By Jim Hohenbary

An Imagined Scenario

You just took a job in the Southwest.  A few months after settling into your new neighborhood, the guy across the street asks you: “Have you seen the mystery village yet?”  He proceeds to tell you about an abandoned village a few miles outside of town.  He tells you that it is hundreds of years old and that nobody knows who lived there or why they left.  “It seems like they just vanished,” he says cheerfully as he sifts through his mail. “You should check it out!”

On a quiet weekend, you decide to see for yourself.  You find that, although much of the village has fallen down, there are still towers, mazes of rooms, and feats of architectural engineering.  And true enough, whoever lived there seems to have left many of their material possessions behind.  Beautiful plates and bowls remain.  Shoes even.  You almost expect to find a piece of half-eaten toast still sitting on one of the tables.   And just hiking to the village, covering rocky terrain in the Southwestern heat, is an accomplishment.  You wonder, sweat staining your shirt, what kind of athletes could even come and go from this place on a daily basis.

You talk about your excursion when you return to work on Monday.  One of your associates mentions that the local indigenous tribe disavows that village.  They say it is not their handiwork.  Another associate mentions that there are actually hundreds of these villages all over the region.  All similarly abandoned.

Would you, then, speculate about what might have happened there?  Would you return to look for clues on your next free weekend?  Would you, images clicking through your brain, lie awake at night reflecting on that village, wondering what might cause the residents of an entire community to just abandon their homes?

Perched beneath the Shelter of a Cliff near You

The scenario imagined above is not all that different from the experience of settlers and explorers to the American Southwest as they began to discover the ruins of the cliff dwellers that had once lived in the Four Corners region, which roughly encompasses southern Utah and Colorado and northern Arizona and New Mexico.

Richard Wetherill, a rancher from Mancos, Colorado, who “discovered” Cliff Palace, the largest cliff dwelling in North America, in 1888, is credited with helping to popularize the use of the term Anasazi to describe its original owners.  The term comes from the Navajo language.  Some translations of the word have seemed suggestive of legend and slightly sinister: “ancient enemies” or “enemy ancestors.”  Other translations seem much more benign: “the old ones who are not us.”  Whatever the exact meaning, the name stuck to a large degree, especially in popular imagination.  Most archaeologists now refer to the ruins as Puebloan, which acknowledges their cultural connections with and claims of ancestry by modern tribes such as the Hopi, Zuni, and Acoma; but the cliff dwellers would not have answered to either Anasazi or Puebloan.  Their true names remain unknown.

Due to the scale of some of the ruins, as well as the sheer number of structures, it is hard to imagine the cliff dwellings as anything less than the remains of a once-vibrant desert kingdom.  This endows them with an aura of mystery, one that is only strengthened by the fact that many of the sites, perhaps because they are more intact than fragmentary, leave an impression of hasty abandonment.

Hauntingly Familiar

But has the absence of the cliff dwellers remained entirely mysterious?  Some aspects of their culture and history may never be fully known, but clever detective work has revealed many details.  For example, dendrochronology, the science of using tree rings for dating construction and for tracking climate change, has revealed that the region was afflicted with a protracted and severe drought.  It has also allowed archaeologists to date precisely when all construction stopped at certain sites.  Tree rings are the fingerprints that helped establish that there is no evidence of human habitation after 1300 AD at Mesa Verde, one of the best-known Puebloan sites.

In fact, the explanation that has slowly emerged regarding why the cliff dwellers abandoned their homes has an unnerving familiarity to it.  The best guess of the archaeological community, while always subject to revision, seems to run something like this:

Climate change and population growth pushed the resources and agricultural productivity of the area to its limits.  These pressures then put a strain on social order and cohesion.  Scarcity and strife almost surely followed.  Multiply these factors over many tribes/clans/factions, and the conditions were ripe for conflict and societal collapse.

Was there war among the cliff dwellers?  Did they live in fear of migrant groups and/or raiders who pushed into the territory, strangers on the move due to similar problems in their own home territories?  The evidence for significant warfare seems to be mixed, and of course, the kind of tragedy that befell one place in the region might have been successfully avoided in another.  However, the site selection for many cliff dwellings and the commonality of defensive design elements, such as easily defended chokepoints, suggests that violence may have been a constant source of anxiety in some parts of the Four Corners region.

At the end of day, unrelenting environmental pressures, and the potential for conflict and societal breakdown that comes with those pressures, probably wore down the cliff dwellers.  And finally, continued habitation simply became untenable.  The cliff dwellers did not actually vanish, but rather like any proud people, they refused to live indefinitely in a situation that would not allow them to flourish.  They simply left.  Most likely, they migrated to the south, towards water and the potential for better agricultural productivity, towards other groups with whom they had probably engaged in trade, with whom they shared more cultural similarities than differences.

It remains true that we will never know the full story of these abandoned ruins.  And the thought of an unsolved ancient mystery definitely fires the imagination.  However, the fact is that we do have a pretty good guess at the broad strokes.  We know that environmental stressors can fracture a society and spark conflict.  We know that these issues can cause entire communities to abandon their home territories.  We know enough to be concerned, a fact that should keep us awake more often, reflecting on the cliff dwellers in the night, images from our own times clicking through our brains.

 

[Ruminations such as these were the inspiration for Jim Hohenbary’s debut novel Before the Ruins]