Ancient Ones

I met Palmer at Occidental in the 1960s before he became a gastroenterologist, before he was banned from practicing medicine in three states, and before his uncivilized behavior was eventually diagnosed as bipolar.  Palmer came to college from New Mexico where he had grown up in Deming, a town whose population was then around 5,000.  Palmer was always going on about “the land of enchantment” and while his enthusiasm for New Mexico was well deserved it may also have been an effort to compensate for his home town. 

Deming is best known for two events – the annual duck races, and a run in that sixty-three-year-old David Eckert had with the local police that made legal history.  Two Deming police officers pulled Eckert over for a routine traffic stop and claimed that he appeared to have “clenched buttocks.”  Suspecting that Eckert was hiding either drugs, weapons or a secret decoder ring; the officers managed to obtain a search warrant from a local judge based solely on this observation.  Eckert was subjected to x-rays and eight cavity searches including a colonoscopy.  No contraband was found and the clinic where the procedures were performed billed Eckert for $6,000.  Shortly thereafter, the County of Hidalgo and the City of Deming settled out of court with Eckert for 1.6 million dollars.  

Dr. Palmer returned to New Mexico in the early 1980s to work at The University of New Mexico’s teaching hospital in Albuquerque.  Every few years I would drop by his place for a weekend and he would launch into his bureau-of-tourism persona.  Palmer never entertained visitors with theme parks, restaurants or city skylines; rather he shared with you what had always captivated him – how the areas’ ancient cultures had integrated with the visual phenomena of landscape and sky.

Photo from astropics.com

I brought my sons Michael and Marc with me one weekend and we rode with Palmer out to the Chaco Culture National Historical Park that contains over 2,400 archaeological sites.  It’s a three-hour drive from Albuquerque on two-lane county roads through southwestern panoramas to a remote canyon where sits the greatest ancient ruins north of Mexico.  Archaeological finds indicate the area was inhabited as far back as 10,000 BC.  Visible today are fifteen separate crescent-shaped complexes constructed between 850 and 1150 AD.  The sites are placed along a nine-mile stretch of the canyon which marks the center of a system of thirty-foot-wide roads that extend out seventy miles.

The complexes were built by the Anasazi “ancient ones” who were ancestors of today’s Pueblo Indians.  Decades, but more probably centuries of observation, led the Anasazi to configure and erect the sites in relationship to solar and lunar cycles.  The structures were the largest standing in North America until the 1800s. 

Pueblo Bonito is the largest of the fifteen sites and covers two acres, contains over 650 rooms and features three-foot thick walls with some sections reaching over five stories (see below).

Photo from reddit.com

 Below is an artist’s rendering of Pueblo Bonito as it appeared when completed around 1150 AD.

Photo from tour-tales.com

The walls are formed by two bearing walls set three feet apart, each built with large flat sandstones and clay mortar.  The space between the two walls is filled with rubble.  The exterior of the walls is a veneer of small sandstones that have been pressed into the mortar.  One source calculates that the timbers needed for the fifteen sites would have meant hauling 200,000 trees from a mountain range over fifty miles away.

Photo from summitpost.org

The park is open to visitors from sunrise to sunset but we never saw another soul in the five hours we spent exploring the canyon.  We were free to walk through the entire Pueblo Bonito which is well preserved due to the arid climate and lack of rain.  The Fajada Butte (shown below) was one area that had been declared off limits for erosion concerns due to tourists.

Photo by Greg Russell

The Fajada Butte gives additional evidence of archaeoastronomy at Chaco.  A trio of large rock slabs placed against the face of the butte create narrow slits through which a sliver of light from the sun is directed onto two spirals carved into the rock face. 

Photo from Colorado.edu

This is the same use of sunlight and symbol as found in the cave paintings at Burro Flats in the hills above Simi Valley, yet more refined.  The light and shadows that appear on the spirals at Fajada Butte coincide with the winter and summer solstices and the 18.6 lunar excursion cycle where the edges of the cast light and shadow serve as a gauge reaching each successive ring, year by year. 

A possible source for the use of a symbol with concentric circles or a spiral might be found in the night sky (see below).  If the Anasazi were able to note subtle movements of the sun and moon over a few decades, despite the lack of time-lapse photography, could they not also have observed the movement of the heavens during a single evening?

Photo from seedinstituteNM.org

Throughout the day we spent at Chaco Canyon it seemed as though the structures, the land and the sky were bound together.  Although more than ten centuries ago, how could anyone who lived there have ever wanted for anything?  Prior to an extended draught during the twelfth century that forced the Anasazi to disperse, there appears to be no possible reason for any of the residents to ever consider being anywhere else but Chaco Canyon. 

Here was a people that by all appearances had found a place where they could form a culture based on a rational blend of science and spirituality.  The very walls they lived within were carefully aligned with the cosmos and their structures contributed to the overwhelming visual spectacle of the natural world that surrounded them.  When every aspect of your existence is in direct relationship to the known universe, does Maslow’s hierarchy of needs apply?  After all, self-actualization was only a peyote button away.  Walking through Pueblo Bonita I couldn’t help but think that Maslow’s thoughts may have been overly influenced by “modern” civilization and a Judeo-Christian work ethic. 

Dr. Palmer was in a manic state the entire day, far removed from any thoughts of Deming.