On Joe Biden and the Omicron Variant

 

Max Boot

appears on CNN to say that we have seen the light at the end of COVID’s dark tunnel.  But the light turns out to be the headlamp of a train roaring forward to overwhelm us.  The name of this train is the Omicron Variant of Covid.  

Max Boot is a purported export on military affairs who parleyed his hatred of Donald Trump into a CNN consultant spot.  His qualifications to discuss epidemiology are questionable.  But, then, we live in the Land of the Free and Opinionated.

Mr. Boot has a bald head and a mild expression and he wears little round spectacles.  He looks like a small-town president of the local Chamber of Commerce and talks that way as well. His words come simpering and mincing out of his lips, a parade of toy soldiers.  

An inflamed basketball studded with fearsome prongs

represents the Omicron variant on TV news shows.  The picture isn’t much different from the original image of the novel Covid virus, also spherical, encrusted with a swollen surface, and sporting dozens of stubby horns.  But the Omicron is a very different kind of Covid mutation, one characterized by 30 mutations in its prongs.  (These prongs are the plugs that fit into the sockets in our cells, binding the illness-producing virus to those cells and, thereby, sickening us.  Antibodies are imagined as bluish shields, a bit like the child-protection inserts that can be plugged into electrical sockets to keep small children from stabbing their fingers into those outlets.)  With more and different prongs, the virus can be thought of having more keys on its keychain and, therefore, more access to the closed and locked doors in our body.  Once the thing opens the door and gets inside who knows what mayhem will ensue?

There is a very lucid short video (about eight minutes) produced by the Wall Street Journal that explores the physiognomy of the Omicron variant.  A friend of mine, who has been a skeptic about Covid, tells me that the tone of the video is arrogant, informed with the sort of specious knowingness that characterizes liberal East Coast journalists.  “She is pretending to know what she does not know,” my friend writes to me in an email.  But it’s in the eye of the beholder.  To my mind, her video is the best short scientific explanation of the new variant that I have seen.

My friend may be confused.  I think he is objecting to the information that she presents – that is, another bout with this miserable disease, another surge, more hospitalizations and more deaths.  I think my friend has mistaken his own dismay for the lucid certainties which the journalist presents.  Like many people, he believes Covid is the hand of evolution striking down those who are unsuited to survive in the fierce competition of life.  Everyone believes this notion on some level – at least, until they get sick or someone close to them dies or becomes very ill.  

No one knows

why Omicron exists or where it came from.  Some people think the virus gestated for six months in the body of someone with a compromised immune system, possibly a person suffering from AIDS in South Africa.  Others believe the viral variant is zoonoetic – that is, the virus jumped from humans into some animal, mutated in that creature or creatures (bats? pangolins? macaques?) and, then, clawed its way back into the human race.  Others think that the virus is just assiduously adapting to human defenses in the form of our vaccines.  I suppose there are some who think the virus is part of the witches’ brew in the same secret military laboratory that fomented COVID in the first place. Possibly, it was invented by big Pharma to sell more vaccine.  

In any event, it is known that Omicron is much more transmissible than Delta which, in turn, was much more infectious than the original COVID virus.  It also seems that this variant virus, demonstrating its own peculiar cunning, is less virulent and less likely to lead to hospitalization.  This means that the virus has contrived a way to spread through asymptomatic transmission.  People are walking around everywhere with the disease concealed within them.  But it remains to be seen how devastating this next surge of Covid will be – Omicron is new: it was only discovered in the last week of November.  We are now one month into the new variant’s propagation.

Joe Biden

seems to be completely baffled by challenges posed by the Omicron variant.  Consensus scientific opinion is that the virus will now spread through Omicron and become virtually ubiquitous.  Since many people (perhaps most) will be asymptomatic, testing is the key to tracking, and controlling, the spread of the virus.  This has always been the case but the United States has lagged seriously behind the rest of the developed world with respect to our capacity to test for Coronavirus.  Biden has been criticized for not invoking the Military Preparedness Act to commandeer pharmaceutical factories and retrofit them to produce more test kits.  The President promises a half-billion test kits by mid-January.  But this measure is obviously too little too late.  Millions of people are traveling for the Holidays and they will contract the virus and drag it home with them to every nook and cranny from sea to shining sea.  Testing will slam the pasture gate shut about two weeks after all the cows have escaped.  Of course, the courageous and scientifically valid approach to the Omicron virus would be to discourage all Christmas travel until more is known about this variant.  But the President doesn’t have the political will (or capital for that matter) to act courageously. He dithers about his response but refuses to use the bully pulpit to bend public opinion so as to discourage holiday travel.  So the airports are full of lines of people, probably about ten percent of them, carrying Covid among their Christmas gifts to their destinations.  

Biden is interviewed, “one-to-one” as the media likes to say, by a journalist with questions about his management of the Covid epidemic.  The journalist isn’t really hostile and lobs a few softballs at Biden – easy pitches that he should bang out of the park: “Is the fact that people can’t acquire cheap COVID tests a failure of your administration?” the journalist asks.  “It wasn’t foreseeable,” Biden says.  Then, he inexplicably alters course:   “Well, some may argue that it was foreseeable two weeks ago or a month or six months ago...”  This is a preface to the “but” clause – “but they were wrong.”  Except that Biden loses his way and doesn’t refute the notion that he could have foreseen the need for more tests six months ago.  He appears to be confused.  And, in fact, now, perhaps, he’s adopting his own counter-factual rhetoric as true.  The way he responds doesn’t refute what “some may argue” and so, perhaps, he is conceding that he should have known earlier about the enhanced need to tests before the 2021 Holiday Season.  

And it gets worse when things take a turn to the bizarre.  Biden decides to pivot on his accomplishment, that is, tout the half-billion tests that his administration will make available in January.  So he says: “And I’ve arranged for a half-billion pills, a half-billion to be available in the next few days...” he pauses.  “There will be a half-billion pills for the American people...oh, I mean tests... for the people.”  (Biden is confusing his tests for Covid infection with anti-viral post-infection palliative therapy, pills that you take to moderate the symptoms of the disease – this remedy was just approved by the FDA a day or so before the interview.)  The interviewer is willing to give the President the benefit of the doubt for misspeaking.  He asks something about whether the need for tests was foreseeable.  Biden responds: “No one saw this coming but I’ve got 500,000 pills on the way for the American people.”

It’s pretty clear that Biden is uncertain as to what he has accomplished: is he filling prescriptions with a half-billion pills or has he arranged for the dissemination of the same number of Covid tests?   The media seizes on this interview.  Of course, the media’s bias is to favor Joe Biden if this is plausibly possible.  But this clip is too good to be ignored.  The fragment of the interview can be played without comment, ostensibly on the subject of the administration’s response to the Omicron crisis.  But, there’s a side perk – the clip seems to show the President confused about just exactly what he has done and, at minimum, gravely disengaged from the crisis that he is supposed to be managing.  (No one else in the public arena keeps mistaking tests for pills.)  The media’s knee-jerk reaction is to subvert anyone in power and, so, the clip has a particular sinister efficacy – it can be shown without remarking upon Biden’s apparent confusion, while still making that point implicitly.  And, the clip can be displayed to Biden’s shills in the chattering class of left-wing pundits so that they can vigorously defend the President.

In fact, the clip is shown to David Axelrod, a Democratic pro-Biden commentator.  He doesn’t mention the President’s inability to keep clear in his mind the distinction between tests and pills, two completely different responses to the virus. He simply asserts that Biden’s encouragement of the tests is a good thing and that we are far “ahead of where we were last March.”  (Fatigued by the endless pandemic, most people would not agree that we are “far ahead” of last March’s surge.  Objectively, the statement is true – in March 2021, there were no vaccines widely available – but subjectively, as far as most people experience the Covid crisis, Axelrod’s assertion is simply tone-deaf.)  Two other pundits take the same tack: they praise Biden for getting the tests available to the public, ignore the fact that this testing will come two weeks late to prevent holiday transmission of the virus, and act as if they didn’t hear the President confusing pills with tests.  These are pundits who wrote books literally accusing Trump of murder for his response to the Covid virus when he was in office.  Biden has no idea what to do and seems committed to a disastrous course of encouraging holiday travel.  But he gets a pass notwithstanding clear evidence that he doesn’t understand his own response to Omicron variant and its probable catastrophic spread.  

This latter point is significant.  Trump was abused for objecting to shut-downs of schools and businesses during the height of the virus (and before vaccines) in the early Spring of 2020.  But Biden is following the same course – he has appeared on TV encouraging Holiday travel when, in fact, everyone concedes that this will result in calamitous spread of the disease.  The reason that a President should discourage Holiday travel in these circumstances can be simply, if cynically, stated: people need cover to avoid family gatherings.  Many are pressured into traveling cross-country to commune with relatives whom they don’t particularly like and whom they avoid for the rest of the year.  The Holidays enforce this debt to family that, in our modern world, a lot of people don’t particularly enjoy paying.  If the President were to have the gumption to discourage holiday travel, this would provide an excuse, or “cover” as I have said, for those who are afraid to travel because of the virus or for other reasons.  But, instead, the President has taken the exact opposite course – and this is in the context of more lock-downs in Europe where already Omicron is devouring the population.

Bill Gates knows better

when it comes to the virus.  In view of the President’s default on this issue, Bill Gates, who is nothing if not well-informed, says that he is canceling most of his Holiday plans.  He sends a tweet or an email to the world indicating that he doesn’t intend to travel for Christmas.  Obviously, he disagrees with Biden’s bizarre stance of encouraging people likely to become infected to spread their disease all across America.  

Of course, the Republicans are notably silent on all of these issues.  They can’t denounce Joe Biden for his fecklessness with respect to responding to a disease that many are on record as regarding as fraudulent and a hoax.  So the GOP, handed an issue with which to batter Biden on a silver platter, as it were, is powerless to act. How can they accuse Biden of not taking appropriate measures to combat the plague, when they argued that there is no plague at all?

The world has gone mad

and evidence for this is a strange story coming from India, the fons et origo of many strange stories.  In a village somewhere, a pack of dogs killed a baby macaque, a sort of aggressive and cunning monkey.  The monkeys were outraged and they began to kidnap dogs, drag them onto the roofs of houses, and, then, pitch them headlong into the street below.  More than 250 dogs are said to have perished in this bizarre war between canines and monkeys.  Later, the story is amended to suggest that the monkeys were kidnaping puppies out of some sort of misplaced solicitude, hauling the cowering baby dogs into trees and atop houses and, then, negligently allowing them to plummet to their death.  This weird tale spreads like a virus over the internet but without any real details to support checking these allegations. It’s just another baffling event in some nameless village in some nameless wilderness in India. 

A couple of fat Indian cops in opera bouffe uniforms gesture at a small corpse resting on a sheet atop a table.  The corpse, they assert, is the petrified remains of a baby Tyrannosaurus Rex, retrieved from some cave or cranny in the Himalayan massif.  The camera peers at the mummy. It’s obviously a shriveled dead cat with a lizard’s tail affixed improbably to its feline hind quarters.  The policemen say that the dead cat proves that T. Rex still stalks the remote glaciers and rhododendron thickets of the high mountains. This story is aired on the laughably fraudulent Strange Evidence series, a TV show that features supposedly inexplicable footage on which so-called experts comment.  (The experts are a rogue’s gallery of young actors identified with labels such as “Science Journalist,” “Military Expert,” and “Freelance Archaeologist”.)  This is one of my favorite shows because of its bizarre video clips and the utterly obtuse and idiotic commentary provided by the self-proclaimed experts, often opining in fields very remote from their alleged expertise (fictional in any event I suppose).  For instance, a pretty and earnest girl identified as “Entomologist” studies the images of the dead cat on her lap top.  She says something like: “If this is an example of what’s running around in the Himalayas, I think I’m staying away.”  But what is running around in the Himalayas is obviously feline and, apparently, a domestic house cat.  One of experts, I think an “Internet Scientist”, tips her hand by saying: “This isn’t the normal thing that the cat drags in.”  She also gazes at the petrified cat.  “Holy Cow!” she says, also, I think a jab at the plump Hindu cop-dumplings: “It looks like a dinosaur!”

A pundit named Ezekiel Emmanuel

is asked to opine as to Biden’s failure to get testing kits available for the public before the Holidays.  He’s shown the clip in which the President repeatedly confuses pills with tests.  He doesn’t comment on that confusion.  Clearly, he wants to say that Biden has, so to speak, fucked the pooch here, but this would not earn him any plaudits on CNN. So he says: “Testing has been problematic from the start.  In the previous administration, testing wasn’t emphasized and, it seems... that this has been extended...”

“Extended” – that is, Biden has adopted Trump’s failure to encourage prompt and accurate testing for the virus.  But the guy can’t bring himself to actually use Biden’s name.

Another prehistoric creature,

a baby dinosaur, is discovered curled up in a fossilized egg. The egg has been neatly split apart to show the little monster tightly embraced in a loop of its own bony tail.  The fossilized fetus looks something like a miniature version of the creature in Alien, all jaw, claw, and prehensile tail.  The TV hosts on CNN coo and giggle about the baby dinosaur.  It’s as if they think it’s cute.  To me, the petrified fossil, which looks a bit like the withered mummy of a cat, is horrifying.  It’s a harbinger of our future quarried from the remotest past, a monstrous sign of things to come.

December 23, 2021

On Tom Selleck and the Raiders of the Lost Ark

1 – A rose-red city half as old as time

The Archaeological Conservancy, a non-profit enterprise that protects historic and pre-historic sites in the United States, sponsored a lecture on a Chaco outlier in southwestern Colorado, two great houses in the Montezuma Valley called the Haynie Site.  On the day of the lecture, I watched a You-Tube video reporting on excavations at Haynie during 2021 season.  The video was disappointing: three men stood beside some narrow slits in the ground and gestured toward barely perceptible stratigraphy in the soil.  Someone held in his hand a tiny potsherd painted with a black spiral motif.  The chief archaeologist on the site, someone with the picturesque name of Kellam Throgmorton, commented on a stink bug ambling across a plaster floor inset at the bottom of a hole.  Some irregular rocks protruded from the side of the pit.  Sometimes, the camera angle showed a small white house about sixty feet away, the sort of humble, but comfortable, dwelling that you might see anywhere in the suburbs: three BR two Bath with new siding and a neatly shingled roof.  The You-Tube clip, about 15 minutes long, almost persuaded me to avoid the ZOOM lecture scheduled for 6:00 CST that evening.  The place just didn’t seem that interesting.

The movies and popular imagination promote a fiction that archaeological sites are located in remote places, hidden away in desert wastelands or concealed in high rugged mountains.  Machu Picchu sits atop a thousand-foot pedestal of sheer mountain where the Amazon basin laps up against the Andes.  The rose-red city of Petra in Jordan, half as old as time, is accessed through a slot canyon with towering incarnadine sandstone walls and its remains are carved into high, barren cliffs.  We imagine Egyptian archaeologists uncovering ancient pillars and frescos buried in shifting sand dunes or concealed in remote desert oases.  The celebrated cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde are built into the walls of deep gorges that run as fissures through the flat top of a Colorado mountain – just reaching those sites involves a harrowing ascent on winding roads up the side of the sheer mesa.  Far out in the stony desert, there are rock shelters gouged by the wind into buttes where human bones and bits of decaying basket peek out of the dust.  Much of archaeology’s romance is related to travel in exotic places and the conquest of hostile jungles and deserts. I recall hearing wolves howl in the mountain fastness above the oracle complex at Delphi. Angkor Wat is always in danger of being reclaimed by the rain forest.  Indiana Jones probes tunnels in crumbling heaps of masonry in the jungles of South America – when he emerges from subterranean chambers writhing with arachnids, cannibal tribesmen pursue him.  Chaco Canyon exerts a powerful claim on the emotions because it is so hard to reach, beyond a formidable escarpment of pitted gravel roads running between god-forsaken hogans where Navajo children ride bareback on Indian ponies.  

The Haynie site has none of this appeal.  The landscape is mostly flat, irrigated green fields extending toward a horizon where a few nondescript buttes rise, square-cut and indistinct against the sky.  A heavily traveled highway seems to skirt the site and the You-Tube video shows pickups coming and going, the sun glinting on their chrome.  Several modern structures, including a house, rise over the network of craters and shallow pits where excavations (or pot-hunting) has occurred.  Most startling: the occupants of the neat little house devised their septic system to drain into the big, humped mound of one of the Chaco Great Houses.  In the side of a trench, we see a white PVC pipe protruding over the remains of several prehistoric walls made from interlocked field stones.  Evidently, the Haynie site lacks the sort of romantic isolation, hardship, and picturesque terrain that the novice expects of an archaeological dig.  It’s like Cahokia across the river from St. Louis.  When I first visited the site, the great city of mounds and lagoons was surrounded by flat river-bottoms dotted with ruinous trailer courts, a kind of semi-rural ghetto where auto-salvage yards stood amidst the sort of poverty that can’t exactly be characterized as urban, but that is not rural either – the wreckage of pauperized suburbs where the flotsam from the city seems to have washed up against the edges of farmland.  A highway cut through the site, high-speed and difficult to cross on foot, and at the edge of the archaeological precinct there were (when I first visited) some battered taverns built from construction scraps and plywood and a motel that the scientist digging in the ruins quickly discovered to be a brothel.  

2 – Tom Sellack is lying to you

Viewed skeptically, most TV ads demonstrate the opposite of the propositions on which they are intended to persuade.  Most ads explicitly undermine themselves.  TV commercials for SUVs show people driving into idyllic mountain or seaside landscapes, wild romantic places empty of people.  The ads seem to suggest that if you buy an SUV, you are treading in the footsteps of John Muir.  But John Muir, of course, didn’t drive a gas-guzzling, climate-destroying pickup into Yosemite Valley.  Ads for cancer drugs show people canoeing and barbecuing and playing beach volley-ball at the edge of the surf.  These ads suggest that it is fun and, even, athletically adventurous to have fatal cancer – the fine-print flashed at the bottom of the image advises that use of the touted drug, benefits those fortunate enough to be prescribed these pills (or infusions) by an average of three-and-a-half extra months of life. (And generally at the expense of rashes, perineal infections, and possible hemorrhage.)  Tom Selleck, the star of a once-popular show Magnum P.I., pitches reverse mortgages.  Acknowledging that he is rather long in the tooth, Selleck says that this isn’t his first rodeo and that a “reverse mortgage is just a another kind of loan – it’s not some sort of scheme to take your house.”  If Tom Sellack tells you that reverse mortgage isn’t a scheme to take your house, you can be darn-tootin’ sure that this is exactly what is plotted by such a mortgage: of course, mortgages are enforced by foreclosure and, so, obviously a reverse mortgage is, indeed, a legal contrivance precisely designed to allow the lender to take your house.  Tom Selleck is lying to you.

This assertion is proved by the history of the Haynie site.  The five-acre homestead is near Cortez, Colorado.  Two narratives compete as to this history – I suppose both are likely true although staggered somehow chronologically.  In the first narrative, a benign looter named Haynie owned the premises and dug innumerable burrows looking for pots.  This woman was a sort of amateur archaeologist and she documented her looting with polaroid pictures showing where artifacts were found and a number of crisply drawn diagrams showing the locations of walls and rooms, appearing as cellar-like depressions during her tenure on the property.  She is described as being well-meaning, conscientious, and inept.  Haynie artifacts are scattered through many different collections throughout the Four Corners region.  The second narrative involves “a shade-tree mechanic” who lived on the property in a mobile home.  This fellow had a girlfriend who ended up with the property when the auto repairman died.  (The mechanic seems to have upgraded to the small white house on the property, although, perhaps, it’s core was a modular home when he lived there.  He also erected a “paint shop” for detailing autos – this is a fairly large white pole-barn visible in pictures and on the You-Tube video.  There is also a small shed set atop one of mounds covering the Chaco great houses.  Presumably, the mechanic needed cash to erect the shed and paint shop and so he entered into a reverse mortgage on the property – instead of contracting for installment payments on the mortgage, he took a lump sum (apparently accelerating the installment pay-out – otherwise the arrangement would just be a conventional mortgage) to finance improvements.  When he died, the reverse mortgage was in default and the amount owed considerably exceeded the appraised value of five-acre tract.  The Archaeological Conservancy, through Jim Walker, a fellow that I know slightly, tried to buy the property from the bank.  In order to avoid bidding up the prices on land with archaeological features, the Conservancy’s policies prevent it from paying more than fair market value for property that it seeks to acquire – in other words, the conservancy can’t pay a premium for the features buried in the land that they purchase.  Since the amount of money owing on the premises exceeded its fair market value, the Conservancy couldn’t pay off the reverse mortgage in order to buy the site.  The lender foreclosed on the property and, contrary to Tom Selleck, ended up owning the house – although it was foreclosed when the deceased mechanic’s girlfriend was occupying the home.  As is the custom, the foreclosure auction took place on the steps of the Mancos County Courthouse and the lender, of course, simply bid the amount that it was owed on the reverse mortgage loan, thereby acquiring the property for that sum.  The house was presumably improved and value of the tract enhanced; further, real estate values in the Montezuma Valley increased over the next decade.  In 2016, the Crow Canyon Archaeology non-profit association, a well-known and cutting edge archaeological enterprise in the Four Corners purchased the five-acre tract for what was, then, considered fair market value.  The Archaeological Conservancy, through Jim Walker, bought the site in 2019 from the Crow Canyon consortium.  Walker negotiated with the State of Colorado to establish permanent easements over the premises.  The easements forbid any agricultural use and preserve access to the site in perpetuity for the State.  However, as Walker noted in his introduction to the lecture on December 16, 2021, the first improvements made the Conservancy were to install a high cyclone fence around the land, set up a padlocked gate, and put up high-visibility “No Trespassing” signs.  

I met Walker during a Conservancy tour sponsored of Oaxacan archaeological sites coordinated with the Day of the Dead celebrations in, and around, Oaxaca City.  Walker is a lanky fellow who looks like a cowboy – I think he was raised in rural New Mexico but now lives in Albuquerque.  He’s gay and had a flippant, wise-ass husband about fifteen years his junior, an engaging fellow who was obviously more comfortable with being homosexual than his older, much more conservative, spouse.  Walker has long fingers and a melancholy saturnine expression on his long, rather equine face.  He has a charming horsey smile, although it is seldom seen.  I recall talking with him at bar in Oaxaca City where he ate fistfuls of lemon and chili drenched peanuts from a brandy snifter on the table.  Mr. Walker was interested that I was a lawyer, because he is himself quite an expert in real estate.  He suggested that if there were any acquisitions proposed by the Conservancy in Minnesota, he would likely hire me to work on those transactions.  But the Conservancy has not purchased any sites in this State and, to this day, owns nothing here.  I should suggest to him that the Conservancy acquire the prehistoric flint and chert quarries near Grand Meadow fifteen miles from where I live or, perhaps, an earth-mound village site somewhere along the upper Minnesota River.  

3 – A mini-Chaco

People lived at Haynie for five-hundred years.  By contrast, the town where I dwell has been inhabited for about 170 years.  Clearly, there was something advantageous about the terrain and the surrounding ecosystem that lured people to Haynie and retained them there.  Ancestral Pueblo people were maize farmers with squash and bean gardens.  In the Southwest, water is destiny.  Although row-crop farming has materially changed the topography, geological surveys show that a shallow draw ran past the Haynie village.  Evidence shows that the draw was active, flowing with water for most of the year.  Springs were also located in the hills behind the village, although irrigation has changed the character of these springs, re-charging them with water on a more frequent basis so that they are now more robust than would have been the case 900 years ago.  

Farmers practiced what is called “run-off farming” – that is, they designed their agricultural fields to exploit periodic drainage.  Crops were planted when the land dried sufficiently after flood or snow melt-off events – this sort of agriculture is also called “flood recession farming.”  (“Flood recession agriculture” plays an important conceptual role in David Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Beginning of Everything an argumentative book that declares that Mesolithic people resisted cereal agriculture associated with social stratification and authoritarian regimes by “play farming” – that is, adopting agricultural practices that didn’t require an all-or-nothing commitment to cereal.  One form of “play farming” is exploiting run-off zones that are periodically inundated to grow crops without requiring extensive tillage or the construction of irrigation systems.)  “Run-off farming” is hard to detect because cycles of inundation destroy evidence of the land’s cultivation.  In any event, the location of Haynie is close to ideal for this sort of agrarianism and the villages along this draw in what is now the Montezuma Valley were situated here on the basis of water resources.  The valley hillside is also a transition zone between highlands with wood resources (and tree-nuts) and the more desert-like environs in the valley.  Thus, the place can support foraging for a wide variety of useful plants, animals, and lithic materials.  

In archaeological terms, Haynie shows clear evidence of occupancy during the Pueblo I period.  The earliest excavated structure (or part of a structure) has been dated to the late 780's period – this date is based on dendrochronology.  The site expanded into a large, and, rather, far-flung village for about one-hundred years.  After 880, some sort of political or economic crisis swept through the Southwest and Pueblo I villages were largely deserted for about thirty to forty years.  Beginning between 910 to 920, the villages moved back to their abandoned towns and resettled them. (The hiatus at Haynie isn’t obviously documented and we don’t know if the town was wholly abandoned or just significantly reduced in population.)  The village was renovated and enlarged through tenth century with the people expanding the existing house-blocks through about 1020.  In the Middle Pueblo period, that is about 1020 to 1075, the population continued to expand and some of the house-blocks were filled in with garbage.  Pottery styles changed and there is increased evidence of trade.  The Chaco phenomenon, extended villages arranged in intentionally designed suburbs around enigmatic Great Houses built of elaborately dressed stone, is evident at Haynie between 1075 and 1150.  The Great Houses have not been fully explained.  Some archaeologists regard them as primarily ceremonial and ritual structures although their cyclopean size and complexity seems to argue against one or, even, several dedicated uses.  Stephen Lekson and others believe that the Great Houses were simply dynastic palaces.  There are two Great Houses at Haynie plopped down atop the earlier, less ostentatious Pueblo I house-blocks.  Chaco began imploding around 1150.  As Chaco’s cultural hegemony over the Four Corners collapsed, the people dispersed, many of them to build cliff-dwellings and fortified towns in places like Mesa Verde.  That phase of social development lasted for another hundred years and, then, the cliff-dwellers  migrated to the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in northern New Mexico where the precursors of the modern-day Pueblo Indian villages were founded.  At Haynie, there were periodic and, probably, opportunistic re-settlings of the ruins up until about 1250 when the valley was largely uninhabited except for Ute and mountain Arapaho nomadic foragers who built no villages and left few traces on the land.  European settlement of the area began around 1850.  

Professor Throgmorton’s lecture reveals him as a processual archaeologist, interested primarily in the processes by which societies transform themselves into other forms.  The Chaco Great Houses are a brute fact: elaborate multi-story labyrinths with enormous kivas and a characteristic D-shaped room layout – these ruins are charismatic but oppressive and, even, menacing in their aspect.  The question that fascinates Dr. Throgmorton is how the rather cheery, Pueblo I tenements, evidence of a vibrant communal life morphed into master-slave Chaco architecture.  Chaco Great Houses literally dominate the older Pueblo I villages – at Haynie, the Chaco structures sit on top of plaster foundations and, even, incorporate walls from the Pueblo I house blocks.  These house-blocks were four or five family units consisting of rows of adobe or masonry rooms, generally built like a procession of train cars across the landscape.  The front rooms are larger, better ventilated, and seem to have been work spaces with sleeping alcoves or benches.  The rear rooms are smaller, typically two to a front room living space and seem to have been used for storage.  All of the Pueblo I housing units are, more or less, identical in shape and function; this suggests a generally egalitarian social organization.  Religious observances were similarly dispersed.  Pueblo I housing blocks have a kiva in each tenement or apartment structure.  The kivas are relatively small and built with the same masonry technology as the row houses.  (The row houses have patterned well-coursed single wythe common walls – “wythe”is a masonry term for a wall that is constructed one-unit wide.)

By contrast, the Chaco Great Houses are largely built with massive walls, sometimes set on subterranean disk-like pedestals to support the heavy structures above.  Chaco walls are made from dressed stone, hewn to present a smooth surface on the outside.  The thick walls have fill between inner and outer surfaces.  Furthermore, Chaco dominated the landscape by devising “line-of-sight" relationships between Great Houses.  This is evident in the Montezuma Valley where the Wallace Great House, about a quarter-mile away to the West, sits just across the modern road from Haynie.  These structures seem part of an alignment with a more southern Great House named the Ida Jean Great House (1 ½ miles away).  In turn, these north-south alignments seem to point toward the Farview fortified village that sits at the crest of Mesa Verde, really not a “mesa” but a “cuesta” or inclined table-mountain.  Chaco culture organized their urban landscapes around the cardinal directions and built elaborate linear road systems.  Small roadside shrines called herradura were erected next to these stone-surfaced and curbed highways – the herradura were open-ended masonry structures possibly signifying a change in direction of road and, also, probably oriented to point the way to the closest Great House.  The system of three Great House complexes built in the Montezuma Valley creates a landscape organized according to the urban paradigm at “downtown” Chaco Canyon where big buildings separated by about a thousand yards are erected according to the cardinal directions and seem to be aligned with landmarks on the horizon.  Throgmorton says that the Montezuma Valley in 1125 looked a lot like a smaller version of Chaco Canyon.  His excavational query at Haynie is directed toward ascertaining the social forces that changed the large and scattered Pueblo I communities into the more monolithic and regimented Chaco Great House system.    

4- He digs best who digs least

The Sinagua site at Tuzigoot (near Clarkdale, Arizona) demonstrates by contrast the paradigm shift in archaeological field work.  Tuzigoot was excavated by Clark and Spicer (University of Arizona) between 1933 and 1935.  One-hundred and five of the 110 rooms in the hilltop pueblo were cleared and their artifacts indexed for curation.  Dr. Throgmorton notes that at the time of this excavation, regarded now as highly destructive, the idea was to scour the site and find “everything” there.  In the process, of course, much archaeological evidence is despoiled.  Modern technology can extract a vast amount of date from remnants of burned wood, cultural deposits of sand trodden by generations of feet, and microscopic seeds and lithic debris.  Of course, in the Thirties these techniques didn’t exist and the emphasis was on retrieving pottery shards, implements, and ritual items.  Most everything else was sifted away and, then, discarded as spoil.

Crow Canyon has pioneered an exceedingly non-invasive approach to archaeology.  First, the site is carefully surveyed for surface evidence of cultural occupation – ordinarily potsherds and unusual ridges and depressions (evidence of middens and building sites.)  Drones are used to catalogue surface features and, then, ground penetrating scans are implemented.  At Haynie, drone photogrammetry was instrumental in locating buried walls.  Remote sensing electric resistivity and magnetometer scans cold not be used because much of the site was used as a car repair facility and the land is strewn with metal objects such as springs, car body fragments, glass, and spark-plugs.  

After the surface survey, a plan of excavation is devised, at Haynie in collaboration with the State of Colorado, Native American consultants, and local zoning and code authorities.  Permits are pulled for targeted excavation.  Crow Canyon uses 1 x 1 pits to pinpoint features that the archaeologists wish to examine.  (A one by one “window,” as it is called, is a one-meter by one-meter pit sunk about four to five feet into the ground.  In the You-Tube video, there are comical-looking images of the archaeologists poking their heads up out of these small square excavations.  It looks like a whack-a-mole game.)  If a window encounters an interesting cultural feature, then, a larger excavation is made, although the scope of the hole is circumscribed by the objectives that it aims to uncover.  The notion of systematically proceeding to excavate across an entire site isn’t implemented by Crow Canyon, although, of course, there are salvage or rescue contexts in which a feature threatened by a road or housing development must be uncovered according the old paradigm.  Once an opening is made into the earth, the archaeologist feels a “responsibility to the excavation unit” – “excavation unit”is the term  used to describe the incision made in the earth.  Throgmorton says that it’s the archaeologist’s responsibility to glean every possible bit of evidence from the excavation – this may involve calling into other disciplines to study dendrochronology, ceramic sequences, evidences of food processing and agricultural detritus much of which is microscopic.  The mantra is that you should move less earth but gather more data from the dirt that you do displace.  

Another problem arising from old techniques for archaeological “digs” (not a term used for field-work today) is that objects uncovered must be “curated”, a process that involves multi-disciplinary teams and extensive expense.  Furthermore, “curated” objects may invoke religious or sacred responses from present-day Indians.  This is particularly true of human remains which are ubiquitous at archaeological sites.  If you dig something up and reclaim it from the earth, you have moral duty to that object and those who once possessed or used it.  This moral duty involves curation and preservation, processes often more expensive than the intrinsic value of the bone or potsherd discovered.  

At Haynie, Throgmorton excavated Structure 1047.  This is a small benched kiva located under the corner of a Great House and, formerly, part of the row-block apartment unit.  The kiva seems t have been ritually decommissioned, remodeled, and turned into something else, possibly a cache or storage unit.  In the floor of the kiva, a dog burial was found next to turkey also intentionally interred.  A ritual cache of bone awls were discovered and a”sandal last” – that is, a miniature effigy of a tool used to make moccasins.  (Pueblo I people apparently regarded moccasins made for certain ceremonies as highly charged ritual paraphernalia and, therefore, sacred.)  Some Dogoszhi-style ceramic shards were found dating the decommissioning of the kiva to about 1040.  Throgmorton observes that these objects weren’t accidentally left in the room, but where put there intentionally – whatever they were ritually doing, they are, the archaeologist said, still apparently serving that function.  The kiva had been purged with flame – there were lenses of soot found in the fill.  After carefully photographing the objects in situ, they were reburied so that they could continue their function whatever is was (or is).  Indeed, most of the intrusions made into the earth at Haynie will be back-filled.  When the site is finally opened to the public, most of the action, as it were, the “interesting stuff” will remain underground.  The concept is that the archaeologists of the future will have even better equipment and technology (and a better overall understanding) with which to continue this conversation with the prehistoric past.  Crow Canyon’s policy is diminish moving dirt, take “sneak peeks” into the sub-strata, and severely limit the amount of cultural material curated.

4 – Finds

Notwithstanding the foregoing, the allure of archaeology exists in large part due to remarkable objects retrieved from the oblivion of the dust.   Several interesting finds were made at the Haynie site.

On the plaster floor of a small kiva from a Pueblo I room-block, a trifoliate (or three-lobed) Sipapu was found – the little pit looks something like the French fleur de lys.  Sipapu are holes indented into kiva floors that signify the place of origin within the earth for all living beings.  Ancestral animals and humans were thought to have emerged into the light through these holes.  Most Sipapu are a single tube-like pit in the floor.  A compound Sipapu may signify that someone using the kiva was a ritual specialist, some sort of professional shaman or religious practitioner.  

A one-by-one unit exposed a half-dozen ceramic ladles.  The ends of the ladle handles are decorated with burden-basket effigies.  A burden-basket is a cone-shaped tightly woven vessel, usually about two-feet long, with straps so that it can be closed at the top and borne like a backpack on the shoulders of its carrier.  (Photographs show desert Indian women trudging through the thorns with these baskets on their backs.)   Burden-baskets and their effigies seem associated with women’s societies – in some places, they are found with menstrual aprons, basket-woven girdles spattered with menstrual blood.  The effigy baskets, all of them snapped off the ladle stems, have a spritely appearance – some have carrying handles that look like little rounded legs; there is a faintly anthropomorphic aspect to them.  The fabric’s basket-weave is represented by a lattice pattern of black on white.  The making of small figurines to represent people and every-day tools was common throughout the Southwest and, indeed, characteristic of Meso-American Indian cultures. No one knows what these objects mean or how they were used: whether they were toys or ritual regalia or something in between is unknown. The fact that these burden-basket effigies were located at the end of ladle handles suggests that spoons may have been used in healing ceremonies, possibly associated with female reproductive tract ailments. But, of course, we are just making up stories about objects that we understand only imprecisely.

5 - The Curse of the Manure Cloud

The dog burial in the decommissioned kiva haunts me.  Dogs are companion animals, bred to bark at strangers.  The dog is a guardian.  Therefore, one might ask what the canine was thought to be protecting when it was killed and, then, ritually buried in floor of the kiva.

Near the dog, turkey bones were found – indeed, a whole turkey which is diagnostic of a ritual burial.  The dog seems to be guarding a domestic turkey.  In the ancient Southwest, beginning around the Common Era (that is 1 AD) there copious evidence of turkey domestication.  (Turkeys had been domesticated in west Mexico, for instance, among the Colima about 500 BC and, even, earlier by the Zapotec in Oaxaca).  Male occelated turkeys are showy creatures with plumage like pheasants – they have iridescent red, bronze, green, and gold feathers.  Basketmaker II sites (circa 500 AD) show evidence of turkey pens made from standing wicker sticks; in fact, in a remote Utah canyon, turkey pens still upright and mostly intact have been found. (In the archaeological record, turkey pens are usually visible as thick deposits of turkey dung with eggshell sherds.)  Probably, these turkeys were raised for their feathers; from their manure, we know they were corn-fed.  Although extremely fragile and, therefore, rare, turkey-feather cloaks have been found in caves in Utah – these are elaborately woven yucca textiles in which turkey feathers have been interlaced, in some instance as many as 1000 feathers comprising a garment.  Domestic turkeys were ubiquitous in the Chaco world and, indeed, raised in industrial numbers – at Paquime (Casas Grandes), a huge Mexican urban site that shows both Hohokom and Chaco influences, no fewer that 255 ritual turkey burials were found in an area where low adobe walls seem to have penned hundreds of the birds.  When the Chaco world collapsed, deer had been hunted almost to extinction in areas near the Great Houses and, so, the people had to eat their turkeys, a practice that suggests serious food shortages.  

The dog barks to protect the turkeys.  The turkey is tended by a man or woman.  A figurine of a moccasin last, toy-sized, is also embedded in the kiva floor.  Humans have left their footprints between the dog and the turkey.  These burials simulate a world.

Poncho House is located in the Chinle Wash near Canyon de Chelly.  It’s a complex of three fairly extensive cliff-dwellings in rock shelters scooped out of the red cliffs.  The people who lived in these masonry structures were likely refugees from the Chaco Great Houses to the north and west, then, abandoned when the cliff-dwellings were built.  In the early part of the century, an archaeological team from the Field Museum excavated at Poncho House.  At the rear of the cave, the workers encountered a deep drift of turkey manure.  The ancestral Pueblo living in cliff dwellings kept their birds in the very back of the rock shelters in which they built their lodgings.  The turkey manure was dry and, when the workers waded through it, the stuff rose in choking “filthy clouds”.  Several of the men digging at the site became ill from inhaling the fog of manure-dust.  One of the men developed pneumonia.  His lungs were scarred and he never fully recovered.  

The Navajo stayed away from Great Houses and ancestral Pueblo cliff-dwellings.  They believed that the Chaco ruins were the remnants of a culture addicted to gambling.  The people who lived near those monumental ruins were seduced into wagering away everything they possessed, including their children, livestock, wives, and, at last, their own freedom.  In this way, most of the people became slaves of the masters living in Great Houses.  Life was out-of-balance: in the castles of the Great Gamblers, the condition of Koyaanitsqatsi (life-out-of-balance) prevailed.  As far as the Navajo Apaches are concerned, the wreckage of the Chaco world is haunted by ghosts and demons and cursed as well.