In Search of the Old Ones
In Search of the Old Ones (1996) and The Lost World of the Old Ones (2015), both by David Roberts, traverse some of the same territory covered by Craig Childs in House of Rain (2006). Both authors are fascinated by the mysterious Anasazi, builders of impressive masonry “Great Houses” such as Chaco Canyon and, later, of cliff dwellings like Mesa Verde and Canyon de Chelly in the Colorado Plateau of the SW US, from the 11th – 14th C AD. Another nexus amongst the books is that both Roberts and Childs are climber types who glory in the challenges of reaching (almost) unreachable ruins using their skills and both seek the answer to the question anyone who sees the cliff dwellings asks themselves: why? Why, after the abandonment of Chaco (ca 1250 AD), built on the flats in a shallow non-descript canyon in northwestern New Mexico, did the Anasazi build so many dwellings and granaries in such dramatic, difficult to reach, impregnable sites when there were so many easier places to live/store food nearby? The answer seems complex: the push of environmental stress and resulting internecine warfare and, much more tenuously, either political revolution against an oppresive lordly class (cf. Steve Lekson) or the pull of the kachina religion, which is hypothesized to have arisen in present-day New Mexico at about the same time (ca. 1350)?
Roberts’ geographical focus in Search is on the Cedar Mesa area of southeastern Utah, centered on Grand Gulch, where we took Emily on one of her first camping trips while we lived in Salt Lake. The bluffs here are festooned with cliff dwellings and it seems to have been a major settlement area of the Anasazi culture after the decline and abandonment of Chaco Canyon, until it too was abandoned in the 14th C. He starts the book with his discovery of a beautiful, undisturbed and intact pot there and ends it with the discovery of a basket in the same area; telling what he did (photograph and write about) and did not do (touch, move or reveal the location of) with both and the consequences. He ties much of his narrative together with the story of the famous (or infamous, depending on your point of view) Wetherill family, Four Corners area ranchers and Indian traders who were the early 20th C discoverers of Mesa Verde and a plethora of other famous sites in the area. The Wetherill’s, while abhorred as nothing more than pothunters by most modern archeologists, nevertheless still have their admirers, including a group led by one Fred Blackburn of Bluff, Utah, who respect their dauntless exploration of very difficult and inaccessible sites, and the fact that they did the best they knew how with what they had. Interestingly enough, much of the material that the Wetherill’s collected was shipped to eastern museums for preservation and study, and effectively lost. It was poorly stored, egregiously catalogued and received paltry attention from the museums and degreed academic archeologists of the day. In some cases the museums even sold their artifacts to curio shops, collectors or traders! He gives a number of examples of the stripping of artifacts from sites by modern archeological teams and the cheesy restoration jobs done by the so-called professionals in the employ of the National Park Service over the years at many famous ruins.
Which brings up another theme shared by Roberts and Childs, to wit: the roles of fashion and “political correctness” in Southwestern archeology. For decades the Pueblo Indians and, by backward extrapolation, their Anasazi ancestors were portrayed as peaceful egalitarian socialists (and there is certainly some truth to this, especially with respect to modern Puebloans). This image persisted in spite of early documentary and growing archeological evidence of violence including warfare, human sacrifice, cannibalism (and a strongly hierarchical society, especially amongst the Chacoans) and scalp-taking among their societies. The Utopian image is still cultivated for obvious reasons by the modern Puebloans and their white partisans. Archeologists espouse other viewpoints at the peril of losing their digging privileges on Indian land and sites. Which brings up the presence in both author’s books of the agent provocateur, iconoclast and court jester of Southwestern Archeology, Steven Lekson (see my review of The Chaco Meridian). Roberts points out that his first attack on orthodoxy was questioning the paradigm that the “kivas” of the Anasazi sites served the same religious purposes as do historical Puebloan kivas (there is good evidence that the earlier versions were actually dwellings). He’s gone on from there to question much more, such as the presumed nature of Chacoan society and the relationship among Chaco, Aztec Ruin (Colorado) and Paquime, Chihuahua, and propose very creative alternative hypotheses (e.g. the eponymous line in the Chaco Meridian).
In Lost World, Robert’s tells the sad story of Range Creek Utah, where an amazing array of sites associated with the Fremont culture (northwestern contemporaries of the Anasazi) located on a private ranch were lovingly curated by the owner, rancher Waldo Wilcox, for 50 years. In 2004 he sold the homestead to the state of Utah to be excavated, studied and preserved. The Utah Museum of Natural History proceeded to undertake a multi-year effort that resulted in…almost nothing! Lots of digging (sacking?) of sites, drawers of artifacts in its collections, a few trivial papers in obscure journals, scandal, divorce, raging academic rivalries and professional kerfuffles but little obvious increase in knowledge beyond what the by-now bitter Mr. Wilcox had already deduced or speculated on during his residence at Range Creek.
The complex relationship of modern Indians with southwestern pre-history and archeology is the subject of a good third of Lost World. A trip to Canyon de Chelly is the backdrop for giving the Navajo point of view on the Anasazi ruins that cover their Rez. They fear them as places of the dead, they deny that the Hopi (Zuni? Pueblo Indians?) descend from their inhabitants, and believe that the Anasazi were flying magicians that angered the gods and then were destroyed by them. And they believe that Anglos are headed for the same fate! He relates the heroic defense of Navajo Fortress Rock in Canyon de Chelly, where a small group of Dine spent four months and outlasted a siege by Kit Carson’s troops in 1863-1864. They were one of only two groups of Navajo who were not rounded up and sent on the devastating Long Walk to Bosque Redondo, NM, where 2,000 of the 9,000 originally captured perished. The other was led by Hoskinnini, who, with 16 companions and a few sheep, headed northwest down the San Juan River with Carson’s troops in pursuit. He disappeared into the rugged wilderness southwest of Navajo Mountain only to return in 1868 after hearing that the captives had returned from Bosque Redondo. By then he had scores of followers and a wealth of sheep, silver and food, which he used to generously support his less fortunate fellows. Needless to say, he is a hero to the Dine. Roberts may have found the hiding place of Hoskinnini and his brave little band on one of his trips into the region.
Roberts’ travails trying to get permission to explore on Jemez Pueblo tribal land sound pretty typical (Childs relates similar experiences with the Hopi). After 500 years of dealing with Europeans and Euro-Americans with pretty consistent results (anytime you give them a chance, they screw you!) the Puebloans stonewall any such request. They have a history of pretty successful resistance to their colonial overlords, starting with the eviction of the Spanish from their homeland during the Pueblo Revolt of 1680. And even though the Spanish reconquered New Mexico in 1692, the revolt put the Puebloans on a much better footing vis-à-vis their colonial masters than previously. He then goes on to describe one of the most intractable problems in Southwestern archeology and anthropology: while almost no one denies that the current Puebloans are, in some way, shape or form, descendants of the Anasazi, why do they speak languages from four distinct families that are mutually unintelligible? Several groups’ oral histories recall an origin in SW Colorado or beyond (Mesa Verde? The mythical Lake Copala of Mexica origin tales, be it in central Utah or elsewhere?). And there are occurrences of pottery styles very similar to Mesa Verde black-on-white at a few sites in the Rio Grande valley.
He closes Lost World with trips to the Kapairowits Plateau and Desolation Canyon of the Green River, fringes of the Anasazi and Fremont worlds, respectively, and then makes a return trip to the basket he found on Cedar Mesa at the end of In Search of. Despite the vastly increased visitor traffic to the Mesa in the 15 years since he found it, he is surprised and delighted to discover it still in place and intact.
One of the prevailing theme’s in Robert’s books is the tension between two fundamentally different approaches to preserving precious natural and archeological sites in an ever more populous world with ever more back-country traffic. There are those who would make national parks or monuments (which means tourist attractions, with their bureaucrats, rules, crowds, parking lots, gift shops and the inevitable degradation that come with all of these) out of natural wonders and areas containing important archeological sites and those who would leave them as they are. The latter, personified by Fred Blackburn of Bluff, simply wouldn’t tell anyone outside of their own elite cabal about them, but would curate them as “Outdoor Museums”, developing an ethos of extreme secrecy and conservation amongst those “in the know”. In the best of cases, the latter is much less destructive, in the worst: very risky as well. The “wrong” people can stumble onto or get wind of the sites, blow the well-kept secret, and overuse, abuse or, worse, loot or vandalize the sites. And now with internet GPS locations to just about anywhere available to just about anyone, that threat is particularly acute. Numbers of visitors to places like Cedar Mesa have skyrocketed, which in and of itself poses a serious threat. Through most of the two books, Roberts seems to be in the “cabal” camp, though there were those among the cognoscenti who wanted to anathematize him for publishing even sanitized descriptions of Cedar Mesa sites in his books, with the risks they think that entails. The immediate multiple threats to Cedar Mesa, in particular, seem to have him teetering on the brink of advocating Park or Monument status by the end of Lost World.
I recommend both of these books as being of interest not only to laymen fascinated by SW US archeology and anthropology, but for anyone who likes good back-country adventure stories and some very intelligent discussion of the ethics of visiting fragile ancient sites, of land use, conservation and preservation in an ever more crowded and accessible world.
