Day 10 (4/10)
Everything I thought I knew was wrong (maybe) . . .
After breakfast at the hotel, we stopped for groceries and firewood and set off for Chaco Canyon, or, officially, Chaco Cultural National Historical Park. We drove for a while on US 491 and then on Navajo Reservation roads, which were all good until we turned on to highway 57. Were tooling along a perfectly good paved road and, trusting Google Maps, made a sudden, sharp turn on to highway 57. Highway! It was a dirt road! And, we had 20 miles to go. After the first couple of miles I was thinking that this might not be so bad and then we hit the washboarding. For the next hour we would get up a little speed and hit a patch where I would try to calm the screw loosening rattling by slowing down, which would only raise it to a tooth loosening level. It was stressful and maddening and seemed to last forever. But finally, we were there – Chaco Canyon. I don’t know how long I have wanted to visit Chaco Canyon. It may have started when I helped Connie with a paper on Native American culture while she was finishing up at Santa Clara University. That was 44 years ago. Or, it might have been later, but not much. I read an article in National Geographic about Pueblo Benito and the canyon and have sense then wanted to see it.
Pueblo Benito was one of the greatest structures built by Native Americans and had been described as the largest building in North America before the nineteenth century. The article described Benito as the home of 1500 people and the center of a civilization that stretched up and down the canyon. I have been telling people this since and all of it is wrong. Maybe.
We stopped at the visitor’s center and checked in, and then went on to the campground. Not seventy meters behind our campsite under the cliff overhang was the ruin of an ancient home. We took the bikes off the back of our van, moved the firewood out of our living room and had lunch. Then, we drove the 4 ½ miles to where our first tour was to begin.
Our tour guide was an archeo-astrologer working for the park service who had been living in the canyon for 29 years. This tour was of Pueblo Bonito, the most intact of great house ruins. It didn’t take long fro me to learn that all I though I knew about the place was wrong. Maybe. Our group of about twelve tourists wandered around and through the building and grounds thoroughly entertained for two hours by all that our guide had to say about the site, the canyon and Chacoan culture and history.
The first tour ended just in time for us to begin another tour that started at the same place. This one was of Chetra Ketl, another big house a few hundred meters from Benito. This guide was a volunteer, but fully knowledgeable and he had a notebook of visual aids. Chetra Ketl was built late (1100 CE), just fifty years before the Chacoan diaspora began.
Our former brother-in-law, George Bottesch, is a stonemason in Maine. I have taken some pictures of the various masonry techniques to show him how these buildings were built. The cliffs of the canyon are made mostly of sandstone. It’s estimated that several hundreds of millions of stone bricks were used to construct the buildings in the canyon. The bricks were cut with stone tools and the mortar was a mixture of local clay and water. But, the lintels (wood used to support the stones above doors and windows), vigas (wooden logs that support floors and ceilings) and letias (smaller logs perpendicular and above the vegas) were all imported from as far as sixty miles away. Over 260,000 of them. Early Europeans thought that the ancient builders had clear-cut a forest that existed during their day when the climate was wetter. Modern archeology has proven them wrong on both accounts.
While the construction was interesting and advanced for the time and area, the layout was amazing. The most astonishing example was the great kiva on the south side of the canyon. All of the Great Houses were on the north side of the canyon and the homes of the people were, for the most part, on the south side. The great kiva was an exception. Fully twenty-five feet deep and 120 feet in diameter, this was a massive place of ceremony. It has two entrances, stairways that are perfectly aligned on a north-south axis. And barely visible above the canyon rim to the north is Pueblo Alto, again on that perfect north-south line. Another village to the south and out of our sight completes the line. Around the north stairway is an antechamber with two doors. If you sight through the two doors with the cliff face two miles away centered in your view, you are looking along a perfect east-west line. And, if you do that on a solstice, the sun will rise from the base of that cliff. It goes on with more mind blowing solar and lunar orientations, including a truly arcane lunar 18 ½ year cycle created by the wobble of the moon.
Dusk at 6200 feet was colder than it had been in Gallup, so we got as set up as necessary and retreated into the Land Yacht (god bless our van!). We heated our rotisserie chicken and precooked rice in the microwave. It was the first time using it powered through the inverter by the house battery. All went well and with the wind blowing outside, we were snug inside eating our hot meal. Afterward, we donned our heavier pajamas and snuggled down under comforter and blanket and had ourselves a great night’s sleep.