House of Rain: Tracking a Vanished Civilization Across the American Southwest by Childs Craig

Author:Childs, Craig [Childs, Craig]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: History, Travel, Science
ISBN: 9780759518575
Amazon: 0759518572
Goodreads: 10142714
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2007-01-01T08:00:00+00:00

Colin and I spent most of the day at this cliff dwelling, hardly speaking to each other, just moving from ruin to ruin—some hardly ruins at all. I eventually made my way to a set of three kivas built at the edge of a precipice. They were sunken next to each other, each broken open, with their fine southward facings gone and their roofs fallen into the canyon below. I stepped down into the first kiva, its deflector still in place like a gravestone and one of its ceiling posts still standing. I walked to this upright timber and ran a hand down its gray and ancient surface, kneeling as I felt all the way to its base. There my fingers stopped at a change in the wood’s texture. I felt a space the size of a quarter on the post’s backside, a plug of cork used to cover a hole, a message someone had left.

To determine dates of construction for various sites, an archaeologist walked through this area in the 1970s gathering viable wood samples. Tree rings from extracted cores were read like bar codes, revealing the exact date that a tree was felled for construction. I felt the plug’s smoothness, how it was hammered in and then carefully sanded flush so it would not be obvious. I knew who put it here. Jeff Dean, head of the Tree-Ring Lab in Tucson. Now I knew where I was. This canyon previously unnamed in my mind was Waterlily Canyon. The cliff dwelling had been called Pine-Tree House by an archaeologist who had come through in 1910. To the Navajo it is Dogoszhi Biko, a remote canyon of ancient death. Few Navajo come to these places. They are too full of ghosts—someone else’s ghosts. The Navajo have closed these canyons off, as if boarding up rooms in a house where terrible things once happened, where human skeletons slowly erode out of steep graves. Dogoszhi Biko is hardly a place to be visited.

Jeff Dean had inserted this plug while roaming these canyons, taking copious notes pertaining to cliff dwellings, and drilling cores out of choice pieces of wood. He took cores back to his lab in Tucson, where he put together the most detailed prehistoric time line ever deciphered in the Southwest. Among Kayenta cliff dwellings he found two decades of steady growth through the 1260s and 1270s, followed by a final flurry of small-scale construction. The flurry ended suddenly and by 1290 it was over, the last pieces of wood cut.

Overseeing a collection of sixty thousand Southwest wood specimens that show in their tree rings not only dates but also climate fluctuations, Dean is the quintessential time and weather keeper for the Anasazi. When I spoke with him about the abandonment of Kayenta sites, he told me that climate and social factors had been delicately balanced against each other, as was always true for the Anasazi. But there was no resisting the Great Drought of the thirteenth century. After it hit, there remained enough water to keep some meager population alive.

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