The hiatus in my blogging was the result of my trip to Utah and New Mexico.
I camped in Chaco Canyon, which is still isolated (30 miles down a corrugated dirt road and across several washes). The ruins are still impressive, and arouse in everyone the questions — why here? And why did everyone leave?
Reconstruction of Pueblo Bonito
Archæoastronomers have found strong evidence that the Anasazi (the term I still like) had a complex calendar. Not only did they calculate the solstice and equinoxes, they (unlike the Mayans) calculated the 18.6 year cycle of the lunar standstill. Each building, and the whole complex of buildings and roads that fills the San Juan basin, an area bigger than Portugal, seem to be aligned with both lunar and solar movements.
In 1977 Anna Sofaer discovered the sun dagger on Fajada Butte. At the solstice light from between two slabs forms a dagger in the center of a 19 revolution spiral, and equinox and lunar movements are also marked by movements of light on this and other spirals.
The Anasazi seemed to have reproduced on earth the order of the heavens and to have constructed the Center Place that the Hopis sought in their many wanderings.
But everyone left.
The Navajo explain the departure by the story of the Great Gambler. The Great Gambler lived in Chaco, and the Native Americans, then as now, had a fascination with gambling. The people first pledged and lost their lands to the Great Gambler, then their goods, then their wives and children, then themselves. They lost everything, and became the slaves of the Great Gambler, who built the magnificent buildings of Chaco. He then tried to extend his dominion over the sun and rain, but the Holy People formed a young man who challenged the Great Gambler, who lost, and was thrown outside the universe.
The Hopi Gambler
The people of Chaco scattered, and some joined the Navajos. They brought with them the construction of houses and pottery. But later, when the Spanish tried to subdue the Navajos, the Navajos gave up living in houses and making pottery and became complete nomads, to avoid being enslaved again.
Somehow the resemblance to the history of finance capitalism (and the stock market is a great gamble) is altogether too striking.
Interesting.
Is there any indication that the weather in that region suddenly changed about the time everybody left? If, for example, annual rainfall suddenly changed, that would explain why they abandoned the place.
There were two droughts, which contributed to two abandonments of the site. But the droughts were never severe enough to explain total abandonment, and people did not return after the droughts ended. The first group was eventually replaced by people from Mesa Verde, and no one replaced the Mesa Verde people after they left. The Navajos (and many others) suspect that soemthing terrible happened at these abandoned sites, and just before the final abandonment of the Four Corners region there is evidence of gruesome violence and cannibalism .
Is there any evidence of the cannibalism and violence coming from within the society or does it seem it came from some external group(s)?
Welcome back!
No one knows. But there are many traces of contacts with Mexico: the Anasazi imported toucans, copper bells,and chocolate. They may also have imported the idea that one shows that one regards one’s enemies as less than human by eating them. Our society shows it regards unborn children as non-human by harvesting their cells and organs and grinding them up for cosmetics.
My wife has a theory: alkaloids become more concentrated in plants during droughts, and the Anasazi may have used too-strong hallucenegenic drugs in their rituals.
Other archeologists think that great men, kinglets or kings, began dominating society and used terror to maintain control. They may have used drugs to convert their henchmen into zombies. It would explain the violence: pits of people torn limb from limb.
Welcome back. We missed you.
Sometimes I wonder if the relevant question is not why a society fell apart, but why it ever held together in the first place.
People are so flawed in so many different ways, it’s all to easy to imagine ways for it to end. Simple things like the transfer of power from one ruler or administration to another can be a big calamity.
Oh, wait, I know. They started to allow homosexual marriage. 🙂
The Hopi Elders told me that there was a “storm” on the Sun, which caused a massive climate change. The people who left Chaco Canyon became the Modern day Pueblo Indians. The so-called “cannibalism theories” were made by prejudiced non-Indians who want to justify slandering the Indians taking the Indian lands. the only cannibals were the white pioneers who ate each other at Donner Pass, California during a severe winter storm.
The people of Chaco Canyon were much more advanced in their time than the ancestors of the archaeologists who roamed the forests of Europe during this time of their “Dark Ages”. The Anasazi were like their Hopi and Pueblo descendants always known as a people of peace. The religious wars and cannibalism were more common among the descendants of the Vikings and Neanderthals who were the real “savages”.
I’m not sure that the issue of where the remains of dismembered bodies originated has been addressed by your posting Jacabo.
As a descendant of “vikings and Neanderthals” (the later, evidence suggest, were peaceful) I don’t think reverse racism is a helpful approach. No human group has a monopoly on virtue or vice. From what I understand, native societies in the Americas were as varied as those in Europe, Asia, Africa, etc. As Crowhill pointed out, it is amazing, given the brutality and selfishness ALL people are capable of, that good, peaceful societies have even existed and still exist.
Europeans have sometimes romanticized the “peaceful” Indian, “in harmony with nature.” But they are as fallen as everyone else. They seem to have exterminated the magafauna (such as the mastodon) in North America, and in historic times even the “peaceful” Hopi massacred the one Hopi village that converted to Christianity. Of course Anglos after Auschwitz and Hiroshima can have no pretense to moral superiority.
Why don’t you tell them the real reason why the Hopis destroyed their sister pueblo of Awatobi?
It was not just that they converted to Christianity! Hopi elders say that the Franciscan priest at St. Bonaventura de Awatobi (or Awatovi) was molesting the young children in their pueblo and treating the Hopis as slaves and peons. In 1973, the Hopis had a group of pedophiles who were teaching elementaty school on First Mesa at Polacca Day School. The Hopis say that they ruined a whole generation.
The Navajos did not give up making pottery and living in adobe houses. They inter-married with the pueblos and learned how to weave blankets and grow crops. The Navajos fled to “Dinetah” to the North and East of Chaco and settled in nearby Largo Canyon, where the Spaniards hunted them down and took many for slaves.
On the back cover of Jay Nelson’s book “Sons of Perdition” that documents the history of priestly sexual abuse in New Mwxico, there is a photo of Yowe, the Priest-Killer Hopi Kachina. He represents the one who killed the priests at Awatabi and Oraibi and is shown holding a bloody knive and sometimes a human head.
How old is the Great Gamblers’ story?
a good question. Anyone out there know? It is hard to tell how old oral tradtions are.
The Navajos came around 1300 A.D. and have a story for every rock, river and tree on their lands. Most Navajos avoided the Chaco Canyon like the plague because they were afraid of all the spirits of the dead. “Anasazi” means ancient enemy in Navajo.When I lived a few miles north of Chaco in 1971 as principal of Lybrook Elementary School, I saw the mesa where the Navajos found their first horse that had strayed from the Spanish. One winter on the last day of school before Xmas, in the middle of a snowstorm ,I accidently cut my wrist while trying to close a frozen window. One of my teachers tied a tourniquet around my wrist and we went looking for a clinic, but they were all closed because the missionaries all left for Xmas vacation. We finally found a clinic right above Chaco Canyon and a young Navajo said that he was left behind to give pills to the elderly until the missionaries returned. He sewed up my wrist and later became a doctor. I was his first patient!