Pueblo Bonito, the largest and oldest archaeological site at Chaco Canyon, was excavated (more accurately despoiled) twice – the Wetherill expedition (Smithsonian) conducted digs here between 1896 and 1900 and, later, National Geographic explored the ruins in the 1920's. These excavations took place at the dawn of modern scientific archaeology and they were primitive and destructive by today’s standard. Explorers remarked that desert nights were cold and so the archaeology teams burned big timbers found in the debris to keep themselves warm. These bonfires forever eliminated tree-ring evidence in support beams that might have been used today for very accurate dating as to building construction and, then, remodeling at the site occupied from 850 to 1150 AD. Everything that could be found was rooted up from its context and sent to museums on the East Coast. Accordingly, it was generally thought that the Great House has given up its secrets and that there was little left to discover at Pueblo Bonito. This may be true in some respects, but the original excavators kept copious notes and journals of their findings and this written record can be explored –that is, excavated in its own right – to make new and additional discoveries.
Dr. Hannah Mattson (Department of Anthropology at New Mexico University) has examined record entries made during these excavations, now more than 100 years old, to determine whether this written material contains clues as to Chaco cosmology. The Chaco people are called “ancestral Pueblo” in light of the fact that their descendants radiated away from the canyon to form the Tewa, Hopi, and Zuni communities in Arizona and New Mexico, particularly the well-understood villages near Taos and Santa Fe on the Rio Grande River. Dr. Mattson’s study was to determine whether directionality intrinsic to Tewa and other modern pueblo cultures can be linked to evidence found in Chaco Canyon, particularly in the heavily excavated Pueblo Bonito great house.
Native American cultures divide space into four quarters with an up (“zenith”) and a down (“nadir”). Unlike European societies that imagine lines radiating from a so-called “compass rose,” Indians thought of horizontal space as comprising four quarters – that is, a quaternary organization of landscape. Colors are associated with the different quarters – typically white, red, yellow and black, as well as blue-green (Southwestern Indians didn’t distinguish between shades of blue and green ordinarily using one word to denote that part of the color spectrum.) Various historical pueblo societies orient colors according to different paradigms. However, the principle for spatial organization into color-coded quaternaries remains a pattern throughout these cultural groups.
There’s no reason to think that the people in Chaco Canyon didn’t map space in a similar way. It’s evident that Chaco Canyon’s great houses are organized according to a quaternary geometry and that its architects designed structures and road systems to embody this sort of directional order. Pueblo Bonito, the type-site for Chaco great houses, is shaped like an enormous “D” lying on its side. The long axis of the “D” is oriented east-west to within about two degrees of the true directions. The “D” shaped assemblage of enclosed rooms is divided at its center with a bisecting wall, a stout structure that runs perfectly north-south. The great house varied between 600 and 800 rooms. Many scholars, notably Stephen Lekson, describe the vast complex (it occupies three acres) as a dynastic palace. Despite the building’s great size, it did not house many people, likely only members of an elite family and their retainers. The place contains two celebrated mortuary crypts, the most famous being “Room 33". A walled enclosure in the center of the oldest part of the pueblo, the chamber contains a subsurface, timbered shaft-grave in which two skeletons were found. One of the individuals had perished violently and was buried with thousands of marine shells and turquoise beads. Similar, mortuary trappings were found around the second skeleton, presumably someone relating to the first body. It’s generally believed that these are the bodies of the founding family at Chaco Canyon. Over the next three-hundred years, eleven other people were interred above the sub-floor crypt in Room 33. DNA testing published in 2017 revealed that the skeletons were related through matrilineal lines – apparently, political power was passed down through mothers and the people buried in Room 33 must have represented a political dynasty.
Lampedusa in his novel The Leopard has one of his aristocrats ask the rhetorical question: “What use is a palace in which every room is known to its owners?” The vast labyrinthine structure now called Pueblo Bonito may have expanded to embrace a similar concept of grandeur. Many of the interior rooms would have been airless black cavities in the huge pile of masonry core walls – the construction style is called “core and veneer,” that is, a stone rubble core covered in lime-based plaster. In places, the palace was four or five stories high. Therefore, it seems unlikely that anyone could have mastered a map as to the interior lay-out of the pueblo. Most likely, whole portions of the edifice were abandoned or devoted to storage for hundreds of years. The people who ruled from the Pueblo dwelt inside a vast intimidating maze which even they didn’t fully understand.
Within the pueblo, there are 35 kivas. Modern-day pueblo people uses round-shaped, subterranean pits for ceremonial purposes and as lodge headquarters for ritual or secret societies. The function of kivas in Chaco Canyon’s buildings remains a matter of conjecture. It seems that some were sacred spaces, others were used for domestic activities and storage; some may have been public places for large meetings. Each ancient pueblo contains one or two so-called great kivas – that is, round silos sunk in the ground that may be between 30 and 60 feet in diameter. These structures are ringed with stone benches and have various ceremonial appurtenances, including astronomically aligned fire pits and vent holes as well as the so-called Sipapu, small navel-like orifices thought to simulate the hole through which the races of men and animals emerged at the dawn of time. Mattson, in her study of Chaco directionality, examined evidence recorded in the 21 smaller “court kivas” in Pueblo Bonito.
“Court kivas” are similar to the Great Kivas but smaller – they are between 12 and 24 feet in diameter. These structures feature a circumferential bench, masonry and heavily built, from which spring brick pilasters. The pilasters support elaborate ceiling structures comprised of log-cribbing. Chaco Canyon lacks timber resources; it’s set in an arid and treeless desert. Accordingly, the log beams comprising the “Court kiva” ceilings were harvested in the Chuska Mountains fifty miles to the West. Each ceiling contains dozens of heavy beams and represents an enormous investment in labor. The people at Chaco Canyon had no pack animals and so the 15 foot long beams would have been cut in the wooded mountains and, then, carried by hand across the desert to the complex at Pueblo Bonito.
It is sometimes surmised that the potency of elaborate ritual structures arises, at least in part, in the expenditure of energy and human capital in building these places. In other words, construction is sacramental in itself and may comprise an important aspect of ritual consecrating these structures. Clearly, the use of heavy wood timber in a barren desert was significant in itself, a lavish expenditure demonstrating the importance of the sacred space. This is further established by the fact that offerings were placed in alcoves in the pilasters supporting the wooden beams. These alcoves were sealed and became inaccessible to the people using the kiva. The pilaster alcove offerings are the source of the data that Mattson amasses in support of her conclusions as to Chaco directionality.
A total of 122 pilaster offerings are documented in field notes as to the excavations at Pueblo Bonito. Depending on its size, each Court kiva had between six and ten pilasters. The location of pilasters can be reconstructed from field note sketches and measurements. And, with some difficulty, Mattson was able to correlate recorded offerings – that is, the objects extracted from the pilaster alcoves – with the location of these support structures. Chaco Canyon “Court” kivas are carefully constructed accordingly to directional plan – east-west axes are within 2 degrees of true.
Mattson classifies the 10,000 objects recorded as pilaster offerings into six categories: white, red, black, blue-green, multi-colored and translucent. Offerings were arranged in the following quaternary colors: East is mostly white with some green-blue; South is mostly green-blue; West is red and North Translucent objects were found in all quadrants. The color-scheme isn’t exact – all offerings contained some artifacts from each quadrant – but statistically the color system identified by Mattson is obvious and intentionally observed by the Court kiva builders.
It helps to visualize the artifacts making up the color groups. White is represented by marine shell (imported from the Gulf of California 800 miles away), gypsum, and bone. Ocher, chert, spondylus shell, and hematite comprise the red group. Black objects are jet, shales, obsidian, and galena crystals. Blue-Green objects are mostly turquoise, but also azurite and malachite. Iridescent abalone shell (also from the Gulf of California) is characterized as multi-colored by Mattson. Translucent objects, found in each pilaster offering, include crystals of various kinds, selenite, and quartz. White artifacts with blue-green are found in all offerings. However, there is four times the amount of turquoise in the South-Southeast pilaster offerings.
Blue-Green, possibly representing water, is heavily correlated with South-South East alignments. In fact, Chaco Canyon’s structures are generally oriented along a South / Southeast axis – five of the seven great houses in the canyon embody this feature. The Chaco world, in general, was bounded by natural landmarks – to the South, Mount Taylor, a high peak that is capped in snow for much of the year; the green-black evergreen ridges of the Chuska Mountains are located to the West. Shiprock, a massive volcanic plug that assumes the colors of the time of day in which it is seen appears to have been a Northwest boundary to the Chaco homelands. To the East, Huerfano Mesa bounds the San Juan basin (as it is called today) in which the Chaco people lived.
All modern pueblo people imagine the cosmos in terms of a zenith, nadir, and four quadrants. Historical pueblo people living in post-contact times, always associate white with the East. All present-day pueblo cultures have a yellow quadrant, although it’s directional association alters between Tewa, Zuni, and Hopi groups. Mattson points to longstanding cultural continuities between the Chaco people (ancestral Pueblo) and modern Pueblo; however, she also observes that cultural patterns change within the fixed quaternary template. Modern tribal archaeologists regard the Chaco kivas as symbolizing a cosmography. The elaborate, massive, and labor-intensive kiva roofs, probably, symbolize the sky. This sky is upheld and supported by four cardinal directions, that is, kiva pilasters oriented in quadrants. This world-map is further organized according to qualities associated with these quadrants, those qualities identified by the pilaster offerings which signify the red of the earth, blood and human flesh; bone and sea shells correlate to the white quarter; turquoise signifies the throb of water flowing underground or falling in greenish sheets from the sky. In modern pueblo thought, the sky is a basket inverted over the earth or, perhaps, a ceremonial ceramic – the Chaco people may have believed something on this order and, possibly, kivas imagined as representing this world-structure. (There is similar continuity between the Chaco kivas and archaic basket-maker pit houses the preceded the Chaco cultural phenomenon – pit houses also show directionality and are oriented according to S - SW axes.)
In London, there is a painting executed by the French artist, Nicholas Poussin called “Dance to the Music of Time.” On the canvas, we behold a rondel or ring-dance: four figures with linked hands, facing outward and skipping in a circle. The figures are classically attired in flowing drapery that fails to fully cover their breasts and shoulders. The dancers seem to be color-coded: one wears a vivid green skirt, two are clad in tangerine colored smocks, and the fourth, a rosy-cheeked and self-satisfied maiden who gazes with a complicit smile at the viewer, is dressed in blue flowing blouse and red-orange skirt. This figure wears an elaborate floral garland in her hair. To the left of the ring dance, a herm of two-faced Janus scowls at the dancers – the ritual dance takes place in the past and future simultaneously. The columnar pillar of the herm is also draped in flowers. At the right lower edge of the painting, a putti plays with an hour-glass while an old man with wings strums a figure-eight shaped lyre, also vaguely orange in color – this is Father Time. Apollo flies overhead in blurry chariot shaped like a golden bowl – some female figures floating behind the chariot recapitulate the terrestrial ring dance and a goddess carrying a laurel precedes the god. Apollo brandishes a big golden ring – it’s a bit like an enlarged hula hoop; this represents the Zodiac. The landscape in which these events occur is a bit misty, moist, as if exuding vapors in the aftermath of a Spring shower – two trees that seem to be just budding decorate the watery landscape and there are some storm clouds overhead, a bit like the thunderheads that you see in New Mexico threatening rain that never quite reaches the ground.
The painting is an elaborate allegory: the dancing figures represent an eternal procession in human affairs: Poverty induces Labor, Labor leads to Wealth, Wealth is spent in Pleasure, and a surfeit of Pleasure leads back to Poverty – hence the ring dance is has no beginning and no end. Further, the dance of these four emblematic figures is organized according to the four musical modes recognized by the ancient Greeks: the Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian, and Mixolydian. Poussin’s “Dance to the Music of Time” was painted in 1632. Around that same time, a renaissance writer, Giovanni Battista Doni wrote a treatise called Il Trattato della musica scenica. Doni’s ambition was to revive the Greek musical modes in the context of masques or scenic interludes presented during plays by Seneca that he staged for the Barberini family and their intimates. (The Barberini were Roman nobility and art patrons, prominent in the 17th century – Pope Urban the VIII was a member of the clan; Bernini worked extensively for them.)
Doni imagined the Greek musical modes, representing the four principal and equal tones, as quaternaries complex with symbolic associations. Each mode correlated to a season of the year, one of the four humors governing human moods, as well as to one of the four elements. Doni writes:
For example, the Dorian we assign to Melancholy, to Autumn, to the earth and to dryness. This Phrygian, to the choleric temperament, Summer, Fire and Heat. The Lydian to the sanguine temperament, to Winter, to water, to cold...to the Ages and Passions: infancy will be given to the Mixolydian, Adolescence, the Lydian, Youth, the Phrygian and Old Age the Dorian. To Love, Joy, and Delight, the Lydian, to Pain, Sadness and suffering, the Mixolydian,; to Wrath and Fury, the Phrygian.
Thus, Doni conceives the four-fold or the quaternary that governs human existence in all its forms, moods, and ages. Probably, Chaco philosophers imagined their world, constructed in four quadrants, in similar terms. If we substitute an Indian drum circle for the figure of Father Time in Poussin’s painting, we can conceive of the four dancing figures as executing a circle-dance, a shuffling rondel rotating around an axis representing the dimension between the nadir and the zenith. All of the characteristics of the world and its four quadrants can be interpreted as present in the rondel. But the Indians with porcupine roaches, elaborate feather headdresses, turquoise bracelets and pendants, beaded moccasins and shields of galena and copper mirror catching the sun would have been much better dressed than Poussin’s classically attired dancers.
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