Anasazi America: Seventeen Centuries on the Road from Center Place, Second Edition

Anasazi America

Anasazi America

Seventeen Centuries on the

Road from Center Place

SECOND EDITION

DAVID E. STUART

With the research assistance and contributions of Jenny (Lund) Sherman and Susan Moczygemba-McKinsey

© 2014 by David E. Stuart

All rights reserved. Published 2014

Printed in the United States of America

19   18   17   16   15   14                1   2   3   4   5   6

The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

Stuart, David E.

Anasazi America : seventeen centuries on the road from

Center Place / David E. Stuart.

Second edition.

   pages cm

 Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8263-5478-5 (paperback) — ISBN 978-0-8263-5479-2 (electronic)

1. Pueblo Indians—Antiquities. 2. Chaco culture. 3. Chaco Canyon (N.M.)—Antiquities. 4. Pueblo Indians—Social life and customs. 5. Human ecology—Case studies. 6. Social change—Case studies. I. Title.

E99.P9S83 2014

978.9004’974—dc23

2013046716

To all the University of New Mexico students in my Ancient New Mexico courses, who have given focus to my professional life these past forty years. Thank you for the journey.

—DAVID E. STUART

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

Maps

The Four Corners

A Trip through Chaco Country

The Heart of Chaco

The Pueblos of Modern Times

Figures

1. FCF Growth

2. Corn, Beans, and Squash

3. Temporal Changes in Burial Goods

4. Normal Bone Cross-Section

5. Stressed Bone Cross-Section

Table

1. Comparison of Humerus Measurements

Photographs

The Land and Its Farmers

1. Canyon del Muerto

2. Chaco River near Kin Bineola great house

3. Chaco River near Peñasco Blanco great house

4. Pueblo Bonito and Chetro Ketl great houses

5. Casa Rinconada great house

6. A small farmstead

7. A medium-size farmstead

8. A larger farmstead

9. BC58 and BC57, two medium-size farmsteads

10. Closeup view of BC57 farmstead

The Chaco Phenomenon

11. Tall sandstone walls of Kin Kletso great house

12. Pueblo del Arroyo great house

13. Pueblo Bonito great house

14. Pueblo Bonito, view to the southeast

15. Chetro Ketl and Talus Unit great houses

16. Una Vida great house

17. Wijiji great house

18. Pueblo Pintado great house

19. Greenlee great house

20. Kin ya’a great house

21. Standing wall at Kin ya’a

22. Lithograph of stairway in cliff face

23. Bis sa’ani great house

24. South House at Bis sa’ani

25. El Faro great house

26. Kutz Canyon

27. Great house on Animas River

28. Salmon Ruin great house

29. Sandstone block tower at Manuelito Canyon

30. Two unidentified archaeologists

Puebloan Descendants

31. Hopi pueblo of Shimopovi

32. Close-up of chimney and doorway at Shipaulovi

33. Oraibi, Hopi village on Third Mesa

34. House and Hopi family

35. Firing pottery at Zia Pueblo

36. Traditional dancers at Acoma

37. Acoma plaza area

38. Acoma drummer

39. Taos Pueblo

40. Large storage jars at Pojoaque Pueblo

41. Kiva at San Felipe Pueblo

42. A dance at Isleta Pueblo

PREFACE

The first edition of this book was prepared in 1998 and 1999. The American nation—on the surface—seemed to be in pretty good shape. I chose to compare the rise and fall of the Southwest’s Chaco Anasazi with then-contemporary America because my students at the university responded to those comparisons in class. Digging deeper into the research, I discovered to my surprise another America underneath the one we portray in our national news and other public media. That America was more fragile, less equal, and far more shortsighted than I had imagined. Thus, I wrote it just as I discovered it—and compared it with the Chacoans a millennium ago. With publication came acclaim from some quarters and dismay from others, who balked at dissecting trends in modern America. Apparently they wanted to believe it was perfect as is. It wasn’t. It isn’t. Unlike the ancient Chacoans, we have the remarkable advantage of vastly more information about the fundamentals of energy, resources, production, and the rhythmic dynamics of large, complex societies. This book argues that we exploit that advantage, even if it discomfits us.

What I did not know then, and was not to fully realize until the groundbreaking macro-ecologist James Brown—a colleague at the University of New Mexico—pointed it out in one of his seminal papers, was that the total energy flow in America had started to flatline. As a nation we were fluxing (processing) about the same amount of energy—measured in Kcals and gigacals each year—and were no longer growing in energy flow. That profound fact led me to apprehend that particularly well-placed parts of this huge growth-oriented American system might have begun to react by clawing for a greater share of an increasingly static pie before most of the rest of us had figured it out. As we all know from national conversations in 2010 through 2013, the well-placed clawed for more and got more . . . even as the rest of America got poorer and did finally figure it out. Refrains about 1 percenters, 47 percenters, and the vanishing middle class; shrieks about Obamacare; and howls about the takers and so on all indicated that, yes, finally we got it.

The practical problem for America in 2013 is that the well-placed have grabbed so much that our structural problems have become even more like Chaco Canyon’s over the fifteen years since the first edition was written. Worse still, most American business elites simply do not know how to manage their banks, brokerages, and businesses as stable, homeostatic entities, so some create risky will-o-the-wisp temporary islands of growth, such as debt derivatives. When these fail, they move onto another scheme rather than deal with fundamentals. I hope that some policymakers pay attention to this reality. It has little to do with politics as most of us imagine. Rather, this inability to deal with homeostasis, or sameness, smacks of a crucial evolutionary failure. This defect has the potential to totally redefine America.

Like almost everyone, my worldview was shaped by my family and its experiences in America. My fourth maternal great-grandfather, John Hart, signed the Declaration of Independence. He, as founders go, wasn’t all that special. He was a New Jersey farmer, a hard worker, and, in contrast to the big slave-owning landholders like Jefferson and Washington, had no university education. Also unlike them, he died nearly broke in 1779, but had his four sons and three daughters and left many descendants—making him rather more successful in strict evolutionary terms than many of the more famous founders. His vision was a practical one. Like many men of his era, he dreamed of an America that works for the majority, where no aristocracy—financial, political, or genetic—gets in the way of that lovely dream. An updated version of that dream still motivates the vast majority of Americans.

But John Hart’s America, please remember, first belonged to Native peoples. He, his father, and his father’s father all actively colluded to take that America from its original inhabitants. We are the upstarts. As a nation, we too often forget that we are successors to earlier and rather impressive societies. Among them were the Four Corners Anasazi—the Navajo (Diné) name by which Americans first knew the former occupants of the region’s great prehistoric villages. The Diné were, and remain, successors to much of what were once the Chacoan domains. It is they who first referred to those ancients as Anasazi and passed that name on to us. In recent years, academics, nervous agency bureaucrats, and publishers have begun to use other labels as more correct. I sometimes do as well. This obscures two realities, however. First, scholars do not know the name by which the Chaco Anasazi referred to themselves, or even if there was one. Second, Anasazi is an Indian given name . . . not a perfect one, to be sure, and therefore likely to be replaced eventually. But it is a name that has been in use for well over five hundred years. Archaeologists didn’t make it up. And it is a name distinctive enough to serve for the moment as a reminder to non-Indian Americans that ancient peoples in the U.S. Southwest have been here for at least a hundred centuries and that other Indians knew the subjects of this book and their villages by that name long before the rest of us showed up.

The general theme of this book’s first edition began as a brief keynote address, The Rise and Fall of the Chaco Anasazi: Lessons Learned, made at the seventieth annual Pecos Conference, held at Chaco Canyon in August 1997. The theme was mistakes made in ancient times that we might prefer not to repeat as we neared the millennium. I described the failure of the Chacoans to change course and adapt in order to avert the collapse of the impressive regional society they had created in the tenth and eleventh centuries. Foremost among Chacoan problems were misuse of farmland, divergence of wealth leading to the desperate economic and nutritional status of small farmers, the loss of community, unsupportable costs of massive infrastructure, and an inability to deal with climatological catastrophe. The Chacoans had grown spectacularly in the 800s to the mid-1000s CE, but they lost their adaptive agility as their size and increasingly stubborn formulaic responses, forged in earlier—and less complicated—centuries, failed them. The parallels to modern America seemed obvious.

I also argued that the Puebloan societies that succeeded the Chacoans had adapted intelligently and strategically to minimize a recurrence of these problems. I ended the address with a simple query: As we approach the millennium in modern America, can’t we recognize our own problems and adapt as well as the Puebloans did, without first having to suffer the dramatic consequences of myopia in our own society? The audience was surprisingly receptive, so I began to emphasize that theme more incisively in my Ancient New Mexico classes taught at the University of New Mexico. This theme resonated among the undergraduates. The spring of 1998 class—full of talented, motivated students (to whom the first edition was dedicated) inspired me to write the first version of this book.

By contrast, this second edition includes much innovative undergraduate student research about caloric flows/usage in prehistoric times, and it focuses more on the evolutionary dynamics induced by those energy flows. It also focuses more on the consequences of an increasingly detached central Chacoan decision-making structure. The Chaco Anasazi and their descendants, the Southwest’s current Pueblo peoples, provide us with a rather wondrous object lesson for our own times.

In explaining the importance of research to university students, academicians often point out that their research and publications help them teach better undergraduate classes. It is rarely phrased the other way around. We simply do not expect our undergraduate classes to help us learn new things, conceive our research, contribute meaningfully to it, or directly motivate us to see the world differently. That is precisely what has happened in my undergraduate classes, however. For a number of semesters, class research has pursued a long-term project, called Finding the Calories, and the students have done a bang-up job of addressing questions for which I and my colleagues have no answers. For me, it is not work: after forty-one years of teaching it feels as if I am in college again. Any among you who is a teacher will understand that.

In other respects, this book is as unusual as the experience that wrought it. In the first place, several of its intellectual themes are distinctive—the products of my own broad training in anthropology. They began many years ago with the publication of Prehistoric New Mexico, a reference work I wrote with Rory P. Gauthier. I argued then (in 1979 and 1980) that evolution, both biological and cultural, is the process that continually and selectively separates metabolically more powerful from metabolically more efficient organisms or societies. The idea was that captured energy is the essence of life. Even men and women are metabolically different. Women metabolize more slowly and efficiently than men and are a bit smaller, but they live longer. Men metabolize more rapidly and are larger on average, but they die younger. In any large group of children born in a given year, the males and females, absent catastrophe, will each consume the same number of calories in basal metabolism over the natural life span of the cohort—but they will use those calories differently. Those differences have enormous evolutionary consequences.

Similarly, a powerful society (or organism) captures more energy and expends (metabolizes) it more rapidly than an efficient one. Such societies tend to be structurally more complex, more wasteful of energy, more competitive, and faster paced than efficient ones. Think of modern urban America as powerful, and you will get the picture. In contrast, an efficient society metabolizes its energy more slowly, and so is structurally less complex, less wasteful, less competitive, and slower paced. Think of Amish farmers in Pennsylvania or contemporary Pueblo farmers in the American Southwest.

In competitive terms, the powerful society has an enormous short-term advantage over the efficient one if enough energy is naturally available to feed it, or if its technology and trade can bring in energy rapidly enough to sustain it. But when energy (food, fuel, and resources) becomes scarce, or when trade and technology fail, an efficient society is advantageous because its simpler, less wasteful structure is much more easily sustained in times of scarcity. Because both power and efficiency offer enormous advantages under the right circumstances, most human societies are engaged in a constant and complex balancing act between the two. Being human, we want to have it both ways.

Having it both ways gives us the capacity to continually refashion society as either more powerful or more efficient and is the primary reason we humans have become ascendant over other species. In other words, human culture responds more rapidly to new circumstances than genetic change does, and hence culture is an inherently more powerful (but riskier) evolutionary mechanism. Our cultural ability to transform ourselves has allowed our species to change the metabolic signature of its societies at will and dodge many of the evolutionary bullets that have extinguished other species. The metabolic-energetic signature of animals is hardwired genetically. In a human society, the energetic signature is encoded in cultural software. We just rewrite the program as needed. The rewrite, though, like our perceptions of a given problem, is often imperfect. So failure, transformation, and survival are themes of this book.

In the second place, this book is not an archaeological text per se. Rather, I use archaeological data along with ethnographic data, historical records, and contemporary sources to chronicle the rise and fall of one remarkable Southwestern society (Chacoan) and its replacement by another (Puebloan), and to point out the parallels between those two societies and modern America.

The fundamental threads that tie Chacoan, Puebloan, Spanish, Mexican, and American societies together in the Southwest are time and place. Each succeeded the other in what is now New Mexico. Each has struggled, surprisingly, with similar issues surrounding farmland, water, climate, economy, and community. Among them, only industrial America has not yet struggled with the issue of cultural survival. I argue that this struggle will come if Americans are not both wiser and more adaptable in the future than they have been in the recent past.

It is my hope that this book will both inform readers and provide them with food for thought. The American Southwest is distinctive, colorful, and delightful. Most important of all, it offers a parable from the past that can inform our own present, if not our future. I predict that this parable will dismay some readers. History is not elegant. Failure is not glorious. Success is not permanent. Knowledge is not absolute. Survival is not a birthright. Instead, it turns out to be hard, gritty work.

For at least seventeen centuries, this gritty work of survival was done by the prehistoric farmers whom archaeologists have labeled Anasazi and by their Puebloan descendants, who excelled at it. The Anasazi do have lessons to offer America—hence the title of this book.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

First and foremost, I thank the many energetic students in my Ancient New Mexico courses for the most stimulating episodes of my teaching career. Outstanding among them are Susan Moczygemba-McKinsey and Jenny (Lund) Sherman. Writing books is a lonely business, so I am as indebted for their fellowship as for their important contributions. Other undergraduate students at UNM contributed directly to the material in this second edition of Anasazi America. They are Christine Du Bois, Jenn Fuller, Holland Sutton, Louis Wilcox, Mike Smith, Stella Kemper, Roy Huddleston, T. Bradley-Varner, Elliot Hubbard, and James Medina.

I am also pleased by the support I received from John Byram, director, and his team at the University of New Mexico Press. They are a cultural voice of the American Southwest, and their imprimatur on this book means a great deal to me.

Others also gave generously of themselves. G. B. Cornucopia of the National Park Service helped us answer a number of questions for both editions. Annotated illustrations were cheerfully and efficiently provided by Joyce Raab with assistance from Heidi Reed and Angela Rogers of the Chaco Archive, a remarkably valuable facility housed at UNM’s Zimmerman Library. Missing photographs from the first edition were replaced by Wendy Bustard. The maps were created by Dawn Davis and Carol Cooperrider of Albuquerque, and copyeditor Helen Glenn Court added much to the quality of the finished text. Patrick Ryoichi Nagatani graciously granted permission for the publisher to reprint his distinctive artwork on the cover of the new edition.

I am enormously grateful to Linda S. Cordell, who, right up to the week of her sudden passing, continued to update me on research conducted by scholars in her vast network of professional colleagues. I considered Cordell one of the best in the business, and was I blessed to have her as a close friend and colleague for forty-three years. I miss her deeply.

I am also grateful to evolutionary anthropologist Dr. Jeffery Long, and to Drs. Bruce and Lisa Huckell and W. H. Wills and Patricia Crown, whose lunchtime conversations—and field schools—have shaped the student research published in this edition. New research will change what we know about the prehistoric Southwest in a few years.

David E. Stuart

Limonata Café

PROLOGUE

Daniel’s Question

Many readers may suppose that archaeology is about mounting expeditions to exotic places, assembling fabulous museum exhibits of priceless antiquities, or reconstructing ancient societies. Archaeology does involve all of these at one time or another, but the fact is that people like to romanticize archaeology—and archaeologists. After all, the Indiana Jones movies are about a flamboyant and fictional archaeologist—not an accountant, an engineer, or an insurance actuary. Those professions are important and necessary, but they just don’t stir the public’s imagination as things archaeological do.

The pure emotional aura of ancient civilizations and abandoned cities inflames the human imagination. Nearly every archaeologist understands this. It is, after all, what drew most of us to an unusual profession in the first place. But archaeologists are not the only ones fascinated with antiquity. Every tribal society that continues to survive at the edges of the modern world has its oral history about how the world was created and how the ancient ones behaved. Australian Aborigines have their dreamtime. Herodotus later had his history of cities and civilizations far more ancient than his own classical Greece. And, as every student of history knows, the later Romans aped both Greece and ancient Egypt. Even we modern Judeo-Christians have our Genesis story.

Here in the contemporary American Southwest, many Indian men—Pueblo, Navajo, and Apache—still own medicine bundles that often contain ancient objects such as lance points made thousands of years ago by hunters and gatherers who once roamed these parts. These bundles have power, partly because they connect the owner to the past. Is it a deep human hunger for connection to the past that generates near-universal fascination with archaeology? Yes, partly. But it is also something more. Much more.

Daniel, a Pueblo Indian potter and a student in my Ancient New Mexico class at the University of New Mexico, captured it all in a recent conversation. Professor, he said, I need to talk to you about the Folsom points we studied last semester. He was referring to a type of exquisitely made spear point common between 9000 and 8500 BCE. He continued, They baffle me. I cannot understand them. I have made copies of all the rest that we studied and I understand these. But the Folsom is different—trying to make one, I have driven flakes of obsidian into my fingers until the tips were hard and bloody. But I cannot do it. I think it is a spiritual thing—some spiritual thing that I do not command. I need to understand this part of my past in order to become both the artist and the historian of my people that I wish to be.

I couldn’t solve Daniel’s immediate problem, having neither the technical skill nor, perhaps, the spirituality to make a magnificent fluted Folsom point. His quest, though, captures the very essence of our collective human fascination with archaeology. It is all about who we were, who we are, and who we hope to be.

This sense of our connectedness to the entire flow of the human saga is deeply intoxicating. Archaeology is about much more than antiquities on a museum shelf. It is about the hypnotic rhythms of civilization—the rise and fall of humankind’s cultural breast, from which issues the collective breath of human triumph and folly, of greatness and ruin, of kindness and cruelty. It is about both past and present, about power and decline.

Daniel’s quest is more focused and urgent than most of ours. As a descendant of the ancient farmers of the Four Corners popularly called the Anasazi, he needs to learn his people’s story. The precious legacy of their survival is his inheritance. Bequeathed to him at great human cost, the structured knowledge of his Anasazi Puebloan ancestors and the collective arts of survival they acquired over the course of seventeen centuries allowed his people to win the greatest of all human battles—evolution. Puebloan survival itself is absolute proof of this Homeric victory.

Daniel’s task will be even more complex than that of his ancestors. He must first understand and recapitulate their lessons if his own world is to last for another millennium. At the same time, he must adapt to the modern world that now surrounds his. Like all powerful societies, it unthinkingly threatens to swallow up all that is traditional. These lessons are essential to the rest of us, too. Through them, modern industrial and information-based societies may also find the means to survive another millennium. This, then, is why we do archaeology. Archaeologists are detectives in the game of evolution and keepers of the tally in the human saga of survival. Archaeology is about people and almost always about the present as well as the past, though we often fail to make that obvious.

Because Daniel’s question prompted me, his thoroughly American professor, to write this book as an answer, I have written it as if addressed to him. It is his people’s story. I have not told it the way his elders would tell it, and it won’t help him make a perfect Folsom point. I tell it as a fundamental part of the grand rhythm of human civilization, with the fervent hope that its telling will speed Daniel on his quest, his spirit strengthened by the wisdom of the Anasazi, so that he and his society flow ever forward on the winds of time.

CHAPTER ONE

The Rhythms of Civilization

This book reconstructs the rise and fall of the Chaco Anasazi of New Mexico. It is about how ancient farmers in the American Southwest gathered the knowledge and power to create the grandest regional social and political system in prehistoric North America during the tenth and eleventh centuries CE, only to lose nearly all that they had created in the twelfth.

At their height in the late eleventh century, the Chaco Anasazi dominated forty thousand to fifty thousand square miles of the scrubby, semiarid Four Corners region.¹ This was an area nearly the size of Scotland—and considerably larger than any one European principality of the time. A vast and powerful alliance consisted of twenty thousand to thirty thousand farming hamlets and more than 150 spectacular district towns, called great houses by archaeologists, that integrated the surrounding farmsteads through economic and religious ties.

Hundreds of miles of formal roadways interconnected the whole system.² Chaco Canyon, now a national park and, like the great pyramids at Giza, a World Heritage Site, was both the heart and soul of this domain. It took these Anasazi farmers more than seven centuries to lay the agricultural, organizational, and technological groundwork for the creation of the classic Chacoan period, which lasted about two hundred years—only to collapse spectacularly in a mere forty.³ Why did such a great society collapse? Who survived? Why? How did the survivors behave? What has that to do with modern Pueblo descendants of the Anasazi? What has it to do with the rest of us?

When Chacoan society collapsed, different clans and families experienced different fates—each according to their wealth, their station, and the knowledge they possessed. Some stayed on in the great houses while others moved away, abandoning their farmsteads. Among each, some perished. In complex eleventh-century Chacoan society, there were many differences among people, and those critical differences were grist for the mill of evolution during the collapse. Some were ground down and perished. Others, though not left whole, survived.

Those who perished became the past. Those who survived left more descendants and became the present. If we can understand both, we will have retrieved a saga worthy of the telling. We will also know much about how the Anasazi once created a great but fragile society, and how catastrophe forced them to dramatically transform it into a far more modest but sustainable one. That transformation allowed them to survive and has brought their descendants face-to-face with our modern version of a powerful society.

Because non-Indian Americans dominate the social landscape that surrounds current Puebloan society in New Mexico, both of our presents have become intertwined. In some ways, Pueblo people and the rest of us are quite alike—we hope, dream, work, joke, make families, believe in a higher order, and expect to pass our societies on to our children and our children’s children.

In other ways, though we live near one another, work in many of the same places, and often share communities, our differences are great. Just what are these differences? Are they destined to be more grist for the mill of evolution should another catastrophe befall us in our own time? Who would perish and become the past of an evolving saga? Who would survive and become the future—a new present? Now that much of the world, both traditional and industrial, is so deeply intertwined, Pueblo people are not the only ones who need to know the fundamentals of survival. We all do. In today’s world, an economic disturbance in one nation can within days cascade into direct financial consequences for others half a world away. A famine in one country can trigger a war in another. A plague in one faraway place can become a pandemic in weeks. One small person with a very big bomb could end the entire human saga in mere hours. What have the Chaco Anasazi got to do with all this? Perhaps nothing. They are not responsible for us; they could not even have imagined us. Yet in another sense, their survival as Pueblo people means everything—for if we do the necessary detective work and listen carefully to their past, we can retrieve an important message for all surviving traditional societies, for the rest of us, and for all of twenty-first-century society.

What is currently called the Four Corners region of the American Southwest was homeland to the ancient American Indian farmers popularly called Anasazi. Actually, Anasazi is a Navajo name that is usually, and romantically, translated as the ancient ones. A better translation would be ancestors of our enemies,⁴ a frank description of the social relationships that once prevailed between local Navajo bands and the village-dwelling farmers of the late prehistoric Southwest. I use Anasazi in this book simply because library catalogues and Internet databases the world over still use it. Pueblo Indians do not; they prefer, in English, the ancient ones, or our ancestors. In practice, most publications currently use ancestral Puebloan.

Long known to the Navajo, the Anasazi first attracted the attention of a young, expanding American nation in 1849. That year, an American military expedition accompanied by Lieutenant J. H. Simpson filed into the broad, jagged canyon of the dried-out Chaco River and, under a blazing August sun, beheld a number of magnificent, abandoned sandstone citadels in partial ruin.⁵ Though these empty villages had long been known to the New Mexican and Indian guides accompanying the expedition, they were new to Simpson and fascinated him. He began to romanticize them immediately, choosing Pueblo Pintado (Painted House), the more lyrical Spanish name, over the more prosaic Jemez name, Pueblo of the Rats, to identify the first-met, easternmost of these intricately constructed communal settlements.⁶

Simpson speculated that these large ruins evidenced an earlier and higher civilization than that which existed among Indian nations in his own day.⁷ This is pertinent to the theme of this book on several counts.

First, it downgraded the status of then-contemporary Southwest Indian societies, denying them equal cultural footing with white Americans while romanticizing these impressive ruins whose vanished inhabitants seemed to Simpson more like members of his own civilized society.

Second, this line of reasoning may have unconsciously assuaged some guilt and ambivalence over the potential fate of contemporary Indians as America expanded westward. Simpson was, after all, part of a military reconnaissance sent to contain Navajo raiding on Hispanic and Indian settlements along the Rio Grande.⁸ He arrived in the Four Corners less than a year after the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was forced on Mexico, ceding all these lands to the United States.⁹ The growing nation was keen to assert its rights, survey its spoils of war, and eliminate threats to its emerging power. In the ensuing twenty-five years, it often viewed contemporary Indian peoples as a threat, and nearly as often eliminated them.¹⁰

Third, Simpson, the soldier, civil engineer, and native of New Jersey, quintessentially American, knew power when he saw it—and he clearly saw its vestiges in these immense ruins (see map above).

Before leaving Chaco Canyon that day, Simpson, along with others, carved his name into one of the inner walls of the great house now called Pueblo Bonito (pretty house).¹¹ He was, in a sense, marking his territory—staking a claim that the Chaco Anasazi were somehow kindred to an expanding American identity.

It is no accident that the most powerful epoch in all of Anasazi prehistory created the great houses that made such an impression on Simpson and succeeding generations of Americans, scholars and tourists alike. Simpson probably did not realize how rapidly the great houses had been built and then abandoned. Powerful societies do often rapidly create vast amounts of infrastructure and remarkable quantities