The Ancestral Puebloans

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A name is the first thing to get right here, because the wrong one has done real damage. For most of the twentieth century the masonry towns of the San Juan Basin were filed under Anasazi, a word taken into archaeology from Navajo, where anaasází carries the sense of ancient ones who are not us — ancestral enemies, the scattered old ones of another people. The archaeologists who borrowed it in the 1920s and 1930s heard only “the ancients” and let the rest fall away. The Pueblo nations who descend directly from these builders never used it and do not accept it; from the early 1990s the Hopi, the Zuni, and the Rio Grande Pueblos pressed the National Park Service and the museums to retire it, and the field has largely complied. The standard term now is Ancestral Puebloan — the ancestors of the Pueblo people who are still here. Hopi tradition calls them Hisatsinom, the people of long ago, though that word speaks only for Hopi and cannot cover Zuni, Acoma, and the river towns. The old loanword survives in book titles and on highway signs; it is named only to mark what is being corrected.

A farming people of the Colorado Plateau

The Ancestral Puebloans were the agricultural civilization of the high desert where Utah, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico meet — the Four Corners and the broad San Juan Basin around it, a country of mesa and canyon at five to seven thousand feet where rain is scarce and the growing season short. Across roughly twelve centuries, from about 100 to 1300 CE, they turned this hard ground into one of the densest cultural landscapes north of Mesoamerica. The engine was the trinity of crops carried up from the south — maize, beans, and squash — grown by dry-farming, floodwater diversion, and check dams that wrung a harvest from a few inches of summer monsoon. On that base rose pottery, masonry towns of hundreds of rooms, a road system surveyed across open desert, and an architecture of the sky.

The shape of their history is read from the ground and from wood. Tree-ring dating, developed in the Southwest by A. E. Douglass in the early twentieth century, gives the region a chronology of almost calendrical precision: a roof beam felled in a known year fixes the room it spanned. The conventional framework is the Pecos Classification, agreed at a 1927 conference at Pecos, New Mexico, convened by the archaeologist A. V. Kidder, and still the working spine of Southwestern prehistory despite its round-number dates. It runs from the early farmers — Basketmaker II (c. 100 BCE–500 CE) and Basketmaker III (c. 500–750), so named for the exquisite coiled baskets that preceded fired pottery — through the Pueblo I period (c. 750–900), when above-ground room blocks began to replace the pithouse, into the great florescence of Pueblo II (c. 900–1150) and Pueblo III (c. 1150–1300), and on to the later river-valley towns of Pueblo IV. The transition that gives the people their name is the move from the pithouse, a roofed chamber dug into the earth, to the pueblo — the stacked, contiguous, flat-roofed masonry village. The pithouse did not vanish; it descended, deepened, and became the ceremonial room.

The kiva and the round room

That ceremonial room is the kiva, and it is the architectural signature of the whole tradition. Where domestic rooms were rectangular, the kiva kept the circle of the old pithouse — a subterranean or half-buried round chamber entered from above, with a bench around the wall, a central hearth, a ventilator shaft, and, set into the floor, a small shaped hole. In Pueblo cosmology that hole, the sipapu in the Hopi word, marks the place of emergence: the opening through which the first people climbed up into this world from the worlds below. The kiva is therefore not a meeting hall with a religious flavor but a model of the cosmos in miniature, the floor standing for the surface of the earth and the sipapu for the navel that joins it to what lies beneath. Kivas range from the household chamber to the great kiva, a roofed circular space tens of feet across with masonry seating boxes, a raised firebox, and floor vaults, capable of holding a community. The interior life of the kiva — what is done there, by whom, and when — belongs to the living Pueblo nations and is not a matter for outside description; it stands in the record as the form it is, and no further. The same reticence governs the katsina tradition, the spirit-beings central to Pueblo ceremony, which the archaeological record can date but cannot disclose.

Chaco Canyon: the great houses

The high point of the Pueblo II world stood in a shallow, almost waterless canyon in the northwestern New Mexico desert. Between roughly 850 and 1150 CE, the Ancestral Puebloans raised at Chaco Canyon a cluster of monumental masonry buildings — the great houses — on a scale unmatched anywhere in what is now the United States until the nineteenth century. The largest, Pueblo Bonito, was built and rebuilt across three centuries into a vast D-shaped structure rising in places to four and perhaps five stories, with something on the order of six hundred and fifty rooms, dozens of kivas, and three great kivas enclosed within its arc. Its core masonry — thin shaped sandstone tablets set in banded courses, a rubble heart faced with veneer so fine the mortar barely shows — is among the most accomplished dry-stone work of the premodern Americas. Chetro Ketl, Pueblo Alto, Pueblo del Arroyo, Casa Rinconada, and a ring of others made the canyon a built capital.

What happened inside these buildings is debated, because they do not behave like ordinary towns. Many great houses have far more rooms than the refuse and the burials suggest were lived in; the canyon’s resident population may have been modest while the architecture was colossal. The reading that has gained ground treats Chaco as a regional ceremonial and economic center — a place of periodic gathering, pilgrimage, and redistribution drawing on a network of more than a hundred and fifty outlying communities across tens of thousands of square miles. The goods bear this out. Turquoise arrived in quantity and was worked on site; cacao, identifiable from residues in tall cylinder jars, came up the long chain of trade from Mesoamerica more than a thousand miles south; and scarlet macaws, tropical birds with no business in a cold desert, were kept at Pueblo Bonito from the late 800s, their skeletons recovered by the dozen, their feathers buried with the dead. A crypt beneath the oldest rooms held two men interred about 850 with thousands of turquoise and shell beads — the richest burials known in the ancient Southwest, and evidence that Chaco’s society was layered, not flat.

A geometry written on the land

What most distinguishes Chaco is that its order extends past the buildings into the desert and up into the sky. The great houses are not scattered at random: their walls and doorways carry repeated alignments to the cardinal directions and to the turning points of the sun and moon. The principal wall of Pueblo Bonito runs close to true east–west; Casa Rinconada’s great kiva is oriented to the cardinal axes; and a number of structures appear set to mark the solstice sunrise or the limits of the moon’s long 18.6-year standstill cycle, the slow swing of moonrise along the horizon that takes nearly two decades to complete and return.

The most celebrated of these instruments is the Sun Dagger on Fajada Butte, a steep promontory near the canyon’s mouth. Near the summit, three heavy sandstone slabs lean against the cliff face, and behind them the rock is incised with two spirals. The slabs channel the noon light into narrow blades that move across the spirals as the year turns: at the summer solstice a single dagger of light pierces the center of the larger spiral; at the equinoxes and the winter solstice the daggers fall to either side and to its edges, framing it. A second set of markings tracks the moon against the same spiral across its standstill cycle. The site was identified in 1977 by the artist Anna Sofaer, who founded the Solstice Project to study it; within a decade the slabs had shifted, blunting the alignment, and the National Park Service closed the butte. Whether the Sun Dagger was a working calendar consulted by priests, a commemorative marker, or both, it makes the same point as the architecture: the people who built Chaco read the canyon and the cliff as a single text with the heavens.

The reading off the land continues in the Chacoan road network. Radiating from the canyon are wide engineered roads — some thirty feet across, the best surveyed running for tens of miles — that hold a straight bearing across mesa and arroyo, cutting rock-cut stairways into cliffs and laying earthen ramps rather than swerving around obstacles. The grandest, the Great North Road, runs almost due north some thirty-five miles from the Pueblo Alto complex to the broken badlands of Kutz Canyon, with parallel tracks and low masonry curbs along stretches of it. The roads puzzle archaeologists precisely because they make poor sense as transport: in a society without wheels or draft animals, a thirty-foot causeway running dead straight to a canyon edge is built for something other than hauling. The favored interpretation is cosmographic — that the roads bind the outliers to the center symbolically, and that the North Road in particular aligns the living canyon with the direction north, which in Pueblo thought is the place of emergence and the road the dead travel. The landscape, in this reading, is not the setting for the sacred architecture; it is part of it.

Mesa Verde and the cliff dwellings

As the Chacoan center waned after about 1150, the densest building shifted north and west, and the Pueblo III period produced the images most people carry of this civilization: the cliff dwellings tucked into the sandstone alcoves of Mesa Verde in southwestern Colorado. For most of their history the Mesa Verdeans had farmed and lived on the mesa tops; in the thirteenth century they moved down into the sheltered overhangs of the canyon walls and built, against the back of the rock, masonry towns of remarkable compactness. Cliff Palace, the largest, was raised mostly between about 1190 and 1280, growing to roughly a hundred and fifty rooms and more than twenty kivas, built in increments as families added their own room suites and round chambers. Balcony House, Spruce Tree House, Square Tower House, and scores of smaller alcove villages crowd the same canyons.

Why the move into the cliffs — defense against rising conflict, the shelter of the alcoves, proximity to seep springs, or some mix — is argued rather than settled. What is clear is that the cliff dwellings were the last great construction of the Four Corners core, and that they were lived in for only a few generations before they too fell silent.

The thirteenth-century migration

By about 1300 the Four Corners heartland was effectively empty. Chaco’s outliers had been left, Mesa Verde’s alcoves abandoned, the great masonry towns shut up room by room. This is the event that the older literature, in the language of “the vanishing race,” turned into a romance of a lost people — a framing that the salvage paradigm of nineteenth-century ethnography did much to spread and that more than a century of evidence has dismantled. The Ancestral Puebloans did not vanish. They moved.

The thirteenth century closed with a sustained crisis. Tree rings record a severe and prolonged drought across the Southwest in the last quarter of the century — the so-called Great Drought of roughly 1276 to 1299 — falling on a population that intensive farming had already pushed against the limits of a thin and fragile land. Drought alone is too simple; the depopulation was also driven by deforestation and soil exhaustion, by colder and less predictable seasons, by rising violence visible in burned villages and defensive siting, and by religious and social upheaval that the archaeology registers but cannot fully read. Under that compound pressure the people of the Four Corners did what their whole tradition of migration had always allowed: they gathered up and walked to better-watered country. They went south and east — to the Hopi mesas of northern Arizona, to Zuni, Acoma, and Laguna, and in large numbers down into the Rio Grande valley of New Mexico, where the river-fed Pueblo IV towns swelled in exactly the generations the northern country emptied. The migration is written in pottery styles that travel, in clan and emergence narratives that name the abandoned northern homes, and in the genetic and biological continuity that links the Four Corners populations to the Rio Grande Pueblos who descend from them.

The living continuers

The towns the Ancestral Puebloans built in the south are not ruins. The Hopi villages on their Arizona mesas, Zuni Pueblo, Acoma — held continuously for centuries and among the oldest occupied settlements in North America — and the nineteen pueblos of the Rio Grande are the same civilization, moved and continuous, speaking the same architecture of plaza and kiva, planting the same maize, climbing in story from the worlds below. For these nations Chaco and Mesa Verde are not heritage in the museum sense but homeland: ancestral towns where forebears still rest and prayers are still directed, places of pilgrimage and migration-memory rather than abandonment. The two registers sit on the same ground without contradiction — Chaco Culture and Mesa Verde are units of the National Park Service and inscribed on the World Heritage list, studied, measured, and toured; and they are living sacred landscapes whose management the Park Service now undertakes in formal consultation with the descendant nations, with more than two dozen affiliated tribes recognized at Mesa Verde and the All Pueblo Council of Governors speaking for the Greater Chaco landscape against the encroachment of energy development that continues to threaten it.

It is partly because these are working sacred places that so much of the deep interior is closed to outside telling. The Pueblo nations restrict the publication of ceremonial knowledge by their own long-standing law — the Zuni and Hopi prohibitions on recording ceremony are explicit tribal policy — and the most notorious early breach of that order, the ethnographer Frank Hamilton Cushing’s publication and reenactment of initiated Zuni material in the 1880s after he had been taken into the Bow Priesthood, stands as the founding lesson in what extraction costs. The architecture, the chronology, the macaws and the turquoise and the geometry of the roads can be described from the outside record. The meaning carried inside the kiva belongs to the people who carry it still.

Against the precision of that record stands a persistent misreading from outside it. The straightness of the roads, the reach of the alignments, and the sheer ambition of the masonry have made Chaco a recurring target of the ancient-astronaut current, which treats achievements like these as too advanced for their makers and reassigns them to visitors from elsewhere. The premise fails at the first dated roof beam: the Ancestral Puebloans recorded their own construction, year by felled tree, and the descendants who planned and built it are alive to say so. To credit the great houses to anyone but the people who quarried and stacked them is the old vanishing-race story wearing a spaceship.

Reading the record

The Ancestral Puebloan past is unusually legible because two methods invented or perfected in the Southwest converge on it: stratigraphic excavation and dendrochronology. The classificatory spine remains the Pecos Classification agreed at A. V. Kidder’s 1927 conference, refined ever since against tree-ring dates that pin individual roof beams to the year. The great houses themselves are documented to research standard through the National Park Service, which administers the core sites and publishes their excavation and management history; its account of Chaco Culture National Historical Park is the working reference for the canyon’s chronology and the descendant nations’ relationship to it. The archaeoastronomy carries its own rigorous literature: Anna Sofaer’s Solstice Project has produced decades of peer-reviewed measurement of the Fajada Butte Sun Dagger, the cardinal and lunar-standstill orientations of the buildings, and the cosmographic survey of the Great North Road. Around these run the great institutional series — the Chaco Project of the 1970s and the long sequence of Mesa Verde excavation reports — and a still-living debate over what Chaco was, conducted by archaeologists in close consultation with the Hopi, Zuni, Navajo, and Pueblo communities whose ancestors built it. The interpretive frame for that consultation, and for what may responsibly be told from the outside record, follows the critique of salvage ethnography that descendant scholars have pressed since the late twentieth century.

Among the civilizations of the Americas

The Ancestral Puebloan world belongs to the long, parallel flowering of monument-building societies across the pre-Columbian Americas, each working its own ground in its own idiom. They share with the Neolithic farming cultures of the wider world the foundation of settled grain agriculture and the impulse to build for the sacred in stone. East of them, across the Mississippi and the Eastern Woodlands, the Mississippian mound-builders at Cahokia raised a city of earth where the Puebloans raised one of stone — a different material, a different region, an overlapping age. Far to the south the desert societies of Peru’s coast left their own ground-written marks, from the Nazca lines to the highland empire of the Wari and the coastal kingdom of Chimor; in Mesoamerica the Mixtec screenfold painters and the Toltec of Tula worked still other registers of the sacred. Set among them, the distinction of the Ancestral Puebloans is that their civilization never ended. The maize is still planted, the kiva still built, the emergence still recited; the people who designed the Sun Dagger and surveyed the North Road sent their descendants south, and those descendants are at Hopi and Zuni and along the Rio Grande, keeping the calendar their ancestors cut into the cliff.

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