TRAVELING IN STYLE : ON THE TRAIL OF THE ENEMY ANCESTORS : By All Means, Visit the Mysterious, Stunning Anasazi Ruins of the Southwest--But Tread Lightly and Don’t Take Home Any Souvenirs

IT IS SUNRISE IN CHACO CANYON, N.M., THE eeriest remnant of the prehistoric world in the place we now call America. I am the only living human in the canyon at the moment, but I don’t quite feel alone. Somewhere in the distance, a coyote calls. A hawk glides overhead, scanning the desert for breakfast. And then there are the Anasazi themselves--whose resident spirits I am hoping not to annoy.

“Chaco gives me the willies,” a friend back in Tucson had said, and I know what he means. I know a guy who was poking around these ruins a few years back--alone, like I am--when he saw a crow that seemed to be urging him to follow it. He did. Eventually the bird fluttered down beside a prehistoric stone ax. Nice souvenir, he thought, and he pocketed it.

In the next few months, business at his restaurant, a little creperie in Tucson, fell 70%. He suffered a string of illnesses his doctors couldn’t diagnose. Then, at home one night, he got out of bed in the dark and stumbled over the ax; it severed a tendon in his foot. When he had gone to bed a few hours earlier, the ax had been wrapped in plastic and stashed on a table.

The next week he took it back.

I’m not superstitious, barely even religious, but there is a world of things we do not know about the Anasazi, a prehistoric culture of the Colorado plateau, who were among the ancestors of the modern-day Hopis and Zunis. We know even less about what the Anasazi spirits might be up to. I have spent the past two years poking around ruins, working to piece together a book on the prehistoric Southwest, and I sure don’t have an ax, arrowhead or potsherd on my night stand. What I have is a dozen notebooks bursting with more questions than answers.

As just one example, what was Chaco? Its spectacular pueblos, or great houses, could have housed at least 5,000 people, but the arid canyon probably could not have provided food for half that many. The great Anasazi ruins--Mesa Verde and Ute Mountain in Colorado; Hovenweep, straddling the Utah-Colorado border; Navajo National Monument and Canyon de Chelly in Arizona, and, of course, Chaco, all within 100 miles of the Four Corners, the point where these four states meet--are hauntingly beautiful, but they are also infuriatingly enigmatic. Anyone, whether tourist or archeologist, who ventures along the so-called Anasazi Trail (there’s really no such thing; the phrase just means a circuit of Anasazi sites), risks becoming obsessed with it. (I find Ute Mountain and Hovenweep slightly less compelling than the rest, though they, too, are worth a visit.)

ONE FRIGID DECEMBER MORNING IN 1888, A COWBOYnamed Richard Wetherill was scouting a canyon in west-central Colorado for stray cattle when he glanced up and saw a ruined city in the canyon wall. “The solemn grandeur of the outlines was breathtaking,” he wrote later. After he discovered the Mesa Verde pueblo he named Cliff Palace, Wetherill taught himself archeology and spent the rest of his life discovering ruins in the area. It was largely his efforts that first awakened professional archeological interest in the ancient people who came to be called the Anasazi.

Archeologists know practically nothing about the roots of the Anasazi. Possibly they evolved from an amorphous spear-throwing, hunting-and-gathering people now known simply as “the Archaic,” who inhabited the Southwest from around 5500 BC to the beginning of the Christian era.

Anasazi culture dawned with the beginnings of rudimentary agriculture and the weaving of baskets. Little else in the way of progress happened for 700 years. Between 700 and 900 AD, though, the Anasazi learned masonry architecture and began moving from single-family pit houses of brush and mud into sandstone pueblos of several dozen or even several hundred rooms.

Like so many events in the Anasazi world, this doesn’t really make sense: Colorado Plateau winters are windy and frigid, and archeologists have learned through real-world experiments that pueblos are colder than pit houses. However, if Anasazi agriculture had advanced enough so that a year’s supply of grain could be generated in a summer harvest, then the Anasazi needed a lot of storage that could be sealed off from rodents and, possibly, human burglars.

Most of the pueblos also have a distinctly defensive attitude. In 1884, when Charles Lummis trekked through the plateau badlands, filing dispatches to the Los Angeles Times, he concluded that the Anasazi must have been “patient, industrious, home-loving farmers, but harassed eternally by wily and merciless savages.” Nine years later, the Swedish archeologist Gustaf Nordenskiold theorized that “nothing short of the ever-imminent attacks of a hostile people can have driven the cliff-dwellers to these impregnable mountain fastnesses.”

Apparently the “hostile people” grew in number or hostility over time. In 950, only about 20% of the Mesa Verdeans lived in canyon pueblos; by 1150 it was 66%.

Who were the Anasazi worried about? They traded with everybody and probably even intermarried. The architecture of some New Mexico and Arizona ruins suggests that Anasazi and Mogollon, another comparatively developed people in the region, were living side by side. Some archeologists think the Anasazi fought over natural resources among themselves; others theorize about archeological phantoms--nomadic raiders who left no art or architecture to record their presence.

Whatever the menace, it apparently forced the Anasazi to build on sites that any sane architect today would call unbuildable. Except for Chaco Canyon, the most dramatic ruins huddle in natural alcoves in canyon walls or on mountainside ledges. The Canyon de Chelly pueblo called White House crouches near the base of an immense canyon wall towering 400 feet overhead, a dramatic image of both the determination and fragility of human civilization in one of nature’s toughest neighborhoods.

The neighborhood eventually did prove too tough for the Anasazi--or at least it refused to support their increased numbers. From 1150 to 1300, great pueblos were built, then deserted within decades. In south-Anasazi western Colorado alone, the peak population was 30,000 to 40,000; about half as many Americans live there today. The land’s resources--its game, firewood and water--were playing out.

Between 1276 and 1299 a catastrophic drought finished off the Anasazi civilization. The survivors trudged south to the mesas of Arizona or east to the Rio Grande Valley of New Mexico. Their descendants still live there today; we call them Hopi and Zuni.

The Navajos, who now inhabit the ancient Anasazi lands, drifted in from the north after 1300. They never took up shelter in the ghost towns; they feared the spirits of the vanished inhabitants. Some still do. Anasazi is a Navajo word usually mistranslated as “the ancient ones.” The more accurate rendering is a more ominous one: “enemy ancestors.”

MY SURLY RENT-A-HORSE IS CLOMPING ITS WAYthrough the soft, damp red sand on the floor of Tsegi Canyon in Navajo National Monument, in northern Arizona, northeast of the Grand Canyon and just below the Utah border. One of my companions, photographer David Smith, has done this before, on foot. I ask him to compare the two trips. “This is terrible,” he says. “That was worse.”

But this is the best prehistory excursion in Arizona. The monument protects Keet Seel, the most extravagant and nearly intact Anasazi pueblo in the state, by restricting visitors to 20 a day and requiring them to make the 16-mile round-trip on foot or horseback.

Smith tells me about a frightening experience he had the last time he was here. He and some friends had hiked in, planning to camp overnight below the ruin. After dark, they climbed up on a boulder to watch the moon rise over the canyon. Coyotes howled, and a shadowy human figure streaked across the moonlit alcove sheltering the ruin. There wasn’t supposed to be anybody else there.

Smith and company packed up and left in the night.

I tell Smith about the Chaco Canyon ax. I also relate a conversation I had had with a park ranger at Mesa Verde. I had told him I was writing a book on the prehistoric Southwest, and suddenly he was interested in sharing stories he wouldn’t have shared, presumably, with casual tourists. “There are about 600 ruins here,” he had said, “and we go into a lot of them that the visitors never see. One day last year I climbed up to a ruin that was unexcavated, and felt,” he paused, groping for the right word, “a presence. The longer I was there, the stronger the feeling became that I shouldn’t be there.”

Other rangers, he went on, have had closer encounters. One wandered into Cliff Palace alone, after hours, and suddenly there was a disembodied voice shouting at him--in a language he’d never heard. He couldn’t understand the words, but he felt the heat of anger in them.

These incidents add nothing to the objective story archeologists are trying to assemble about the Anasazi. I tell them here because we interlopers should be prepared to tread softly and show respect.

Keet Seel (“broken pottery” in Navajo) proves to be worth seven hours on the back of a sullen horse. From the canyon floor it doesn’t even appear to be a ruin, just an abandoned village. It definitely seems defensive. Armed with spears and arrows, an enemy tribe might besiege it, but not assault it.

The pueblo was started around 1250 and deserted a mere 50 years later. There are signs of turmoil. Living rooms were abandoned and turned into trash dumps, suggesting that people were arriving and leaving rapidly. One room has a floor made of flagstone, a material the Anasazi didn’t commonly use, an architectural anomaly suggesting that people of different cultures were merging here. Keet Seel’s last years were also those of the great drought. I find it easy to stand in the ruin and envision the Anasazi world falling apart.

CANYON DE CHELLY (PRONOUNCED “D’SHAY”) IS 102miles southeast of Navajo National Monument, a two-hour drive through a landscape of spectacular loneliness, punctuated with towering sandstone buttes and wind-twisted juniper trees clawing out a living on dry red hills. Visitors from the cities tend to drive quickly through this country, staring out the window and exclaiming, “Jeez, there’s nothing out there!” The Navajo people, whose attachment to this land is inexpressibly profound, would find this laughably ignorant.

Canyon de Chelly and its tributary, Canyon del Muerto (“Canyon of Death”), are the connoisseur’s canyons of Arizona--far less tourist-infested than the Grand and in certain ways more beautiful. They are certainly more intimate: The geology of these canyons, 400 feet to 1,000 feet deep, is on a scale that humans can comprehend.

Arriving here, I stop at several lookouts on the South Rim Drive and stare into the gash at the tranquil scenery on the canyon floor. Giant cottonwoods, their canopies the color of ripe limes, line the snaking river. Sheep graze placidly, their meanderings directed by tireless dogs. When evening creeps in, the sheer sandstone walls turn amber, then auburn. Spear-like shadows thousands of feet long slash into the canyon. The sensation of peace seems profound, but it is deceptive.

The next morning I sign on with a 28-year-old Navajo named Deswood Yazzi for a tour of the canyon’s interior (Navajo guides are required everywhere except for the short hiking trail to White House ruin). Yazzi is friendly, and he seems to like ironic humor. “We call this ‘Canyon de Chevy,’ ” he says, “because this is where we leave our old pickups.” It’s true; along with 400 Anasazi pueblos in the canyon are the ruins of several Navajo trucks.

Canyon de Chelly and Canyon del Muerto shelter a history of human tragedy stretching back almost two millennia. Yazzi points out some of it. Above one of the Anasazi ruins is an astonishing panel of Navajo pictographs recalling the military campaign of Antonio Narbona, a Spanish lieutenant. On a chilly January morning in 1805, Narbona and his men discovered a huddle of Navajos hiding in a cave 600 feet above the canyon floor. Narbona later boasted that after a battle “with the greatest ardor and effort,” his troops killed “90 warriors” along with a few women and children. Navajo oral history says the victims were all women, children and old men. The Navajo version rings truer: The first Spaniard to reach the cave in the final assault was greeted by a woman wielding a knife.

There was savage killing here in Anasazi times, too. About 1,600 years ago someone heaped a pile of corpses in a Canyon del Muerto cave, their skulls smashed with stone axes. These victims included babies, children and old women. Embedded in the ribs of one of the skeletons was a revealing artifact: part of the shaft and the head of an arrow. The Anasazi didn’t yet know about the bow and arrow. The massacre was the work of invaders.

MODERN INVADERS AT MESA VERDE ARE ON MY mind--some 800,000 a year, according to the National Park Service’s tourist count. During the summer, Mesa Verde feels like America’s prehistoric Disneyland. I’m lucky on this trip: It’s a cold, windy winter day, and I am almost alone with the ruins.

Vincent Scully, the eminent architectural historian, called Cliff Palace, Mesa Verde’s most astounding ruin, “a delirium of man-made geometry.” It is literally a city stuffed into a deep canyon-side alcove. Ruins of circular kivas, or ceremonial structures, fill the front edge, stairstepping toward collisions of rectangular apartments to the rear. Behind them erupts a skyline of three- and four-story towers. The ensemble falls somewhere between architectural commotion and the Frank Lloyd Wright ideal of organic architecture, which grows so naturally from its site that it seems an extension of nature.

Mesa Verde’s other major ruins--Spruce Tree House and Square Tower House--are equally impressive, and the first time I visited them, I wrote some newspaper prattle about the architectural panache of the Anasazi. Now I’m not so sure. Were the Anasazi trying to make an aesthetic statement or trying to squeeze as much as possible of their living and ceremonial space into these “impregnable mountain fastnesses,” fortifying themselves against . . . something? I leave Mesa Verde almost convinced that the Anasazi were doing both at once.

A PROPER EXCURSION INTO THE ANASAZI WORLDends at Chaco Canyon in northwestern New Mexico. This was the epicenter of Anasazi ambition and the place where Anasazi archeology falls apart. Nothing really explains Chaco.

The drive in is 20 miles over washboard roads through desert country that defines desolation. The only plants are greasewood and saltbush, and the weather is always either too cold or too hot. At the Visitors Center, a ranger checks Chaco’s records for me: high, 106; low, -38; average annual rainfall is 8.7 inches. There is little evidence that the climate was any better when the Anasazi were here.

Chaco is no geologic spectacle compared to the Arizona canyons to the west; it is wide, shallow and drab. When the late summer rains come, muddy water surges through an arroyo. There is no permanent river, though you can usually dig a few feet into the arroyo bed and find wet sand.

In this improbable setting, between 900 and 1130, the Chaco Anasazi built 11 great houses--gigantic pueblo-cities, really. Unlike the settlements at Mesa Verde, these were unquestionably planned communities, architect designed. Pueblo Bonito, the largest, rose four or five stories and had more than 800 living and storage rooms and more than two dozen ceremonial kivas. Chaco also exploded with wealth, as the Anasazi defined it. Turquoise jewelry was everywhere--more than 60,000 pieces have been found, shaped into beads, pendants, mosaics and inlays. But there is no source of turquoise anywhere near Chaco Canyon.

There are other weird features. From the air you can still see the system of prehistoric roads leading like spokes from Chaco to outlying Anasazi villages 40 miles to 60 miles away. The roads are always straight, plowing over hills rather than curling around them, and they are uniformly 30 feet wide. Why would the Anasazi, who had no horses and never thought of the wheel, need freeways?

One theory: Chaco was an Anasazi mecca with both political and religious significance; the roads might have been used for ceremonial processions. Another one: Chaco was a city-state, like Athens a millennium earlier or Moscow a millennium later, ruling at least part of the Anasazi world and demanding tribute in the form of food and minerals from its more productive neighbors. In this scenario, the great roads are symbols to remind Chaco’s satellites of its military power.

I climb a trail to one of Chaco’s rims and stare down at what archeologist Stephen Lekson calls “downtown Chaco”--the ruins of Pueblo Bonito and Chetro Ketl--and cast my vote for power. Chaco seems to exude power in every form-- physical, political, architectural, spiritual. It is a secretive place; the great houses were designed to defend against not only enemy arrows but also outsiders’ eyes.

But Chaco never acquired enough power to overcome nature. A drought erased the Chacoan empire by 1200 and the city-state’s warlords and priests became refugees. They may have settled in other places and tried to reconstruct the Chacoan political system, but it didn’t work. Less than a century later, thanks again to overpopulation and a hostile climate, the last Anasazi chapter concluded.

Alone in Chaco Canyon, you think about things. I find myself thinking about rattlesnakes--always a wise precaution here--and hubris. The Anasazi fluorescence lasted for a few hundred years because they learned enough about nature and mankind to manage both. Then they began to believe they knew enough to control them. If my theory is correct, then we may learn something from the prehistoric Anasazi world about ourselves, today.

GUIDEBOOK

Anasazi Country

Prices: Hotel rates are for a double room for one night.

Getting there: The best base of operations for a tour of Anasazi ruins is Durango, Colo. All but the Arizona sites are within an 80-mile radius, and those are only a three- or four-hour drive away. America West offers three flights daily (operated by Mesa Air) from Los Angeles to Durango via Phoenix; two of these have additional stops, in Gallup or Farmington, N.M. From Denver, United Express/Mesa Air and Continental Express have nonstop flights to Durango daily, with Mesa Air also flying from Albuquerque.

Where to stay: Lodging in Durango ranges from simple motor courts to these two elegantly restored historic hotels: The Strater, 699 Main Ave., (303) 247-4431; reservations, (800) 247-4431. Rates: $74-$105. The General Palmer, 567 Main Ave., (303) 247-4747 or (800) 523-3358. Rates: $75-$135. For visits to Navajo National Monument: The Wetherill Inn, Highway 163, Kayenta, Ariz., (602) 697-3232. Rates: $49.50-$78. For visits to Canyon de Chelly: Thunderbird Lodge, Route 7, Canyon de Chelly National Monument, (602) 674-5841. Rates: $61-$84.

Visiting Anasazi sites: Arizona: Canyon de Chelly National Monument. Free admission. Tours of the canyon floor with a Navajo guide start at $30 per person. Six-wheel-drive tours may be booked through the Thunderbird Lodge (see above). Visitors Center: (602) 674-5436. Navajo National Monument. Free admission. Reservations are mandatory for the guided 16-mile round-trip hike or horseback ride to Keet Seel and are taken as early as two months in advance. Horse rentals: $50 per person. Rangers escort visitors on free five-mile round-trip hikes to the park’s other ruin, Betatakin. The monument is closed annually between Labor Day and Memorial Day. Visitors Center: (602) 672-2366.

Colorado: Mesa Verde National Park. Admission, $5 per vehicle. Allow a full day to visit the park’s many ruins and the excellent museum in the Visitors Center; for information, call (303) 529-4465. Parts of the park are closed between Dec. 1 and March 1. Ute Mountain Tribal Park. Guided tours only, $20-$40 per person. Only the full-day tours visit the ruins. Though these ruins are smaller than those at nearby Mesa Verde, they are definitely worth a visit. One advantage is that Ute Mountain is never crowded; last year there were only 2,500 visitors. For information and tour reservations, call (800) 847-5485 or (303) 565-3751, extension 282. The Anasazi Heritage Center, on Highway 184, about three miles west of Dolores near Mesa Verde and Ute Mountain, is an excellent museum operated by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management. Free admission. Open daily; (303) 882-4811.

New Mexico: Chaco Culture National Historical Park. This vast park will take most of a day to see properly. Bring food and water; the Park Service has no restaurant and the nearest town is an hour away. Beware of thunderstorms and afternoon heat in summer. Admission: $4 per vehicle. Visitors Center: (505) 786-7014.

Utah/Colorado: Hovenweep National Monument. Free admission. Self-guided tours only. Visitors Center: (303) 529-4465.

Note: At some sites, rangers offer occasional guided tours of the ruins, even those in which visitors are free to wander alone. Take one if it’s offered; the rangers can tell you more about the sites than you’ll learn from any guidebook or brochure.