Pueblo Peoples on the Pajarito Plateau: Archaeology and Efficiency

PART ONE

Bandelier National Monument

Aerial view of Valles Caldera, the collapsed bowl of an ancient volcano, in the Jemez Mountains just west of Bandelier National Monument. The distant snow line is on the Sangre de Cristo Mountains to the east and north, across the Rio Grande Valley. Courtesy National Park Service, Bandelier National Monument, 1964.

Frijoles Creek in winter. Tyuonyi is to the right, out of view. Courtesy National Park Service, Bandelier National Monument, 1978.

Juniper Campground

July 5, 1986, 8:00 p.m.

The crowd gathers slowly. By twos and threes they file into the huge, darkening amphitheater at Juniper Campground. There, a mile and one-third above sea level, the night sky is breathtaking. Brilliant stars and the Milky Way’s swirling arc of cloudy light mingle with recorded flute music composed more than a thousand years ago.

This is Bandelier National Monument, in the heart of northern New Mexico’s Pajarito Plateau—fascinating by day, a natural theater by night. The crowd at Juniper Campground is hushed. Some people turn to watch flashlights flickering along nearby paths as latecomers arrive from surrounding campgrounds. Children snuggle under blankets, quietly awaiting the promised Friday night campfire lecture. British accents carry softly from the second row of wooden bleachers. To the right there is a friendly twang, typical of East Texas or Louisiana. Connecticut’s clipped vowels are out there, too, hidden in the dark. One boy in the front row, who wears his baseball cap sideways, gapes in awe as Sari Stein lights a bonfire at the amphitheater’s edge, then comes to sit in the front row with her tape recorder. In the summer months she arranges speakers’ programs for the monument. Tonight the topic is a regional favorite—New Mexico’s Archaeological Heritage.

As the flute music stops, the rustic stone stage is lit and Rory Gauthier, a ranger at the monument, steps up to introduce a local archaeologist brought in to lecture. Rory brings the hushed crowd back to earth with some anecdotes, welcomes them to Bandelier, and gives them a brief background to the scheduled lecture. He neglects to mention that he has coauthored a substantial college text on Southwestern archaeology, was born and raised in nearby Los Alamos, New Mexico, and knows more about the archaeology of the surrounding area than all but a few other living scholars. Rory is modest.

Next comes the story of ancient Bandelier. The earliest villages there were built by descendants of the ancestral Pueblo people of Chaco Canyon and its surroundings, more than fifty miles to the west. (Anthropologists once called the early Puebloan peoples Anasazi, a Navajo word best translated as ancestors of our enemies, but contemporary Pueblo Indians prefer not to see it used.) The Chaco people abandoned their basin-land towns about eight hundred years ago. In the 1100s CE (common era, the equivalent of AD), drought in the Chaco country brought a trickle of displaced western New Mexico farmers into the cool, forested highlands of the Pajarito Plateau, where rainfall is greater than in the lowlands and where deep winter snow nourishes crystal-clear streams in nearly every canyon. Years later the trickle of immigrants became a wave. Bandelier’s earliest stone masonry pueblos, built in the late 1100s, were numerous, although small and widely scattered. But even in this new home, times were hard for the immigrants because cold nighttime temperatures prevented them from harvesting the large-cobbed corn they had grown during the earlier Chacoan era. Rectangular, sandstone-slabbed bins in which they roasted green corn at high elevation compensated to a degree. Still, villagers suffered recurring hunger.

The remains of Tyuonyi in Frijoles Canyon. © Baker Aerial Archaeology—Tom Baker, 2007.

In the early thirteenth century, Bandelier’s Indian people gathered into the first large cliff dwellings to be built there, abandoning some of their earlier small, mesa-top farming hamlets. Throughout the 1200s, Bandelier’s canyons filled with south-facing cliff dwellings designed to capture warmth efficiently from the low winter sun. The back rooms of these pueblos were often cut into the soft volcanic tuff of the mesas, overlooking sparkling creeks. Above the monument’s contemporary headquarters, cave rooms lined the main wall of Frijoles Canyon. Long rows of fist-sized socket holes, which once supported the roof beams (vigas) of stone masonry dwelling rooms, show where those rooms projected outward from the cliff face, in front of the cave rooms.

In the late 1200s, a dependable water supply became of utmost importance to the monument’s inhabitants. Because Frijoles Creek ran year-round, its canyon was a perfect place for a larger village. There, the great circular structure of Tyuonyi (Qu-weh-nee, in the Keres Pueblo language) grew until it was two or three stories tall and contained more than four hundred rooms. Founded just before 1300, it prospered episodically into the early 1500s and then was abandoned. By then Pueblo people had concentrated their largest settlements along the Rio Grande Valley, a few miles to the east. Descendants of the Tyuonyi people—speakers of the Keres language—still inhabit the Rio Grande pueblos of Cochiti, Santo Domingo, and San Felipe.

As the lecture ends, a young woman asks what eventually became of the people who inhabited the ruined villages all around. The lecturer tells her that droughts and overcrowding in the fragile canyon ecosystem may have caused a significant portion of Bandelier’s ancient population to move down into the Rio Grande Valley or to perish during the two difficult centuries between 1100 and 1300 CE. The story of New Mexico’s Pueblo heritage is one of pain and hardship—but also one of ingenuity, faith, and hope, all keys to the triumph of Pueblo Indian survival.

After more questions, the crowd drifts away, flashlights twinkling. Later, a meteor shower explodes above the starlit north rim of Frijoles Canyon. Below, the night breeze wanders gently among great ponderosa pines while Frijoles Creek bubbles down to the Rio Grande. By dawn its passing waters will have given yet another day’s precious life to someone’s cornfields.

The Character of Ancient Places

The American Southwest abounds with traces of the homes of people who lived there for thousands of years before the first white colonists arrived. A few of the larger and more spectacular ruined villages have become well-known as national parks and monuments, and Bandelier National Monument is a special one. Today these ruined buildings may strike visitors as silent piles of clay and stone, but each is important as a unique chapter in the story of pre-Columbian society in America. And each conveys a special personality, forged from its geographical setting and from a lingering sense of its place and time in the flow of human events.

Wupatki National Monument, for example, near Sunset Crater, Arizona, is compelling in its desolation. Desert winds blow around the well-laid, well-preserved stone masonry walls of compact, apartment-like buildings. The adjacent slopes of Sunset Crater are still and barren. Only the black volcanic sand and fine pebbles shift ever so slightly in the ceaseless wind. Wupatki seems like the ancient counterpart to a western ghost town as portrayed in a modern movie—wind and dust, bare walls, empty buildings haunted by the echoes of voices long gone. Once a vibrant farming district with soils enriched by volcanic nutrients, the scene is now desolate and forlorn.

Mesa Verde National Park, a natural and cultural wonder in southwestern Colorado, displays an entirely different character. Verdant hills, snowcapped mountains, and high, wooded mesas form a natural picture frame for Mesa Verde’s almost perfect cliff houses. Mug House, Sprucetree House, and Cliff Palace, like all the other major ruins in the park, are neat, compact, well built, and geometrical. Set against soaring cliff faces, they are nearly everyone’s idea of the grandest villages in the ancient Southwest. But much about Mesa Verde remains a riddle. Who were the builders? What languages did they speak? What names did they call themselves? Where and who are their descendants? Some archaeologists have hazarded partial answers, but we still do not know for certain. As grand as it is, Mesa Verde remains a half-written chapter in an old history book.

Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument. Photograph by O. C. Hinman. Courtesy Museum of New Mexico, negative number 6205.

An ancient village whose character is even more enigmatic than Mesa Verde’s is Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument, in southwestern New Mexico. Like Mesa Verde, it rests in high country. In 1200 CE, this pueblo, tucked into a shady alcove in a sheer cliff face, was the only cliff palace in southern New Mexico. By Mesa Verde standards, it was a modest one. Judging from the pottery found in the ruins, researchers believe some ancestral Pueblo people from west-central New Mexico moved south after Chacoan society declined in the 1100s and took up a precarious existence amid remnants of a related society that archaeologists call Mogollon. The Gila community abandoned its cliff dwelling in the late 1200s, just as the Mesa Verdeans did theirs. No one knows where they went or why they had traveled so far south in the first place.

A place with a powerful character even today—and special significance for ancient events on the Pajarito Plateau—is Chaco Canyon, New Mexico. There, clusters of massive sandstone great houses, built several centuries before those at Mesa Verde, stand preserved in Chaco Culture National Historical Park, also a UNESCO World Heritage Site. At Chaco, the timeless, desert-blue sky hangs above rock and sage, bright yellow-orange globe mallows, rabbit brush, stunted junipers, red-brown earth, and red-brown buildings. Pueblo Bonito, with its 332 ground-floor rooms, circular kivas, and banded masonry walls, is Chaco’s crown jewel. In the classic Chaco style, row upon row of sandstone slabs were laboriously hand chinked with millions of stone chips. Both the quality and the cost of such construction, unequaled anywhere north of Mexico, are still astonishing a thousand years later. Ironically, this iconic banded stonework, which now graces casinos, courthouses, and high-end homes throughout New Mexico, was invisible under the layers of off-white plaster that graced Chaco’s great houses in their heyday.

Aerial view of Pueblo Bonito, in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico. The oldest and smallest rooms, built in the late 800s CE, are in the center-rear of the edifice, along the semicircular wall. Newer rooms line the plaza’s front wall (foreground), built just a few decades before Chacoan regional society collapsed in the 1130s. Large kivas encircle the immense plaza. © Baker Aerial Archaeology—Tom Baker.

Chaco Canyon’s persona is awesome, radiating a sense of power. In their day, the inhabitants of Pueblo Bonito surely believed fervently in the potency of their place on the landscape. Even the great broken crag of Threatening Rock, forming part of the cliff just behind Pueblo Bonito and carefully braced up in ancient times, did not dare to fall and crush the rear of the pueblo until the afternoon of January 21, 1941—eight hundred years after the town’s abandonment. Pueblo Bonito and the other great houses in Chaco Canyon symbolize ancient North America’s greatest political and economic power. They also made up the costliest Southwestern society until modern Anglo-America swallowed New Mexico. Not surprisingly, Pueblo Indian peoples today all claim to be connected to, or descended from, those who built Pueblo Bonito.

Cliff Palace, at Mesa Verde, Colorado. The simpler masonry at this post-Chaco village, with its larger blocks, required much less labor than the banded Chacoan walls. Note the towers, where grain was stored. Photograph by Jesse L. Nusbaum, 1907. Courtesy Museum of New Mexico, negative number 60649.

Chaco Canyon arouses strong emotions in the traveler, but one is never more than a visitor there. To outsiders it offers no sense of belonging. Chaco Canyon belongs—has always belonged—to the souls of those who built in it, lived in it, and died in it. The raw power of Chaco Canyon is seductive to a modern American society obsessed with power, but, New Age hopes aside, it does not share its power with casual visitors of any kind.

Bandelier National Monument is very different in character from these other Southwestern places. Perhaps it is simply the Pajarito Plateau’s crystalline air, at more than sixty-five hundred feet above sea level. Perhaps it is the remarkable views across the monument’s craggy, volcanic tuff mesas, or the forested simplicity of Juniper Campground, or the solitude of the trail to the Shrine of the Stone Lions that makes Bandelier seem friendlier and more peaceful. It could even be the striking contrast between Frijoles Canyon’s homey sense of community and old-fashioned efficiency—so important to the survival of Pueblo society—and Chaco’s more American-style penchant for power and excess that so softens Bandelier’s aspect. Most likely, the monument’s