Archeologist on Trail of the Anasazi Thinks He’s Found a Map

When the people of New Mexico’s Acoma Pueblo speak of their origins, they tell a tale of two eggs.

Their ancestors, they say, were traveling southward with the parrot eggs, one bright blue and the other dull-colored. But when they reached Acoma, they had to choose between the two.

When the blue egg broke and crows flew out, the chief told those who had chosen it that they would have to stay at Acoma. The others continued southward and nobody knows where they ended up.

Stephen Lekson thinks he might know where the people of the drab egg settled, and much more about the mysterious ancient history of the Southwest and its people, the Anasazi, Navajo for “the ancient ones.” A simple observation, so obvious that anybody with a ruler and a road map could have seen it, has led him to construct a history for the original inhabitants of the region spanning 600 years and 400 miles.

Lekson, archeology professor at the University of Colorado in Boulder, argues that the three biggest archeological sites in the Southwest--Chaco Canyon, Aztec Ruins and Casas Grandes--represent three successive stages of the same political regime.

That regime enjoyed control over the labor necessary to build giant apartment-like complexes out of stone and adobe, and had access to luxury goods such as turquoise, brightly colored macaw feathers, copper bells and shell jewelry, some of it from the Mexican coast, 1,000 miles away.

In research presented at this year’s meeting of the Society for American Archeology and an upcoming issue of Archeology magazine, Lekson connects the Southwest’s three biggest archeological sites with an imaginary line 400 miles long. The line runs due south from Aztec Ruins, a giant complex near the Four Corners, to Casas Grandes, a similar complex 100 miles south of the Mexican border.

Once they see it, Lekson argues, nobody can deny that the builders of the three complexes meant to put them on that line.

But his colleagues most certainly do.

“When I presented this at the Society for American Archeology meetings last year, it created a fair ruckus,” Lekson said.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, and most archeologists are skeptical that the same people created the Southwest’s three largest archeological sites.

“Could have. Yes. Did they? That’s another question,” said William Lipe, president of the archeology society.

Lekson said he noticed the north-south alignment of the sites more than 10 years ago, but initially ignored it. Then research showed the three sites fall along a timeline in addition to a geographic line, he said.

Chaco Canyon was occupied first, from A.D. 900 to 1125.

Then Aztec Ruins, a complex of buildings on Animas Creek in northwestern New Mexico, became the center of the Southwestern world. It lies 60 miles north of Chaco Canyon, and was occupied from 1110 to 1275.

Finally, the cultural center of the Southwest shifted 400 miles south to Casas Grandes, a maze of adobe buildings in northern Mexico. People lived there from 1250 until about 1500--eight years after Columbus arrived in the Americas.

Lekson speculates that the ancient people must have located their major cultural centers along a north-south line because something about that axis was significant to them.

The giant sites required enormous amounts of labor to build and maintain. The buildings at Chaco Canyon are made of huge stone blocks, and roofed with logs that had to be transported 60 miles. Similarly, Aztec Ruins and Casas Grandes took millions of hours of labor to build.

“They’re not the pyramids of Egypt,” Lekson said. “But they’re not bad.”

It’s not just the alignment of the three sites that suggests geography, politics and perhaps religion were closely linked for the people of the ancient Southwest. There’s also an elaborate road system that obviously wasn’t built for transportation.

The people who lived in the Southwest 1,000 years ago didn’t have wheels or pack animals, so they had no need for the wide, ruler-straight roads they built throughout the region. Some of that ancient road network, which covers an area about twice the size of Maryland, is still visible.

Most astonishing of them all is the Great North Road, which starts behind a giant building at Chaco Canyon known as Pueblo Bonito. From there, it heads to the edge of the canyon, climbs the nearly vertical canyon wall and shoots across the mesa. Except for a small jog as it crosses another canyon 1,000 feet deep, the road runs in a nearly perfect north-south line to Aztec Ruins, the second of the major Southwestern sites.

There are other, shorter roads that leave major sites only to peter out in a few hundred yards. By extrapolating those roads across the countryside, Lekson has found that they point to outlying sites miles away. Sometimes the roads even start up again as they near their destinations.

Why would the ancient people of the Southwest build such a screwy road system? Because the roads weren’t just roads.

“They were also monuments,” Lekson contends. “You legitimize a new political center through reference to the old.”

In other words, when powerful people moved, they wanted to make darn sure their power moved with them. And they did that by recording their movements in the land.

And perhaps in the stories they tell. The move from Aztec Ruins to Casas Grandes, which would have taken years to complete using fundamental surveying techniques, could be the same journey described in the Acoma origin story.

Maybe the people of the drab egg settled in Casas Grandes, where the remains of 500 brightly colored macaws have been found in pens specially designed for the birds.

Or maybe not. The people of Acoma Pueblo are interested when they hear his story, Lekson said, just as he is when he hears theirs. But he doesn’t think his work and Acoma beliefs need to corroborate each other to be valuable.

“I would never talk of this validating an Acoma myth,” he said. “They don’t need that.”