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Front Page
Power, Pathos of Time
A valley is formed
Grand monument
Artifacts
venue travel
August 3, 1997
By James Abarr
Of the Journal
For three centuries, Indian farmers and hunters flourished amid the canyons and forested mesas of the rugged Pajarito Plateau — and then they vanished.
They were the Anasazi, the Ancient Ones, and from roughly 1250 to 1550 A.D., they fashioned a remarkable society in this spectacular region on the eastern slopes of the Jemez Mountains — a land born in the fire of volcanic eruptions in the dim geologic past.
In the soft volcanic rock walls of the many canyons across the plateau, the Anasazi carved their cave dwellings and talus houses, and on the floor of a central canyon, beside a swift-flowing stream, they built the showpiece of their culture, the multi-storied pueblo of Tyuonyi.
They coaxed crops of corn, beans and squash from the volcanic soil of the canyon floors and along the mesa rims. In the deep forests, they hunted deer and wild turkeys. To supplement their food supply, they trapped squirrels and other small creatures and gathered a variety of berries and edible plants.
Even with this arduous and never-ending struggle to maintain a daily existence, however, the Ancient Ones found time to develop a complex religion focused on the rhythms of nature and the Earth, the giver of all life. Their prayers and ceremonies sought the blessings of an array of protective gods — Sun Father, Moon Mother and Awanyu, the plumed serpent, lord of the water.
In the sacred kivas, the underground ceremonial chambers, they sought the blessing and protection of their deities in secret rituals as they contemplated the mighty unseen power around them.
However, the gods were fickle, and the time of the Ancient Ones grew short. By the mid-1500s, the people of the Pajarito were gone, and the great canyons and mesas stood deserted. In their passing, they left thousands of remnants of their culture that today are preserved in spectacular Bandelier National Monument.
A mighty volcano towering to perhaps 20,000 feet once loomed over the region that today encompasses the Jemez Mountains, 46 miles northwest of Santa Fe.
A million years ago or more, the volcano exploded in a series of eruptions that laid down a great sheet of lava and ash in a vast eastward-sloping plain. Over ensuing centuries, rain and melting snow coursed downward in rivulets through the soft volcanic rock in a never-ending process that wore away the land. The small water channels became gullies, then ravines and then canyons, radiating from the Jemez ridge downward to empty into the Rio Grande.
In between the steep-walled canyons, the geologic sculpturing left the line of high mesas, which march across what today is the scenic Pajarito (Little Bird) Plateau.
Where the towering volcano that formed this remarkable land once rose is a vast crater, or caldera, created when the primordial eruptions blew away the top half of the mountain. This is the Valle Grande, the Great Valley, a grassy plain 18 miles long and 16 miles wide and broken by only a few low hills.
The mountains that today surround the caldera, which geologists have identified as the largest in the world, mark the weathered-down rim of the ancient volcano.
Then, nearly 800 years ago, human life ventured onto the Pajarito Plateau. Where these people came from no one is certain, but they probably drifted down in small bands from the dying pueblo centers of New Mexico's Four Corners area — Chaco Canyon, Aztec, Mesa Verde and others. Helping to speed the exodus was a 20-year-long drought that archaeologists believe plagued the area in the late 13th century.
Across the canyons and mesas of the Pajarito these refugees settled in groups of two or three families before abandoning their small settlements to band together in large communities beginning in about 1300. The result was the flowering of a prehistoric Indian culture that reached a high level of achievement before it, too, was gone.
As they had in the Four Corners towns, the recurring enemies of drought, lowering water tables and over-population combined to force the Ancient Ones from the canyons and mesas of the Pajarito to still another new life in the more-fertile Rio Grande Valley.
Today, Cochiti, Santo Domingo, San Felipe and other pueblos along the Great River trace their ancestory to the Anasazi.
In 1916, Bandelier National Monument, named for Adolph Bandelier, the Swiss-born archaeologist and ethnologist who pioneered studies of the Pajarito Plateau in the 1880s, was set aside to preserve the thousands of ruins that dot the region — a land that Bandelier called "the grandest I ever saw."
Although the monument encompasses 40 square miles of steep-walled mesas, canyons and forests and 70 miles of trails, its focal point is in Frijoles Canyon. This two-mile-long slash in the volcanic tuff, cut by El Rito de los Frijoles, the Little Creek of the Beans, contains some of Bandelier's most accessible and impressive ruins. Among them:
Tyuonyi: This great circular pueblo, a short distance up the paved trail from monument headquarters, once stood two and three stories high and contained more than 400 rooms. In the central plaza are three kivas, one of which has been restored.
Although Tyuonyi has been excavated, no walls have been rebuilt, and today, only the lower circle of rooms, with rock walls standing 4 to 5 feet high, remains.
Tree-ring datings from ceiling-beam fragments place Tyuonyi's occupancy from about 1383 to 1466, a period of much building in Frijoles Canyon.
Sun House: On the talus slope of the north wall of the canyon, just above Tyuonyi, is a cluster of houses with 12 to 15 cave rooms as a nucleus supplemented by masonry rooms extending from the canyon wall.
This talus house is an exceptional example of a common type of prehistoric dwelling found throughout Bandelier.
Sun House, excavated and restored, was named for the prominent sun symbol carved into the upper cliff. It probably was occupied in the 1400s.
Long House: This combination cave-and-masonry dwelling, nearly 800 feet long, stands against the 150-foot-high north wall of Frijoles Canyon, a quarter-mile up the trail from Tyuonyi. It is one of the largest dwellings of its kind found on the plateau.
Into the cliff, 40 feet above the canyon floor, the ancient inhabitants dug many cave rooms, cave kivas and storage rooms incorporated into a single dwelling of more than 300 rooms.
Kivas: These ceremonial chambers of all sizes are found throughout the hundreds of ruins in Bandelier, both in the floors of the canyons and in the cliffs. Two of the best examples are in Frijoles Canyon.
Just east of Tyuonyi, centered in the canyon floor, is the excavated Great Kiva, 42 feet across and 8 feet deep. Farther up the canyon is the intriguing Cave Kiva, carved into the base of a heavily-eroded volcanic cliff. The chamber, 20 feet deep and reached by a short ladder, has been restored.
Of the thousands of kivas that have been found throughout the ruins of the ancient Pueblo world, the cave-style is unique to Bandelier.
Ceremonial Cave: A mile up the canyon from monument headquarters is a stunning rock overhang, 150 feet above the canyon floor. Under the shelter of this arch, reached by a series of ladders, are masonry dwellings and an excavated and re-roofed subterranean kiva.
Countless remains of the Pajaritan civilizations lie south of Frijoles in the canyons of Bandelier's rugged back country, which is accessible only by foot trails.
Most frequently visited are the Shrine of the Stone Lions and the Painted Cave.
The Stone Lions, on a mesa summit 10 miles from monument headquarters, are two life-size effigies of crouching mountain lions carved side-by-side in the soft bedrock and surrounded by a stone enclosure. Carved centuries ago and now badly weathered, the lions were probably a religious shrine devoted to the hunt.
In Capulin Canyon, a rugged 12 miles by trail from monument headquarters, is Painted Cave, an ancient art gallery splashed across a 50-foot-wide rear wall of an opening in the cliffs. Many generations of Indian artists evidently used this cave because as space ran out, later drawings were superimposed over their predecessors.
These are merely highlights of a complex and spectacular land whose remote canyons and mesas wear a cloak of mystery woven by the ghosts of a vanished civilization.
One who fell under the spell of Bandelier was Dr. Edgar Hewitt, a pioneer New Mexico archaeologist who gave the Pajarito Plateau its name in the early 1900s. In a report on the area, Hewitt wrote:
"If you want to feel the power and pathos of time, roll up in your blankets some night on any of 100 mesas, or in any one of 100 canyons of the abandoned land of the Pajaritans.
"The stars that sparkle down on you watched the cataclysm that rent the nearby mountains some million years ago; saw the mesas rise out of the chaos ... saw vegetation again creep over the ashen landscape, forests slowly wrap the mountainsides in green ... saw cliff and cave shaped by wind and rain, and at last, saw human life drift quietly in ... then flow on into the river we call time."
