they choose this place, despite the hardships, to build a civilization? Sure, there were concrete, practical reasons: Ridges Basin is a gentle valley with a southward-slanting slope on one side, a stream, and even a marsh, where tasty waterfowl often alighted. But bigger factors must have been in play. Just consider Chaco’s elaborate pueblos, which rose up in a landscape so austere that the early builders had to drag unwieldy ponderosa pine trees from the Zuni Mountains and Chuska Mountains, each fifty miles distant, for architectural uses, and may have even imported corn. It was a pragmatist’s nightmare on par with modern-day Las Vegas.
“Here, the human landscape is meaningless outside the natural context—human constructions are not considered out of their relationship to the hills, valleys, and mountains,” Rina Swentzell, a Santa Clara Pueblo scholar and an architect, wrote with my father and two archaeologists, Mark Varien and Susan Kenzle, in a 1997 paper.
