River of Lost Souls. Jonathan P. Thompson

from Tuba City to Hopi’s Second Mesa. There, I sat down with Leigh Kuwanwisiwma in the living room of his small home.

      Kuwanwisiwma has been the Hopi tribe’s cultural preservation officer for nearly three decades. When an oil company wants to drill public lands that overlap Pueblo ancestral lands, Kuwanwisiwma is called in during the “consultation” process. He fought to get Hopi ritual objects back from a Paris auction house. And he continues to search for leads on the theft, years ago, of a crucial ceremonial altar—he thinks maybe it’s serving as a headboard for some Aspen millionaire’s bed.

      We talked about growing corn and about his tribe’s connections to the lands farther north. He let me taste salt he had gathered from deposits down near where the turquoise-hued waters of the Little Colorado merge with the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon, and also gave me a sample of chili pepper he had grown on a dryland field nearby.

      He told me that when his ancestors emerged from the Third World into the Fourth World, the holy people instructed them to “place their footprints” across the region’s landscape. Each clan was sent on its own multi-generational migratory path—the Parrot, Badger, and Greasewood clans settled at Mesa Verde, he said, and the Rattlesnake, Fire, and Coyote clans at Kawestima in Tsegi Canyon. All paths ultimately converged on the northern Arizona mesas, reaching like fingers off of Black Mesa, where the clans reside today. The other pueblos have similar migration narratives, with common themes of movement, rest, and renewal.⁶ After emerging from the “Sandy Place Lake,” in the mountains north of their current homeland, the Tewa people were directed to take twelve “steps” in each direction, live in each place until it is time to move on, and finally settle for good along the Rio Grande in New Mexico, writes Alfonso Ortiz, a renowned anthropologist from Ohkay Owingeh (San Juan Pueblo).⁷

      A footprint was placed in the Durango area in Basketmaker times, then another beginning right around the turn of the eighth century, during the early part of the Pueblo I period. Humanity trickled in at first, a few families making their way to Ridges Basin or, about a mile away, Blue Mesa. Word that this was a desirable place must have gotten out, because right around 750 AD, the migratory trickle turned into a human flash flood, and by the turn of the ninth century 200 people lived in Ridges Basin and another 250 at Blue Mesa. Considered on their own, each complex would have been the largest community of its time in the Four Corners region; taken together they blew every other Pueblo I settlement away.⁸

      THE SMELL OF CIGARETTE SMOKE, OF THE PAGES OF OLD BOOKS, OF SAGE. They mingle together in my memories of my father, of his tiny home in Cortez, Colorado, of the beaten-down old cars he drove. He was a writer, a journalist, an intellectual jack of all trades. But for the last couple decades of his life—he died in 1998—his focus was on archaeology, on the Pueblo culture, past and present.

      My father was particularly interested in something called AWUF, or architecture with unknown function, such as big earthen berms that arced around prehistoric structures or alignments of huge boulders with no apparent utility. The most famous AWUF of the Southwest are the Chacoan “roads,” which are not roads nor are they exclusively connected to the pueblos at Chaco Culture National Historical Park in northern New Mexico. The Great North Road stretches at least thirty-five miles directly north from the rim of Chaco Canyon out across the plateau toward the San Juan River. This was no ordinary foot path, beaten into the earth by repeated use. It was deliberately constructed to a degree that segments are still clearly visible more than one thousand years later. Rather than ebbing and flowing with the contours of the land, or veering around canyons and buttes, as a path would, it never deviates from a nearly straight, northward course. No one knows its purpose.

      When I was in my late teens and early twenties I’d accompany my father on his journeys. We’d get up early, drink some instant coffee, and drive west from Cortez on some washboarded road that rattled dashboard screws free and caused dust to rise like smoke from the car’s floorboards. We ambled through sage, piñon, and juniper to the site, typically a structure from the Pueblo III period, which usually revealed itself as no more than a pile of hewn stones covered with lichen. In the heat of summer, cicadas screeched in the trees. In the winter, the silence was overlain by the distant hum of infrastructure sucking carbon dioxide from the McElmo Dome. As jays and magpies eyed us curiously we’d walk in circles or a rough grid-like pattern until we found the AWUF. It’s subtle but, to the practiced eye, unmistakable.

      For most of my life I’ve been surrounded by archaeology and archaeologists—my brother’s one, my stepfather was an archaeologist working around the West for the federal government for decades, and my mom wanted to study archaeology in college but was shot down because she was a woman. As a young man, though, the field left me cold (an ailment of which I’ve since been cured). I couldn’t see how excavating the tangible remains of material culture could ever get at the juiciness of what life was really like—what people felt, thought, how they interacted, and what philosophical or religious forces motivated them. Nor could it answer the question that always gnawed at me: Why here? Why did they choose this place, despite the hardships, to build a civilization? Sure, there were concrete, practical reasons: Ridges Basin is a gentle valley with a southward-slanting slope on one side, a stream, and even a marsh, where tasty waterfowl often alighted. But bigger factors must have been in play. Just consider Chaco’s elaborate pueblos, which rose up in a landscape so austere that the early builders had to drag unwieldy ponderosa pine trees from the Zuni Mountains and Chuska Mountains, each fifty miles distant, for architectural uses, and may have even imported corn. It was a pragmatist’s nightmare on par with modern-day Las Vegas.

      “Here, the human landscape is meaningless outside the natural context—human constructions are not considered out of their relationship to the hills, valleys, and mountains,” Rina Swentzell, a Santa Clara Pueblo scholar and an architect, wrote with my father and two archaeologists, Mark Varien and Susan Kenzle, in a 1997 paper. “Puebloan constructions are significant parts of a highly symbolic world. Even today, that defined ‘world’ is bounded by the far mountains and includes the hills, valleys, lakes, and springs.” That suggests that places like Chaco, and Ridges Basin, became communities or political centers not only due to tangible factors, but also because of where they fit into the symbolic world. Perhaps the “roads” and other AWUF were bridges of sorts, linking the built architecture with the symbolic world, a sort of architectural map of the Pueblo cosmos.

      The Great North Road, for instance, points toward 14,252-foot Mt. Wilson, the highest peak in this part of the San Juan Mountains. If one were to follow the road’s trajectory—or what archaeologist Stephen Lekson calls the Chaco Meridian—toward Mt. Wilson, she would first pass through the Aztec Great House on the banks of the Animas River and then, right where the meridian transects the Hogback Monocline, Ridges Basin.⁹ The monocline is not only dramatic looking, but its coal outcrop has been known to ooze methane, spontaneously combust, and even “erupt,” particularly where waterways slice through the monocline. Surely the ancients witnessed these phenomena. We can only guess as to whether it influenced their decision to settle nearby, or the tragedy that followed.

      ON A LATE SUMMER’S DAY IN 800 AD, the Ridges Basin community probably would have looked something like this: The monsoon and its late afternoon downpours have greened up the grass, punctuating it with chaotic wild sunflowers. People mill about their hamlets tending to penned-up turkeys, grinding corn, making pottery. On the outer edges of the community, emerald shocks of corn sway with the breeze alongside beans and squash, planted in alluvial fans.

      There is a small stream but there are no dams, no diversion structures, no irrigation ditches leading to the fields. These were dryland farmers. Across the ancient Pueblo world, with the possible exception of the Tewa Basin along the Rio Grande, acres and acres of corn and beans and squash grew without any liquid nourishment aside from rainfall; the same is true at Hopi today.¹⁰

      This practice can befuddle the modern Westerner. Euro-American settlers in the West are defined by the propensity to move water from stream to field. It wasn’t that the Pueblos lacked the technological know-how to divert streams onto their fields; they did capture, store, and divert rainwater and arroyos, after all. They appear to have chosen to put themselves at the mercy of the rains rather than try to wrest control over temperamental waters