The Lost World of the Old Ones: Discoveries in the Ancient Southwest

by David Roberts

had observed the code of the day among explorers of the prehistoric Southwest: if you commit your discoveries to print, be as vague as possible about their location, and emphasize again and again the conduct necessary to keep those sites pristine. Take home nothing, not even the tiniest flake or potsherd; don’t stand or lean on ruin walls; don’t touch the rock art (for the oils from human skin degrade both pigment and patina).

In the meantime, I stand by my personal touchstone. If a thing is worth doing, it’s worth writing about.

All that we can say with certainty is that the Fremont cannot be convincingly linked with any living Native Americans.

Gifted scrambler though he was, the rancher had never aspired to be a technical rock climber. Many a time he had lowered himself off a tree trunk with his lariat, but the thought of rappelling made him blanch. As he liked to tell Renee, “I’d go to hell for a pretty woman, but not swingin’ on the end of a rope.”

But what sense did it make to execute rock art in the most inaccessible places? Did the Shield, then—and half a dozen other such barely reachable rock art panels in Range Creek—represent some sort of virtuosic deed performed for its own sake? Did the myths or magic those images conjured up gain in potency because some artist had risked his life to paint or pound them there?

The next day, he would turn eighty-three. “What are you going to do for your birthday?” I asked Waldo as he drove us back to his house. “Get up and have breakfast,” he answered.

The archaeology of things is an archaeology of loss.

My pet theory is that because so few of the professionals are climbers, they fail to appreciate the accomplishment of the ancients not only in getting to those remote and dangerous places, but in building structures, storing grain, and even living in those outposts.

the sipapu—the Hopi name for the sacred place of emergence of the people from the subterranean Third World to the present Fourth World in the creation myth.

Why build only in adobe, if you have decent stone available? For adobe is structurally weaker than masoned walls, and it erodes with every rainstorm. Yet here the adobe maze still stands, seven centuries after its builders began to lay the gooey brown muck in place. “It’s about the architecture of power,” said Lekson,

Paquimé lies less than one hundred miles south of the U. S. border, yet it remains woefully undervisited by gringos (we saw only six or eight other norteamericanos during our two days there). This, despite the fact that the grandest archaeological ruin in northern Mexico is not only a national park but a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

“You put Great Houses up high so they can see each other and talk back and forth. ‘Smoke and mirrors.’ Bonfires and pyrite. With one repeater, you could be talking to Aztec in fifteen minutes. But somebody’s gotta be here to answer the phone. “Why’s the atalaya so big? The architecture of power. Impress the hell out of people. The construction of it would have been an event people remembered. It’s monument-building. “And if that wall really is a serpent . . .” Hatcher and I looked at each other, dazzled by the show. I thought, This is how science gets done—by tossing ideas into the air like pebbles, just to see where they land. And staring north myself, I began to imagine that I could see all the way to Aztec.

Pueblo Alto, built on a lonely plateau north of Chaco Canyon itself.

Pueblo Bonito, which some experts deem the most important prehistoric ruin in the United States—a village of between six and eight hundred interconnected rooms, the rear wall five stories tall, the whole town laid out in a perfect D shape.

Instead, Lekson closes his book with a subversive tease: “Was Culiacán the last hurrah? . . . Or is Culiacán another beautiful fact, killed by an ugly theory? Sing the benediction: More research is necessary.”

“It took a high school student, Katie Freeman, to prove that you need only two lines of sight from here to Pueblo Alto, more than a hundred miles away, with Huerfano Butte as the relay station. And there are structures all over the top of the butte.” The professor smiled. “She did it as a school science project.”

For at least the last 250 years (some would say longer), the twin gorges of Canyon de Chelly have formed one of the most sacred locales in the Navajo universe. This was the stronghold in which the Diné (as the Navajo call themselves) believed they could never be conquered by enemies. It was the refuge where, during the cruelest droughts, the water would always flow and the corn grow. And it was the dwelling place of Spider Woman, the deity who taught the Diné to weave and who gave the Hero Twins the power to overcome monsters.

Liebmann invokes the phenomenon of catechresis, in its specialized anthropological sense, by which a colonized people transforms the “value-coding” of practices and images imposed by the colonizers, creating something altogether new.

I was inclined to see such paradoxical dualities as evidence of ambivalence or even confusion, without recognizing the condescension embedded in my own hyperrational way of thinking.

It’s a tour de force of science wedded to empathy.

In the same vein, Alfonso Ortiz, a man from San Juan Pueblo who became a professional ethnographer and whose 1972 book The Tewa World: Space, Time, Being, and Becoming in a Pueblo Society is a landmark in the field, famously quipped, “The Anasazi didn’t disappear, they’re running bingo parlors in the Rio Grande Valley.”

Darwin with his finches, Mendel with his pea plants, Wegener with his tectonic plates . . . The incunabula of a lonely scientist’s brain and lab can transform our understanding of the world.

The disaster that ended Chaco and Aztec was at least in part, and I think largely, man-made: failure of the political system.

In Cortez, Bruce Bradley had succinctly summarized for me that theory: “The Kachina Phenomenon, by integrating clans and kinship groups, allows socialism to flourish. It’s worked in the pueblos for several hundred years. It still works. Down there, the Anasazi found an answer about how to live together. They didn’t find one up here. Surprise, surprise—up here they’re all gone.”

As Fowles told me at the end of our wonderful day among the basalt boulders, “I feel truly humbled before the knowledge of Native American tribes.”

That first blush of discovery Kluckhohn later recalled as one of a series of “fleeting instants, treasured forever in memory, when the soul’s longing is completely satisfied and the spirit soars.”

Indeed for sublimity of scenery Wild Horse Mesa surpasses even Grand Canyon.”

billboard on Main Street announced, “Public lands are for all the people. Wilderness is only for a few people.”)

where DeLane had run cattle for sixty years, starting in 1942. (He would lead the grueling drive every summer, getting his herd up in June and down in October.)

Rounding up his cattle and pushing them up the Lake Trail to the top of the mesa could prove an ordeal. “The cattle had to go single file because the trail was so narrow,” wrote DeLane. Sometimes a cow would turn around in the trail looking for her calf. When she did that, it blocked the trail for the oncoming cattle. We’d have to get off our horses and edge around the sides of the mountain and throw rocks up to turn the critter around. Have you ever tried throwing rocks straight up all day long? By the end of the day you’ve got a limp arm hanging by your side. I think that some of the names hollered up at those old cows caused them to move along faster than the rocks, sometimes.

On that same trip, a cantankerous steer knocked DeLane off his horse and into the bushes. As he tried to get to his feet, the steer charged. DeLane’s father felled the animal with a single rifle shot.

No gallery anywhere in the Southwest is richer than the vast array of petroglyphs (nearly all of them Fremont) in Nine Mile Canyon, northeast of Price, Utah. In its forty-five-mile length, the number of panels on the canyon walls is estimated at around ten thousand, the number of individual images as at least one hundred thousand. Nine Mile, in fact, contains what is regarded by experts as “the largest concentration of rock art in North America.”

The common belief that history is progress has done a great disservice to art.

In Desolation Canyon, the Green cuts a massive gorge through the Tavaputs Plateau, eighty-five river miles that bisect one of the largest roadless tracts in the Southwest.

What I gain as a reward for my search is that elusive but inexhaustible blessing: wonderment.