The American Southwest is a dry place, filled with sand and sage,
cholla
and sandstone. Indians hunted, gathered, and dry-farmed there for
centuries. Around 300 CE or so, someone decided to dig circular holes
near their farm fields and start roofing them over. It was a lot
warmer
than sleeping in the open, and more convenient than caves - they
weren't
always around anyway.
By 700, those pit houses had grown into small adobe pueblos of
rectangular rooms in front of the circular chamber, a true community.
That circular chamber morphed into a kiva, the focus of ceremonies
shared by the whole pueblo. A Great Kiva mya have looked like this
inside:
http://tinyurl.com/oszh6
Near the center of the San Juan Basin in Chaco Canyon, someone
gathered
enough influence by 850 to start building a D-shaped structure of
sandstone bricks, quarried from the Canyon's mesas. If you've been to
Chaco, you know there aren't any big trees there. Logs for building
supports had to be cut and transported by muscle power from the Chuska
Mountains, many miles west of Chaco.
The Canyon is an unlikely place for a ceremonial center - less than 9
inches of annual rainfall, only a few deer and rabbits to hunt,
turquoise for ceremonial beads and statues at mines far to the east.
But there are other reasons for any location. The jungle seems like an
inconvenient place for the ancient Khmer capitol of Angkor Wat, but it
was where the Khmer rulers ended up after moving several times. Those
rulers compelled slaves to quarry sandstone many miles away in
Cambodia's Kulen Hills and transport it to build Angkor's temples. For
Khmer kings, temple-building seemed like the best way to gain merit,
build positive karma, and ensure a good connection with ruling
ancestors. It was hard on slaves.
Chaco's central location and its east-west and southern sight lines
may
have helped it become a ceremonial center. We don't know.
By early 1100, Pueblo Bonito had become the 4-storied D-shaped
building
uncovered in the late 1800s. Its walls were made of massive cut and
dressed sandstone bricks, with long-gone plaster veneer:
http://tinyurl.com/25rmae
Pueblo Bonito and several other Great Houses must have been an
impressive sight for pilgrims descending the Jackson Stairs from
Pueblo
Alto into the canyon after a trek along the Great North Road.
The Jackson Stairs:
http://tinyurl.com/dabsec
New Alto on the Great North Road.:
http://tinyurl.com/gpzq8
But something happened - the dream began to fade in the 1200s. By
1350,
the original residents had burned Pueblo Bonito's Great Kiva,
bricked up
doorways, and left:
Burned Great Kiva at Pueblo Bonito:
http://tinyurl.com/kanv9
No more pilgrims walked the Great North Road. Everybody gradually
migrated out to the Hopi mesas, Zuni, the Rio Grande pueblos, Acoma.
The
Chaco System ended.
** Today, you can still see the structures first excavated by Richard
Wetherill in 1896:
http://tinyurl.com/7fdgod
For more on the solar and lunar astronomy of Fajada Butte and the
Chacoan Great Houses, see work by Anna Sofaer and the Solstice
Project.
Here's Fajada Butte:
http://tinyurl.com/lpk2p
For discussions of the ceremonial and political aspects of the Chaco
System, see Stephen Lekson's "The Chaco Meridian" and his other work.
Kendrick Frazier's "People of Chaco" (3rd edition) gives a good
introduction to the what and whys of Chaco. Frank McNitt's "Anasazi:
Richard Wetherill" is a good biography about the discoverer of Mesa
Verde and first excavator of Chaco.
If you're going, be ready for the dirt road into Chaco. The first 10
miles from Nageezi are paved, but it's another ten miles of dirt (dry)
or muck (wet and icy) after that. You can enter from Grants to the
south, but that road isn't any better. I like winter in Chaco because
it's not too cold, and the tourists are mostly gone. Summers see
100-degree temperatures, and there aren't any gas stations or
cafeterias
at Chaco or on the way in. All you see are occasional hogans or flocks
of Navaho sheep. Watch for the windmill near the Canyon:
http://tinyurl.com/835qc2
Once you get there, you'll need good hiking boots to navigate trails -
if there've been recent storms, running shoes won't do it:
http://tinyurl.com/854usd
I used a Leica M8 with 28mm, 35mm and 50mm lenses, plus Canon EOS 1D
mk
II with 16-35mm and 70-200mm lenses to photograph the ruins in
December
2008. Pictures from earlier visits were taken with EOS 1D (original)
and
10D, or scanned from film (E-6 ISO 64, 100, and 400 - Nikon N90 and
F5).
A tilt-shift or PC lens would be handy too (I forgot to bring my 24mm
TS-E lens the day we went to Chaco). If you want to capture the moon
through a ruin window at dusk, a tripod is a must.
All comments welcome.
Mark Bohrer
Mountain and Desert Photography
www.mountain-and-desert.com
Active winter travel at its best
--
Mark Bohrer, MSEE
www.precision-copywriting.com
I help make clients filthy stinking rich
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