Mesa Verde Victim. Scott Graham

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ

      “You’ve been learning about how the canyons here were home to thousands of people a long time ago, right? Just think what it was like back then—smoke rising from cooking fires deep in the canyons, farmers tending their crops, teams of workers building earthen dams and digging irrigation ditches to capture the little water that fell from the skies. There would have been potters firing clay urns in red-hot coals, flint knappers chipping away at chunks of obsidian, jewelry makers stringing necklaces with turquoise beads they’d traded for all the way from the Sonoran Desert.”

      “Ms. Jarvis says this place was a totally happening scene,” Rosie concurred.

      “Your teacher, right?”

      “Yep. She says it was like a big city, except spread out in all the canyons.”

      “Until just like that—” Chuck snapped his fingers “—it wasn’t. No more smoke from cooking fires. No more farming or building houses or making jewelry. The Ancestral Puebloans abandoned everything they’d built here, everything they’d created. Imagine how heartbreaking that must have been for them. How devastating.”

      Rosie stuck out her jaw. “It would have been really sad.”

      “I agree. That’s what hit me the first time I came here as a kid. Mesa Verde seemed like it would have been such a cool place to live. When I learned that the people had left everything behind, and that they had just taken off, I couldn’t believe it. Why would they leave such a beautiful place? It made no sense to me. I had to find out. As an archaeologist, that’s the kind of question I’ve been trying to answer ever since.”

      “Ms. Jarvis says they left because it stopped raining.”

      “That’s part of it, for sure. Probably the biggest part. The drought stressed the Ancestral Puebloans and other peoples living in the area, which led to fighting between them.”

      “Wars, you mean?”

      “Not big wars. But smaller fights, yes. The archaeological record is fairly clear on that—the towers built by Ancestral Puebloans at high points along the canyon rims to keep a lookout for raiders, plus the defensive positioning of their villages, deep in the canyons, protected by cliff walls on three sides and stone roofs above. In a way, the Ancestral Puebloans probably became victims of their own success. They got really good at homebuilding and farming, which would have made them targets because of how successful they were. They were sedentary. That is, they lived in one place, here on the mesa. That means nomads—people who moved from place to place all the time—could attack them and try to take everything they’d worked so hard for.”

      Rosie turned to Chuck in her seat as they followed the main park road down the sloped mesa top.

      “At the beginning of the drought,” Chuck continued, “the Ancestral Puebloans would have been able to fight off the marauders. But the drought went on for years. The Ancestral Puebloans’ crops probably would have failed, which would have made them poorer and hungrier and less able to defend themselves. At the same time, the nomadic people would have been more desperate, too. In years of normal rain, they hunted wild game and gathered nuts and berries for food. But the drought reduced the amount of game. The same for nuts and berries. So the nomads most likely would have turned to raiding the Ancestral Puebloans and their corn-filled granaries. In response, the Ancestral Puebloans would have had to devote more people to protecting their food stores, leaving fewer of them to tend their crops and maintain the dams and irrigation ditches that were critical to their survival as the drought dragged on. Each year things would have gotten worse—less food, less water, more attacks. The Ancestral Puebloans would have been under siege and starving, unable to care for their farms, their children, themselves.”

      “So they left,” Rosie said, her eyes downcast. “That’s the sad part.”

      “Based on the best information we’ve been able to put together, they had no choice. Mostly, they joined other sedentary societies living to the south along the banks of the Rio Grande, which had water flowing in it year-round, even in dry years. They joined other societies just emerging in the Southwest like the Ute and Hopi people, too. The Ancestral Puebloans’ civilization here on Mesa Verde may have dispersed, but they brought their skills to the societies they joined, and helped those societies succeed in the generations that followed.” He gazed at the broad expanse of the plateau stretching away to the south, cut by canyons. “In the meantime, their villages were abandoned and falling into ruin in the bottoms of the drainages here on the mesa.”

      “Until you came along to dig them up.”

      “I got here pretty late in the game. Lots of other archaeologists were fascinated by Mesa Verde way before I was. There’s so much to be learned here—how to cope with extreme weather changes, and how to get along, or not get along, with one another in stressful times. To me, that’s why archaeology is so important, because there’s so much to be learned from what others went through long before we arrived on the scene.”

      “I just think it would be cool to dig up all the pottery and treasures and stuff.”

      “That, too. But it has to be done with total awareness of whose the stuff was—the Ancestral Puebloans’—and for their modern-day descendants.”

      “The Native Americans,” Rosie said. “The indignant people. That’s what Ms. Jarvis calls them.”

      “The indigenous people,” Chuck corrected her with a nod. “Sounds like Ms. Jarvis really knows her stuff. She’s definitely up to date with her terminology.”

      “She says the word ‘Indian’ is old-fashioned.”

      “She’s right. In the same way, the Ancestral Puebloans used to be called the Anasazis, but not anymore.”

      “Why not?”

      “To the Navajo people, Anasazi means ‘ancient enemy.’ But Navajos see the Ancestral Puebloans as their ancestors, not their enemies. Plenty of Native Americans don’t like the term ‘Ancestral Puebloan’ either, though, because puebloan is a Spanish word, and Spaniards showed up here in the Southwest and ruled Native Americans by force five hundred years ago.”

      “That all sounds pretty confusing.”

      “That’s because it is confusing. Which is part of what I love about archaeology—all the different peoples involved, and all the awareness you have to have of everybody’s different points of view and why they feel the way they do.”

      “Barney loved archaeology, too, just like you, didn’t he?”

      Chuck clenched his teeth as he guided the truck down the road. “That’s why we’re here.”

      The main park road descended through the piñon-juniper forest from the crest of Mesa Verde to a long finger of the plateau known as Chapin Mesa. Deep canyons on either side of the thin finger of land contained the park’s principal concentration of Ancestral Puebloan villages, including Spruce Tree House, Cliff Palace, and Balcony House. Half a mile before the start of Chapin Mesa, a secondary road branched off the main road. Chuck turned onto it as instructed by Samuel. Instantly, the traffic died away. The deserted road headed west past the heads of Navajo, Wickiup, and Long Canyons on the way to Wetherill Mesa, a slice of tableland between deep gorges on the park’s remote western boundary.

      The road was narrow and curvy, the driving slow and arduous. Chuck cursed to himself as he gunned the truck on the few СКАЧАТЬ