People of the Silence (2 page)

Pueblo Bonito (called Talon Town in
People of the Silence
) demonstrates alignments with the cardinal directions and several solstice-monitoring stations. The axis of the large kiva—a subterranean ceremonial chamber—is on a true north-south line, as is the internal line of rooms that divides the pueblo in half. The long straight wall forming the front of the west half of Pueblo Bonito runs true east-west.

Pueblo Bonito also contains curious “corner windows.” One of these windows, Room 228, begins charting the coming winter solstice forty-nine days in advance of the event. A thin beam of light strikes the room’s back wall. This beam gradually widens as the winter solstice approaches, moving northward an inch a day across the wall. At dawn on the solstice, a full rectangle of light shines on the north wall.

Despite the grandeur of their culture, Chaco Canyon was a place of marginal resources. Water, wood, and productive soils were very precious. By the time the canyon reached its peak, at the beginning of the twelfth century, those resources were being strained to the limit. The Chacoans constructed dams and ditches to divert rainwater to their fields, and cultivated special gardens in the side canyons and on the mesa tops. But when the population reached around 2,000 people, the fragile desert ecosystems failed. The canyon could no longer feed its inhabitants.

The outlying communities—linked by the roads—brought a wide variety of goods to Chaco Canyon, in addition to food, timber, turquoise, and other rare minerals. The Chacoan elite also managed a trade network that brought seashells from as far away as the Pacific Ocean, and copper bells and macaws from central Mexico.

Even many utilitarian goods were imported. Up to one-third of the stone tools and half of the pottery cooking vessels found at Pueblo Alto (called Center Place in this book) were made from special stones and clays found in the Chuska Mountains fifty miles west of Chaco Canyon. Much of the finished pottery came from the Mesa Verde region in southern Colorado.

We know from tree-ring data that precipitation between
A.D.
900–1150 was extremely variable around the San Juan Basin. One village might have received unusual rainfall and produced a food surplus, while another village, a few miles away, might have suffered both drought and famine. Many archaeologists have theorized that Chaco Canyon served as a central storage and redistribution center. Surplus food would have been hauled in from prosperous villages, then shipped out to needy outlying communities. This theory is not unreasonable, given that modern Puebloan peoples, such as the Hopi, still maintain a three-year food supply.

Around
A.D.
1130, a new drought began. In a high desert environment even a short drought can be disastrous, but this one lasted twenty-five years. The springs and seeps dried up. Growing traditional crops of corns, beans, and squash became precarious. After decades of exploitation, every stick of wood had been collected, every clump of brush twisted out of the ground. When the scant rainfall did come, the exposed topsoil was vulnerable. Floods surged down the drainages, stripping the exhausted earth and uprooting the frail crops. Chaco Wash, the primary source of water for the canyon, reached its deepest point around
A.D.
1150, cutting to a depth of thirteen feet and lowering the water table.

From skeletal material we know the people suffered increasing malnutrition. A bone disease called porotic hyperostosis—lesions in the skull—afflicted 65% of the adults, and 75% of the children. The disorder is caused by profound iron deficiency, among a lack of other nutrients.

These two events, the drought and the ensuing malnutrition, would have been enough to turn Chaco Canyon into a frightening place to live—but there’s more.

It required approximately 250,000 trees to build the Great Houses in Chaco Canyon. Pueblo Bonito alone, the oldest and largest of the Great Houses, constructed approximately
A.D.
920–1120, stood five stories tall and contained around
eight hundred
rooms. Analyses of pollen and seed records tell us that the Chacoans quickly consumed the building materials in and near the canyon. The count of tree pollens drops dramatically during the last one hundred years of habitation—meaning they cut down every tree they could find within walking distance. And remember, for two hundred years, the resident population had had to cook, fire pottery, light their kivas, and keep warm during the bitter winters.

Why, then, would an ailing people continue to congregate in such large numbers in an area of vanishing resources? The architecture tells us a great deal.

In the last years, the Chacoans began sealing exterior windows and doorways—actually walling them up with stone and mortar. They even plugged small vents designed to aid the circulation of air through the pueblo. Pueblo Bonito had originally been open in front, so that people could come and go as they wished, but during the eleventh century a string of rooms closed off that opening. They left only two entryways. Then one of those was walled up so that only a gate in the southeast corner of the western plaza remained. That single gate was then narrowed to the width of a door and finally walled off altogether. Just before the end, they sealed the town completely. The only way in or out of Pueblo Bonito was by ladder over the walls. The difficulties this would create, especially for the elderly members of the community, are obvious. But the Chacoans clearly believed they
had
to strengthen their defenses.

The evidence for warfare is overwhelming. Modern-day Pueblo peoples, such as the Hopi, Keres, Zuni, Tewa, and Tanoans—the most likely descendants of the Anasazi—tell of ancient and fierce wars fought by their ancestors. Some involve the destruction of entire towns. The archaeological evidence is also powerful: burned buildings, battered bodies, and crushed skulls.

Prior to the 1960s, archaeologists believed that the warfare arose from the influx of the nomadic Navajo, Apaches, and other “Athabaskan” peoples into the peaceful Pueblo sphere, but further research has severely weakened this theory. The best evidence now suggests that the Athabaskan peoples arrived in the Southwest in the sixteenth century—and then in such small numbers that they could not have been a significant threat to fortified pueblos.

The “enemy” may have been other Southwestern cultures: the Hohokam, the Fremont, or the Mogollon. It may even have been other groups of Anasazi. As the religious, economic, and social systems disintegrated, village may have turned upon village, clan upon clan.

By 1150 Chaco Canyon had been abandoned, and many Anasazi began building their houses on highly defensible hilltops, on pillars of rock separated from canyon walls, in hollows in sheer cliffs—all far removed from sources of drinking water and their fields, but sites where they must have felt a small measure of safety.

Yet for more than two centuries Chacoan culture had thrived. They built stunning edifices, engineered hundreds of miles of roads, established an elaborate ceremonial system, created magnificent art, charted the courses of the sun, moon, and stars. The abandonment of the great pueblos was a slow process, occurring over decades. But make no mistake, those grand prehistoric peoples did not “vanish,” as some books and television shows would have you believe. Their descendants, the modern Pueblo tribes, continue to live and flourish in the American Southwest. Indeed, much of what we theorize about prehistoric peoples is based upon Puebloan oral tradition.

The myths, legends, and concepts of the sacred that you will discover in this novel come from those oral traditions. Spider Woman, the Great Warriors, and the
Katchinas
(whom we call
thlatsinas
) are still worshiped today. It is difficult to know from the archaeological record when the
Katchinas
first came into existence, but they probably originated during the latter half of the twelfth or early thirteenth centuries. The Humpbacked Flute Player—the subject of much Southwestern art, modern and ancient—is even older. Depictions of male and female flute players were etched into rocks, painted on bowls, even carved into kiva floors. The humpbacked flute player symbolized fertility, which means much more than human sexuality; it means that he or she embodied the creative power of the universe.

We encourage you to visit the prehistoric sites—Hovenweep in Utah; Chaco Canyon and Aztec ruins in New Mexico; Mesa Verde and the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center in Colorado; and Wupatki and Casa Malpais in Arizona, to name just a few—as well as the modern Southwestern pueblos, such as Acoma and Oraibi.

To really understand the majestic history of the North American continent, one must look for the point where the past meets the present.

Introduction

“Be careful, Grandma. The stones are slick from the rain.”

Maggie Walking Hawk Taylor brushed wind-blown strands of short black hair out of her eyes and guided her sick grandmother toward the entry to the ancient pueblo. Though a fine mist continued to fall, golden shafts of light slanted down through the rain clouds, making oblong pools of bright gold on the cracked and weathered canyon walls that surrounded them. The sage-covered bottomlands glimmered and sparkled. The blocks of red sandstone that formed the walls of the pueblo shone a deep dark crimson, the color of old blood.

Slumber Walking Hawk puffed as she hobbled along, her purple skirt flapping about her legs.

“There’s a step here, Grandma. Do you see it? It’s that rock, right there.” Maggie pointed.

Slumber stopped, but she looked up instead of down. Her gaze took in the huge semicircular structure. It had originally been five stories tall, but only four remained to tell the thousand-year-old story. Maggie followed her grandmother’s gaze. No matter how many times she came here, she always felt dwarfed by the magnificence of the Anasazi, the ancient people who’d built this structure. The pueblo, a walled town, covered over three acres of land.

Slumber took a breath, and Maggie held her wrinkled arm tightly. Sometimes her grandmother tripped over imaginary rocks—and then swore they’d been there when she’d tripped. No one dared tell her otherwise, either, out of fear of being wrong. Her grandmother was a great Seer. She didn’t always live in this ordinary world.

Slumber used a clawlike hand to point to the spot Maggie had indicated. “There? That’s the step?”

“Yes, Grandma. Hold onto me. I’ll help you.”

Cautiously, Slumber lifted her right foot and placed it on the lip of stone, then allowed Maggie to support her weight while she rose on to the step. A small groan escaped Slumber’s lips, and Maggie’s heart ached.
She’s so ill. Why did she insist on coming, today of all days?

“This is going to be a bad day, Grandma. You know I have to meet with those two from the local hiking club. I wish you’d stayed home in bed.”

Maggie had patiently explained how hostile the club president was, not that Kyle Laroque was a bad guy—he wasn’t. Maggie actually liked him. When she’d first met him a year ago, she’d seen a light in his eyes that she’d come to identify only with Indian holy people. It had surprised and fascinated her. But, recently, that light had vanished. The new park plan had affected recreationists the way a match did a fuse. She expected the final grand explosion today. Yet Slumber had insisted upon coming, and she’d been so adamant that Maggie couldn’t say no.

Slumber simply whispered, “I must be here. Saw it … in a dream.”

“All right, Grandma. Let me take you over to the wall. You can sit down and rest while we wait.”

Slumber’s grip tightened on Maggie’s arm, and they started across the plaza, but after only ten paces, Slumber stopped. She wheezed in and out, then took another two steps and stopped, breathing some more.

Maggie tenderly brushed loose strands of gray hair behind her grandmother’s ears. Just looking at her made Maggie hurt. She resembled a knotted twig. Four feet seven inches tall, Slumber was thin enough to blow away if a powerful gust of wind came along. Wispy gray hair clung to her age-spotted scalp, and thick blue veins crawled like knobby worms across her arms and hands. She had the sort of classic “ancient” Indian face that photographers loved to shoot and put on postcards. Cadaverous, and criss-crossed by a thousand wrinkles, it acted like a magnet. People would smile in a kindly way at her wrinkled visage, then glance beneath the thick gray brows that jutted out over Slumber’s eyes and stand transfixed. Maggie had seen it happen. People would just suddenly stop and go quiet. Slumber’s eyes gave no evidence that she had witnessed the passing of ninety-two long, hard years—reservation years, filled with too much hunger, and cold so deep it settled in the bones until a person felt like they’d never get warm. Curiously clear and as black as midnight, Slumber Walking Hawk’s eyes had
Power.
The Navajo called her, “That Crazy Old Keres Holy Woman,” but her own people knew her as, “She Who Haunts the Dead.”

And, gods help me to stand it, she will be among them soon.

Maggie put an arm around her grandmother’s shoulders and hugged her. Slumber affectionately patted her hand in return.

“I’m all right,” Slumber said.

Two weeks ago, the doctor in Albuquerque had given Slumber a maximum of eight weeks to live. The cancer had spread through her entire body. Maggie had been frightened and empty, uncertain what to say or do. Slumber had merely smiled and returned to the pueblo, going about her daily tasks as she had always done. No matter what she might be feeling inside, to the outside world Slumber kept up the appearance of being hale and hearty.

Maggie led her grandmother to a low wall, next to one of the
“Don’t Sit on The Walls!”
signs, and gently eased her down.

Slumber gestured to the sign and grinned. “You’re a big park ranger so it doesn’t matter, eh?”

“I make these decisions on a case-by-case basis,” Maggie replied in her best bureaucratese. “When I’m on duty, the elderly get special treatment.”

The roar of a Jeep sounded at the parking lot and Maggie lifted a hand to shield her eyes from the rain.
Damn, they’re here.
“Grandma,” she said, “I have to go meet these people. Will you be all right?”