This will be a bit of a different newsletter. Normally, there's some thoughts up front, and then there's some interesting science facts, and then there's some distractions and diversions. But this week it's gonna be all jumbled up.

How This Story Starts

When I was 19 years old, I went on a mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the Mormons). I got called (because you don't choose where you go) to the New Mexico Albuquerque Mission, which comprised most of the Four Corners area. When I got through training, got on the plane, landed--completely bewildered and naive--I was told that my first area would be serving in a place called Pueblo Pintado, an area that was widely considered to be the second most remote part of the mission. It was in the middle of nowhere--almost exactly 100 miles from Albuquerque, Gallup, and Farmington. When I got to my new home, all I could see was my trailer, two Navajo hogans, and a chapter house (a sort of government building).

But what I could also see from my trailer, out the back window in a field of sage and sand, was Pueblo Pintado, the ruins of a Great House of the Ancestral Puebloans. (The Ancestral Puebloans are the group of ancient people who were formerly called the Anasazi; Anasazi is a Navajo word which means "ancient enemies" or "enemies of our ancestors" and so the modern Pueblo tribes--there are 14 moderns Pueblo tribes in New Mexico and Arizona--didn't like their ancestors being called a derogatory term.)

I had lucked into living two minutes away from this magnificent ruin, which would lead to a lifelong obsession with the archaeology of the Southwest. Because Pueblo Pintado, a ruin that was three or four stories tall and consisted of more than thirty rooms and kivas, was an outlier of Chaco Canyon. And Chaco Canyon, let me tell you, is amazing.

What Is Chaco Canyon?

Chaco Canyon is a vast canyon of ruins in a very deserted deserty place in Northwestern New Mexico, and was 15 miles away from me in Pueblo Pintado. Native Americans had been living in the area for as long as 7000 years in some capacity, in small nomadic groups of hunter gatherers, then in more sedentary farmers (known as the later Basketmaker people) and, in about 800 CE, they started building stone structures. This ran for a good 300 years, growing from a few rooms and a kiva, to massive Great Houses--huge structures with upwards of 700 rooms and dozens of kivas. In anthropology, one of the things that you look for in budding civilizations is monumental architecture, and the Chacoans had monumental architecture in spades.

But Wait, There's More: The Chaco Phenomenon

The thing about Chaco Canyon is that it is more than just a canyon with fourteen Great Houses in it. It's a massive civilization, rivaling anything anywhere else in the modern-day borders of the United States--as big as Cahokia, for sure, and built out of stone instead of mounds.

Because Chaco has outliers--one of those outliers is Pueblo Pintado, where I lived. All around Chaco Canyon, for thousands of square miles, there are between 150 and 200 Great Houses. And besides that, there were smaller houses, which are sometimes referred to as the "five rooms and a kiva" houses--those are everywhere.

Chaco Canyon, with its roads and major outliers

And The Roads!

We have to talk about the roads, because the Chacoans built a lot of roads. Not paths--and they didn't have the wheel, so these roads were not for wagons--but they were as wide as a modern highway and perfectly straight. So straight, in fact, that if they came across a hill, the road just went over the hill, instead of around it. And if the road came across a rocky crag, they would carve stairs into the rocky crag so they could go over it. There was something very important to the Chacoans about these perfectly straight roads. Not every Great House had a road, and, in some strange cases, not every road had a Great House! (Some roads went straight for twenty miles and then just... ended.) These roads are still visible today, made much easier to see from the air. (And, sadly, many of these roads are in danger because there's a lot of oil and coal in the region, and, well, it's hard to protect EVERYTHING.)

A stairway built into the rock to continue a road’s course

The Tree

Let me tell you about The Tree. Or, I should start by telling you about the vast dearth of trees. Trees didn't grow in Chaco Canyon, because it is very desolate. But archaeologists have estimated that, due to the construction of the many rooms (with multiple stories and roofs) of these many Great Houses, the Chacoans needed somewhere between 200,000 to 300,000 trees, mostly ponderosa pines, carried for as much as 40 miles from the nearest forests.

But, archaeologists found one tree, one solitary ponderosa pine, that wasn't just a thin pole used for building a roof. It was not even just a large tree to use as a beam. It was a tree with roots! It was a tree that was growing, right there in the middle of the plaza of Pueblo Bonito. (Pueblo Bonito is the largest and definitely the central Great House. If Chaco Canyon is the center of the outliers and roads, then Pueblo Bonito is the center of Chaco Canyon--or the center of everything.)

Why did they plant a tree in Pueblo Bonito, and tend it and water it and make it grow big and tall in an environment that was totally unwelcoming to a ponderosa pina? No one knew! Ceremonial, they say. Religous! We don't know!)

Fajada Butte

In the 70s, an artist at Chaco, who was studying petroglyphs and pictographs, realized that on Fajada Butte--a big old mesa sticking up in the middle of the canyon--an incredible feat of engineering finesse tracked the movements of the sun. Three huge stone slabs were standing upright, leaning against the rock face, and there was a spiral petroglyph under the slabs so that, on the summer solstice, a slash of light (dubbed the "sun dagger") would slice right through the middle of the spiral. And on the winter solstice, two sun daggers would appear on each side of the spiral, perfectly framing it.

So, the Chacoans were studying astronomy. Which is cool. But anyone can study the solstices, right?

Chimney Rock

There is Chacoan outlier in southern Colorado called Chimney Rock (no, it's different from the Chimney Rock you pass in the game Oregon Trail). And a little known fact about the moon is that it has its very own special kind of procession, one that is not nearly as noticeable as the solstices: the lunar standstill. It happens every 18.6 years, and it's when the moon reaches it most northerly and southerly paths. And, Chimney Rock Great House is built so that it points directly and obviously at the lunar standstills ("obviously" meaning that it couldn't have happened by chance. Dendrochronology--a perfectly accurate tree-ring dating system--shows that the two major construction phases of Chimney Rock occurred the years of this lunar standstill.)

Total sidenote of another cool thing: Remember in Return of the King where they lit the Beacons of Minas Tirith to send news to Edoras? Well, there is clear evidence that that very thing existed starting at Chimney Rock and leading directly to Chaco Canyon--80 miles away!

But WHY? The Chaco Mystery

This is the question that has plagued archaeologists since the site was first documented in 1823 (by non-natives; Native Americans were well aware that Chaco was right there all along). Why do you build this massive conglomeration of humongous Great Houses (remember 700 rooms?) if it's in a place so inhospitable to live?

Well, when I lived there, I was taught that it was a pilgrimage site. No one lived there, at least not many people. Because while there are all of those rooms, there's very few hearths. Because for all of those rooms, there's very little garbage--certainly not enough for these to be massive apartment buildings. Fifty years ago they estimated that there were 10,000 Chacoans living in the canyon. When I lived there thirty years ago, it was down to 5,000. Current estimates say that it was no more than 1200 people.

So, the story goes, Chacoans would come from far away on pilgrimages and build the site, and visit every so often to maintain it. Often, it seems, when it's hard to explain what something is in the archaeological record, it's assumed to be ceremonial. So, Chaco Canyon was ceremonial.

And this is not unreasonable! Because of all of the roads being illogical, and the heavy emphasis on astronomy (I haven't even scratched the surface of the astronomical alignments of the Great Houses.) And the massive kiva! A kiva has always been assumed to be a ceremonial room; in fact, the word "kiva" comes from modern Pueblo tribes' own ceremonial rooms in their pueblos. But this kiva, Casa Rinconada, is 20 meters across and five meters deep. What would people need this thing for if not for ceremonial reasons?

And the word "kiva" isn't the only thing that has been borrowed from modern pueblos. Because a Great House looks a lot like the pueblos of Taos or Hopi or Acoma, and because the pueblo tribes consider the Chacoans to be their ancestors (hence the name "Ancestral Puebloans") so much of what archaeologists have hypothesized about the Chacoans is based on what current pueblos are like: egalitarian, peaceful and spiritual.

BUT: What If We're Wrong?

So, I studied archaeology in college for a while, and I did some backpacking and traveling in the Southwest, but kinda stepped away from it... for twenty years. And in that time? Everything is upside down.

Now, in archaeology, everything is a theory until proven wrong. But, in Chaco, the winds have changed.

What if: they were not egalitarian? They were not peaceful?

According to work from Dr. Steven Lekson, who lived and worked at Chaco for years, we need to separate ourselves from the modern world to understand Chaco. Don't look at current pueblos to explain Chaco, because Chaco was a thousand years ago and things change. More importantly, he says, ignore the borders of the United States.

Because, if you look at what Chaco and its outliers are (a central group surrounded by 60,000 to 100,000 people in outliers) it looks a lot like the contemporary cultures of Northern Mexico--the people who were there before the Aztecs.

Further: stop saying their egalitarian, because if you ignore everything you know about pueblos and just look at Chaco, you'll find that there are massive palaces (Great Houses) surrounded with tons of peasant homes (five rooms and a kiva). Also, we know, and have known forever, that there was some kind of hierarchy in Pueblo Bonito. In one room, Room 33, they found a burial chamber with two skeletons that were HEAVILY decorated with turquoise beads (like 150,000 beads—75% of all turquoise found in Chaco) and copper bells, and macaw feathers (yes, they apparently had trade networks with the Yucatan). And this burial chamber has 300 years of people represented in matrilineal (mother-to-daughter) descendants. This, Lekson says, is clearly a tomb for the monarchy.

Some of the 200,000 pieces of turquoise found in Chaco Canyon

Now, Dr. Lekson takes things even further and tracks the travels of the Chacoans up north and then down south, and that's super cool, but the main thing is that in twenty years the paradigm shifted. The Chacoan "mystery" of who were these people and what were they doing in massive houses with few people: it's a palace for queens surrounded by commoners for a few thousand square miles, just like Northern Mexico.

(Oh, also: the ponderosa pine? Still, no one knows what it's doing there, but it's generally accepted that it wasn't actually growing there--it may never have been standing. Someone dug it up in the forest and carried it to Pueblo Bonito. Some archaeologists say it may be nothing more than some rich king wanting an expensive bench.)

ANYWAY

I've been thinking about this because I recently watched some great videos by The Trek Planner he did about it (you can view his three part series here, here, and here). But I've also been thinking about this because of how big of a cognitive dissonance it was when I learned the new theories. Stuff that I had been taught as fact (that everything was a mystery) is maybe explainable?

Not everything, of course. Why the roads? Were they the whims of a queen or the directions of a shaman? Odds are we'll never know.

The important thing is that we're able to change our minds when we find out new stuff. I believed what I did about Chaco for twenty five years. Then I learned different.

What other positions do I have that are wrong? What other positions do you have that are wrong?

The title of this newsletter is "A fancy word for changing your mind", which comes from an episode of Doctor Who, in which the Doctor is trying to stop a war. Two people have their fingers on the button. THE button. The one that will wipe out the other. And the doctor is trying to talk them down:

Doctor: This is a scale model of war. Every war ever fought right there in front of you. Because it's always the same. When you fire that first shot, no matter how right you feel, you have no idea who's going to die. You don't know who's children are going to scream and burn. How many hearts will be broken! How many lives shattered! How much blood will spill until everybody does what they're always going to have to do from the very beginning -- sit down and talk! Listen to me, listen. I just -- I just want you to think. Do you know what thinking is? It's just a fancy word for changing your mind.

NOW

If you've made it this far, I'm really happy, because this was very long. Next week I'll get back to regularly schedule programming.

Think. It's a fancy word for changing your mind.

#16: A Fancy Word for “Changing Your Mind”

How This Story Starts

What Is Chaco Canyon?