September 4: Down in the Valley

We left the Mesa Top for the Montezuma Valley, sometimes called the Great Sage Plain.  I mentioned earlier that the real population center of the Anasazi from 1100-1300 was in the valley below Mesa Verde, not way up on top.  This is a computer-generated map of population density in the valley.

There were perhaps as many as 35,000-45,000 people there in 1200.  They grew corn in the shadow of "Sleeping Ute Mountain."

Shaped like a sleeping warrior god, the mountain will come to life sometime in the future to vindicate his people.  (He is on his side.  Notice his elbows and knees.

This is a toe

--and probably a sacred landscape marker to boot.)

We wanted to explore some of the canyon sites that lay buried in ruins and are part of the Canyons of the Ancients National Monument.

First, we visited Yellow Jacket.  (You remember the post office and signs?)  At this juncture of two canyons

the ancestral Puebloans build a huge village for more than 2,500 people, so they say.  Crow Canyon Archaeological Center has done a great job in locating structures and assessing the village layout.  You can go on-line and get a computer-generated reconstruction of the village, its Great Kiva, its reservoir, its towers, its roads, etc.  We had to be content with finding it (it is not on any map--on purpose) because it is on private property.  Using binoculars, however, we could see some ruins.

Driving down some passable gravel roads, we also visited the nearby Sand Canyon Pueblo.

Well, we visited the ruins.  Most of it is buried but a path takes visitors along both sides of the canyon where the pueblo once stood.

It was an enormous place,

of great interest to archaeologists.  Hard to believe that this was a great kiva,

but it was once a spectacular building on the western side of the canyon head.

We would show you more pictures, but they pretty much all look like rock and ruin.

Twenty miles to the south of Yellow Jacket, we followed road "G" down the McElmo Canyon system.

Our destination was Castle Rock Pueblo

at the mouth of Sand Canyon.  This was a site recreated for the 1893 Columbian Exposition (the "White City") in Chicago by the Wetherills, who "discovered" Cliff Palace.  (OK, Chicagoans have bad timing.)

The BLM does allow public access to this site and it has recently been thoroughly investigated by archaeologists.  Its history is an interesting one.

We parked the Jeep on slickrock

--the only spot made available by the government and walked all around the site and up the canyon.  This was a medium-sized pueblo founded around 1200 by immigrants who were probably Anasazi refugees from SE Utah, maybe Blanding or Cedar Mesa or Bluff.  They built their dwellings right up against the rock, presumably for defensive purposes.

The Sleeping Ute Mountain may well have been a sacred site on the landscape, since the pueblo seems aligned toward it.

In any case, around 1250 the people were hacked to pieces.  Archaeologists found body parts all over the place.  There were no corpses intact.  Then the place was burned down.  

Who were the perpetrators?  Up canyon was that large pueblo village, Sand Canyon Pueblo.  Suspects?  What is certain is that violence was rife in the 1200s.  Many of the cliff dwellings on Mesa Verde, like Long House, showed signs of violence and mutilation.  Sand Canyon Pueblo itself suffered a massacred two decades later.

Economic stress and ethnic anxiety has that effect on societies.

In particular, I knew from my research that there were two obscure petroglyphs somewhere at Castle Rock Pueblo.  Janet and I hunted for a very long time, trying to match up a photograph with the rock and setting.  No luck; until I went back to my archaeological source and found a clue.  Behind the large boulder was an odd serpentine marker,

that the Hopi people interpret as a clan symbol.

Above the serpent, and impossible to see without binoculars, were the three figures I was looking for.  Two of them appear to be warriors standing back to back, with drawn bows.

A third figure seems to be falling.  

There is a story here.  Are these the victors letting the world know their prowess, or are these two young men trying to ward off the invaders long enough for some of their relatives to escape?  John Wayne at the Alamo?  You decide.