New Mexico's Mysterious Anasazi Ruins
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THE
blinding sun searches deep into the crevices of rocks that were hewn,
dressed and arranged centuries ago. The patterns and placement of the
broken walls stand in perfect harmony with the surrounding land forms. A
lizard scurries out, then freezes on a stone that was darkened ages
since by the soot of ceremonial fires. If it wasn't for the pinon pines,
the scrub juniper and the sheer canyon cliffs, one might almost imagine
oneself at some remote Greek ruin hidden away in Thessaly or the
Pelopennesus. But this is New Mexico, and these are the ruins of great
towns built by the prehistoric Anasazi people.
For
1,000 years, from about A.D. 500 until their dispersal around 1500, the
Anasazi, whose name is a Navajo word that means "the ancient ones,"
lived in pueblos and cliff dwellings built in the canyons and high mesas
of the Four Corners region (where Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona and
Utah meet). Visitors to northern New Mexico will find no better
introduction to the beauty and the enduring mysteries of Anasazi culture
than the 34,000-acre Chaco Culture National Historic Park and the
32,000-acre Bandelier National Monument.
Chaco,
a rather grueling day trip (ending with 20 miles of dirt road) or easy
two-day trip from Santa Fe or Albuquerque, was the ancient center of
Anasazi civilization and contains the most extensive Indian ruins north
of Mexico. Bandelier, less than an hour's drive from Santa Fe, affords a
rare opportunity to view Indian ruins in a magnificent setting of
mountain, canyon, river valley and pine forest. The Four Corners region
contains a number of other important Anasazi ruins, notably Canyon de
Chelly National Monument in Arizona, Mesa Verde National Park in
Colorado and Hovenweep National Monument in Utah. But Chaco and
Bandelier together reflect the full range of Anasazi architecture and
design, and their ingenuity in adapting strikingly different terrain to
suit their needs. And the drive from one to the other crosses some of
the most spectacular scenery in the Southwest.
Ten
centuries ago, Chaco was the Rome and the Mecca of Anasazi culture, the
spiritual and political capital from which hundreds of miles of roads
radiated to outlying pueblos scattered through a region the size of
Scotland, the economic hub to which merchants journeyed from as far as
Mexico to store and trade beans, corn, copper, pottery, macaws and
turquoise. Thirteen separate pueblo villages of as many as 800 connected
rooms rose from the floor and rim of the broad, low-walled canyon.
Hundreds of people lived and worked here, and no doubt thousands came
each year as pilgrims, artisans, traders, perhaps even as tourists.
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Yet
the first word that comes to mind when you enter Chaco Canyon today is
wasteland. From the north, dirt roads approach the canyon through an
arid plateau of sagebrush, greasewood, juniper scrub, a few dilapidated
Navajo churches, distant glimpses to red mesas. As far as the eye can
see there is no escape from the withering desert sun. Time itself seems
to fall away as one moves across this forbidding terrain.
Abruptly,
a few miles inside the park gate, the road twists and plunges, and one
finds oneself in the sheltered, reassuring embrace of a canyon. The
sudden descent into this other world is a bit like falling down Alice's
rabbit hole, an impression that is enhanced by the sight of strange
heaps of stone thrust up like miniature mountain ranges from the canyon
floor. On closer inspection, these turn out to be the first of the Chaco
ruins.
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The
main ruins at Chaco are Pueblo Bonito (beautiful town) and Chetro Ketl
(a word of unknown origin and meaning), the neighboring towns where
Anasazi architecture and workmanship reached their peak. Here is the
logical place to begin an exploration.
The
aspect of Pueblo Bonito that strikes you most immediately is its
monumentality. Shaped like a vast D measuring some 500 feet across,
Pueblo Bonito was very likely the largest structure in the Southwest
when it was completed in the late 11th century. But the pueblo derives
its power from more than size alone. After you have spent some time
wandering through the ruins, you come to see that Pueblo Bonito is a
carefully and intricately planned city, its form perfectly aligned with
the canyon wall behind it and the pattern of its connected chambers as
complex and finely articulated as a honeycomb -- but a honeycomb made
not of pulp but of sandstone. Like the great Gothic cathedrals of
Europe, which were built a short time later, Pueblo Bonito consumed the
lives and artistry of generations of workers, yet the overall effect is a
grand, hypnotic unity.
Balancing the
monumentality of the pueblo's design is the exquisite, almost gemlike
fineness of the masonry work. Every wall is sheathed inside and out in a
kind of abstract mosaic of flat, smoothly dressed sandstone pieces that
shade in tone from salmon to oxblood. Masonry styles changed over the
centuries from a rather crude stacking of slatelike fragments to an
incredibly beautiful pattern in which a single layer of large
rectangular stones alternates with multiple layers of slender chinking
stone chips. It comes as something of a shock to learn that the Anasazi
covered all of their stunning masonry work with mud plaster.
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Chetro
Ketl, though roughly contemporary with Pueblo Bonito, differs markedly
in design. Shaped rather like a massive E, the pueblo once had a
colonnaded gallery that ran for some 90 feet along its front face.
Archeologists speculate that this structure, unique in Anasazi
buildings, may show the influence of Mexico's Toltec civilization, the
forerunner of Aztec culture.
The
plazas of both Pueblo Bonito and Chetro Ketl are studded with
stone-lined sunken cylindrical structures known as kivas. It is believed
that the Anasazi, like their Hopi and Zuni descendants, used kivas as
places of worship, ritual and ceremonial gathering. But important
questions remain unanswered at Chaco: Why did the pueblos have so many
kivas, as many as 40 at Pueblo Bonito alone? How did the so-called great
kivas (often measuring more than 60 feet across), differ in use from
the smaller kivas? Why, if the kivas served a religious function, were
some of them filled with rubble or garbage?
At
Pueblo Bonito and Chetro Ketl one must content oneself with peering
down into the kivas, but across the canyon at the ruins of Casa
Rinconada, the great kiva -- the largest one at Chaco with a diameter of
63 1/2 feet -- has been partly restored and opened to the public. Shorn
of the flat timbered roof that once rested on immense pillars of
ponderosa pine, its stone fireboxes cold and bare, its ceremonies of
smoke and drums and flickering light fallen silent long ago, the great
kiva now inscribes a perfect circle in the desert sky, strangely
reminiscent of the oculus in the dome of Rome's Pantheon.
After
the intensity, the harsh grandeur and the desolate magnificence of
Chaco, the serenity of Bandelier comes as a blessed relief. Situated at
6,000 to nearly 7,000 feet and surrounded by the rounded blue humps of
the Jemez Mountains, Bandelier has the hushed, sheltered aura of a
secret enclave, a "literal paradise . . . a walled garden," as the art
historian Vincent Scully called it. The ever-flowing Rito de los
Frijoles (bean creek) runs along the canyon floor, supporting a ribbon
of delicate green in the center of the canyon. Stands of mature
ponderosa pine climb the brown slopes, their high branches casting
patches of precious shade. Meadows of tall rustling grasses run right up
to the foot of pink tuff cliffs that are as pocked and pitted as Swiss
cheese. The holes in the stone are the result of the erosion of pockets
of gases that were trapped in the volcanic ash that settled over the
region a million years ago.
To travel
from Chaco to the ruins at Bandelier is to move from the center of a
civilization to an outpost, from the pinnacle to the decline. Though
Bandelier's pueblos, cliff dwellings and kivas date from a later period
than those at Chaco, they are inferior in workmanship, design, scale and
technology, reflecting the general decline of Anasazi culture after the
break-up of the Chacoan system in the late 12th century. For the casual
visitor to Bandelier, however, there is ample compensation for the
quality of the ruins in the beauty of the setting.
Most
visitors to the national monument stick to the easy mile-long loop
trail that circulates through the main ruins, leading from the visitor
center up into the canyon wall and back along the river. The first ruin
one encounters is Tyuonyi (chew-OHN-yee), the dominant village at
Bandelier, which once had 400 rooms arranged in a ring around a central
plaza. The pueblo's ring pattern is still just discernible, but time has
worn the soft tuff walls down to mere waist-high stumps.
Past
Tyuonyi, the trail climbs up into the north side of Frijoles Canyon,
and ladders propped up against the canyon wall ascend to rooms that
Anasazi scooped out of the pink tuff. In peak summer season, small
groups gather at the bases of the ladders to wait for a turn. The ruins
trail continues to the Long House, a series of attached apartments and
storerooms that runs for 800 feet along the base of the canyon wall.
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Though
Bandelier attracts more people than Chaco (300,000 visitors a year
compared with 90,000), it also affords more opportunities to escape
them. Unlike Chaco, Bandelier is a hiker's park, with more than 70 miles
of trails in its its 50 square miles.
The
easiest trail is the half-mile hike along the shaded banks of the Rito
de los Frijoles to the Ceremonial Cave, an isolated cluster of
apartments and kivas built high up in the canyon wall under an
overhanging lip of rock. You make the literally breathtaking ascent to
the semicircular cave via four ladders that rise a total of 140 feet up
the canyon face (prominent signs warn off those with heart problems or
fear of heights). The small kiva sunk into the rock has been completely
reconstructed and roofed over, and you can lower yourself into it on a
ladder just as the Anasazi did. You truly feel reborn when you rise from
this stone womb into an almost perfect hemisphere of sky, mountain,
pine and rock framed by the pink tuff lip of the overhang.
Even
more rewarding and challenging is the six-mile hike to the ruins of
Yapashi Pueblo and its shrine of the stone lions. Centuries of weather
have eroded the pair of crouching mountain lions to hardly more than
humps of stone. Yet the remote shrine remains sacred to the Pueblo
Indians, who walk as far as 400 miles to leave offerings of deer antlers
or eagle feathers inside the ring of boulders encircling the lions.
Without the delicate green cottonwoods and the sheltering walls of
Frijoles Canyon, Yapashi is open the winds that blow clean and dry
through the desert.
Hiking through the
back country of Bandelier, sitting in the great kiva of Casa Rinconada
or standing in the dark stone cube of a perfectly preserved room at
Pueblo Bonito, one feels that the Anasazi -- the ancient ones -- are
close, very close beside one. And something of that sensation persists
even after the return to "civilization." The flat-roofed adobe
dwellings, the geometric designs of Pueblo Indian pottery, the intricate
beadwork of turquoise jewelry, perhaps most of all the deep reverence
for the forms of the land: all of these are part of the heritage of the
Anasazi. The beauty of northern New Mexico is, one realizes, a beauty
that the Anasazi both understood and helped to create. VISITOR'S GUIDE
TO THE PARKS Chaco
Chaco Culture
National Historic Park is a three- to four-hour drive from Albuquerque
or Santa Fe, with the last 20 or so miles on dirt roads. The most direct
route is to pick up Route 44 off I-25 at Bernalillo and drive west to
the turnoff to the park at Nageezi. A far more scenic approach from
Santa Fe is to take Route 84 through Abiquiu (Georgia O'Keeffe's home)
and to pick up Route 96 (west) at Abiquiu Dam and take this to Route 44.
Dirt roads may be impassable in bad weather.
For
information and road conditions, contact Chaco Culture National
Historic Park, Star Route 4, Box 6500, Bloomfield, N.M. 87413; telephone
(505) 988-6727.
Admission to the park
is $3 per vehicle. The ruins are open year round, from sunrise to
sunset, although the visitor center is closed on Christmas. The
ranger-staffed visitor center has toilets, drinking water, a small
museum and a bookstore, and there is a campground a mile away.
Ranger-led tours and talks are offered as staffing permits. No food or
gas is available. Fill up your tank at Nageezi before you set out and
make sure you have plenty of fluids and a hat during hot weather.
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The
only lodging near the park is a small, spotlessly clean bed and
breakfast next to the trading post at Nageezi, The Inn at the Post,
Nageezi, N.M. 87037; (505) 632-3646. The cost is about $50 for a double
and full breakfast. For dinner, there is a fully equipped kitchen open
to guests (rudimentary provisions are available at the trading post).
Bandelier
Bandelier National Monument
is 46 miles west of Santa Fe on paved, scenic, clearly marked highways.
Take U.S. 285 north to Pojoaque, then pick up 502 west and Route 4 south
to the park gate.
Admission to the
park is $5 per vehicle. The ruins are open year-round (the visitor
center is closed on Christmas), 8 A.M. to 6 P.M. in summer, 8 A.M. to
4:30 P.M. in winter. The visitor center has toilets, drinking water, a
bookstore, a small museum, a gift shop and snack bar. Frequent
ranger-led tours depart from the visitor center, and there are other
special programs and talks during the summer. The park runs two
campgrounds and a picnic area.
For
more information and for camping reservations, contact Superintendent,
Bandelier National Monument, Los Alamos, N.M. 87544; (505) 672-3861.
There is a variety of accommodations and restaurants 10 miles away in Los Alamos, and even more in Santa Fe.
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