Civilization Had Roads, but Not Wheels

Tucked inside a canyon of barren rock in the great Southwestern desert in New Mexico are the remains of a mystery civilization that has puzzled a small number of anthropologists for a long time.

The 10th-Century culture of the Chaco had remarkable multistoried buildings that could have housed thousands--but there are no burial grounds for their remains.

There is a surrounding network of “roads” that are wide, flat and straight--but the people who made them did not have the wheel.

Scattered throughout the remains are pieces of turquoise and feathers from colorful macaws--but the precious stones and the birds had to have come from far away.

“They had no art, no writing, no wheel, no metallurgy and no plow,” said David Hurst Thomas, curator at the American Museum of Natural History’s department of anthropology.

‘Elaborate System’

“Yet, they had this calendar carved in rock--on the summer solstice the sun hits the center like a dagger,” he said. “They had an elaborate system to catch the rain and irrigate very extensive fields.

“It’s always been a mystery how these people could have been so advanced in some areas and so exceedingly primitive in others,” he said.

But now archeologists believe they have some explanations.

Downstairs from Thomas’ office on the museum’s top floor, workers were putting the finishing touches on a major retrospective exhibit on the puzzling civilization that may put it in a new light.

“Now,” Thomas said, leaning back from a desk that once belonged to Margaret Meade, “we think we have some answers.”

The civilization, named Chaco after the half-mile-wide canyon that contains its remains, was first explored 150 years ago in what is now New Mexico by an Army Corps of Engineers lieutenant named James H. Simpson.

‘Great Houses’

Simpson spent a week drawing and mapping the crumbling remains of 14 ancient settlements--many made up of a single large building with hundreds of rooms--strung along a nine-mile stretch of the canyon.

Called “great houses,” the largest buildings had walls six feet thick and up to 40 feet high.

These five-story apartment houses had up to 600 rooms each and were supported by wooden beams and rafters made from an estimated 200,000 trees that would have grown more than 25 miles away. Sandstone blocks were cut from quarries to make the walls, and a concoction of clay and sand was used as mortar.

The great houses of Chaco, some of which have remained largely intact, are so impressive that Simpson wrongly assumed that they were made by the great civilizations of Mexico, who he theorized traveled north 1,000 years ago.

He was correct about the date of the buildings but wrong about their builders.

Pueblo Indian Ancestors

Archeologists now believe that the settlements were constructed by the ancestors of the North American Pueblo Indians about AD 800 to AD 900.

Having been rediscovered by European Americans, poked through and mapped, Chaco was left in obscurity.

“There is a belief that American history started the moment Europeans first set foot on Plymouth Rock,” Thomas said, his museum office surrounded by warehoused pots, effigies and tools made by native American Indians.

“We simply overlooked a fascinating story in our own backyard.”

Archeologist Jill Neitzel is one of those piecing together the story, and the first time she made the 100-mile drive from New Mexico 44 to Chaco Canyon, her car bounced so savagely on the little-used road that her side-view mirror snapped off.

“I kept thinking, what in the world could be out in this forsaken place,” she recalled recently at the museum’s opening of the Chaco exhibit. “Then I drove up to the site and all I could think was, wow!”

Mounds of Turquoise

Neitzel spent several months at the site for two years in a row, sifting through mounds of turquoise, pottery shards and macaw feathers, piecing together how the people of Chaco lived and worked.

“Sometimes, when I was alone at the site, it was very haunting,” she said. “You learn to have great respect for a people who did so much in such a hostile environment.”

Neitzel’s recent independent research at Chaco Canyon followed a decade-long project started in 1970 and sponsored by the National Park Service and the University of New Mexico.

The project was designed to take a second, long look at the canyon and attempt to unravel some of its mysteries with the aid of modern investigative techniques.

Data gathered by dozens of archeologists working on the Chaco project, combined with independent research and satellite images of the surrounding area, have formed the picture of a civilization more complex than previously thought.

Road Network

Images from space showed that Chaco had been linked to smaller, surrounding villages by a 250-mile network of wide roads. The roads were straight, turning at precise angles.

When archeologists excavated the end and turn points in these roads, they discovered the remains of signaling stations.

“The sight lines are very good,” Thomas said. “We believe they signaled each other, probably with smoke and fire. It was their communication network.”

The discovery of the probable function of the roads led to a startling theory, Thomas said.

Archeologists now believe Chaco Canyon was not so much a settlement as a cooperative facility maintained by thousands of tribal Indians in a 30,000-square-mile area of the San Juan Basin.

“It was a core, hooked up to outlying villages,” he said. “There were some 25 societies thrown into this cooperative.

‘Religious and Social Center’

“Chaco was a storehouse, a religious and social center,” he said. “No one was buried there because no one really lived there. They came to build it and maintain it, but it wasn’t home.”

Called the Chaco Phenomenon, the theory explains many of the puzzling aspects about the ancient ruins, Thomas said.

Together, the thousands of people in the San Juan Basin could provide the muscle power and ingenuity needed to carry logs and quarry stone from distant parts and build a sandstone and wood fortress to protect food and supplies for emergencies.

Thomas said that whole villages suffering from famine or flood may have lived in Chaco at any given time and that the center was probably used for trade and religious purposes.

“There are enough rooms to house 50,000 people but there are only hearths on the bottom floors,” he said. “That would lead you to speculate the people lived only on the bottom floors and that the upper floors contained something else, like storage.”

Scratched a Living

The Chaco people, ancestors of the modern-day Pueblo Indians, started their civilization in AD 800 and scratched a living in northwestern New Mexico without benefit of arable soil, beast or plow.

Archeologists have found evidence that they raised corn, beans and squash as their staple crops and that they carefully conserved water in their arid environment by scooping out catch basins and canals with wooden paddles.

“Crop failure must have been fairly common,” Thomas said. “The land in that region is not lush.”

It would have been necessary for these historic Indians to predict seasonal changes accurately so fields could be prepared and irrigation systems readied. Archeologists have found observational towers that may have been used to chart the stars, and curious spirals carved on walls opposite some windows in the great houses were probably seasonal calendars that measured the summer and winter solstices.

Food Storage

Thomas said enough food could be stored in the great houses during good years to help round out the bad.

But Chaco Canyon was more than a giant storage facility. Approximately 10,000 pieces of turquoise mined from quarries hundreds of miles away have been found on the site, as well as copper bells and exotic pottery, leading archeologists to theorize that the canyon was used as a trading post by civilizations thousands of miles to the south.

Religion also probably played a major role in the existence of Chaco. Archeologists have uncovered dozens of kivas --large rooms used by Pueblo Indians for religious purposes.

“There would be a secret hole in the wall and evidence of a hearth in front of it,” Thomas said. “You can just imagine a priest disappearing in a flash of smoke.”

A network of hidden tunnels leading to the larger kivas was used for special effects as well, he said. The macaws were probably bred so their colorful feathers could adorn headdresses used in religious ceremonies.

Jewelry, Figurines

The ancient Indians also made shell and bead jewelry, clay figurines of animals, and tools inlaid with turquoise that may have had religious uses.

“Religion is a strong factor in bringing diverse people together and solidifying a society,” Thomas said.

He picked up a reproduction of a palm-sized black frog with a band of turquoise around its neck.

“I mean, look at this,” he said. “They couldn’t make metal tools. But then we get something like this.”

Chaco was abandoned suddenly--archeologists date the year 1130.

“Like so many other places, they’re there and then they’re gone,” Thomas said.

Years of Drought

Recent dating techniques, which rely heavily on examining tree rings to determine climate, indicate that the San Juan Basin was hit with several years of drought shortly before Chaco was left to history.

“The system could support one-fourth of the people being hit with famine, maybe even half,” Thomas said. “But it looks like they were all hit, year after year.

“Chaco was a culture that exceeded its grasp,” he said. “It went out on a limb and made lasting changes in its limelight, but then it could not support itself.

“That’s the way of civilizations,” he said, “any civilization.”