Fajada Butte after the Great Snow of 1986, or was it 1987? Photo by M. Severson

I am an archaeologist who has lived in the desert for almost 50 years so let me start off by clearing the air: I hate snow!

Yes, I know it looks pretty on the mountains, like the powdered sugar you sprinkle on your French toast. And, yes, it is magical to stand out amid the whispering of light flakes spiraling gently from the gray blanketed sky.

After that delightful experience is over, I want it gone!

I doubt there is an archaeologist worth his trowel that likes the idea of snow covering the ground but part of my ‘curmudgeon-y’ attitude comes from my years as a tour guide.

And one of my first trips to Chaco Canyon came the day after a major snowstorm.

If you live in or have visited in the southwestern United States and are interested in Indian culture, or ruins, or rock art, or hiking and you haven’t been to Chaco; shame on you! First reported to the United States government in the mid-1800s, Chaco is the heartbeat of prehistoric archaeology in the southwest. The small sampling of photos that I have included here barely begin to convey the vast array of fascinating places to see in this World Heritage site.

Fajada Butte, sans snow, is the site of the solstice marking Sun Dagger it is seen here from the ruins of Una Vida. The park headquarters is to center left. Photo by M. Severson

The park was first established back in the early 1900s and originally included only the massive 800-room Pueblo Bonito. Gradually more of the current park was added until it included all the major ruins and dozens of outlying prehistoric communities and resources. 1)

Originally access to the canyon was only by two primitive roads. However, today you can drive nearly any vehicle into the park by way of the “Pueblo Pintado” road coming either from Bloomfield or Cuba, New Mexico. 2)

Photograph of fine chaco style masonry technique from Pueblo Pintado. Amazingly enough after creating these painstakingly beautiful stoneworks they coated it all with plaster so it was never seen. Photo by M. Severson

Ah, you say but what was that I said about about snow?

Okay, I better fess-up. Back in the day, and I’m talking mid-80s here, I decided to begin offering tours of archaeological sites and Indian reservations as part of the Community Outreach program at Pima Community College in Tucson. I am also trained as an educator and it just seemed a natural outgrowth of my various careers to visit the places I liked to go and take others with me. It became the perfect second job.

In scheduling my first tour into Chaco however, I made the mistake of setting it in February.

I live and work mostly in Tucson, Arizona in the great Sonoran desert. It is hot. We received a dusting of snow this winter and also last year but that is an infrequent occurrence at best.

Chaco Canyon though is 40 miles from anywhere in northwestern New Mexico. True it is located in a desert but it is the Great Basin; a high, cold desert.

In February they get SNOW! The day we were scheduled to leave Tucson a massive storm had settled over the Four Corners area.

Choosing discretion for once, we waited a day longer before leaving to head north. When I got there I saw that it had been quite a storm. Snow blanketed everything. Realizing that the south road into Chaco was definitely the worse of the two main routes available to me, I chose to enter the canyon from the north. In those days, from the north you could select either the road at the Blanco Trading Post or the one at the Nageezi Trading Post as both eventually hooked up to the Park Service road and the canyon. In good weather I always chose Blanco to go in and Nageezi to return so that we would get a different look coming and going.

Blanco it was.

Corner doorways are an interesting feature in Chacoan towns. This one is at Pueblo Bonito. Photo by M. Severson

Turning off NM 44 I was surprised to see that no one had as yet driven on the gravel road once it passed the trading post buildings. The snow covered it uniformly though I could vaguely see the outlines of the ruts. I was not too concerned, I had driven the road many times, I was in a high clearance vehicle and it was only 25 miles to the park. The proverbial piece of cake — ice cream cake!

In very short order I realized the road beneath the snow was frozen solid, if I drove over 10 miles an hour the van would begin to fish-tale and slide off the road into the ditches on either side. Two and a half hours and several badly bitten fingernails later, we arrived at the park entrance where I faced my next crisis.

The old park service road into the canyon was cut down through the sandstone talus and was about one and one third lanes wide. If someone was leaving by way of this road, which was still frozen; and we happened to meet . . . well, I didn’t really want to think on it further, I had come this far — down I went.

I, of course, shared very little of this with the people in my charge, though I had casually mentioned earlier that usually it took only about forty-five minutes to reach the Visitor’s Center once we left the highway; they couldn’t help but notice the time discrepancy.

My luck held, we arrived at the Visitor’s Center in one piece and amazingly enough we were the only sightseers at that hour and for much of that day. Who would’ve thought?

Everyone loved the canyon’s picturesque sandstone walls topped all in white. The sun came out, the trails drained and it was a chilly but wonderful day.

Yes that is a person emerging from the rocks! One highlight of any trip to Chaco canyon should be hiking up the cliff walls to the overlooks. The views are magnificent. Photo by M. Severson

Later as we were leaving the Visitor Center to return to our motel in Farmington, I happened to mention how bad the Blanco road had been. The Park Service ranger behind the desk laughed and replied, “Oh Blanco, nobody uses ‘that’ road in the winter!”

Here is a view of Pueblo Bonito from the overlook. Photo by M. Severson

OK then, in leaving I would use Nageezi. In retrospect I guess it was the right decision, the Nageezi road was not frozen . . . it was mud! Two and a half hours later I was thrilled to see pavement!

Today you will probably have no such adventures arriving safely at Chaco but if I were you, my trips would be confined to spring and summer.

1) http://www.nps.gov/chcu/index.htm

2) from the Park Service Guide: The preferred and recommended access route to the park is from the north, via US 550 (formerly NM 44) and County Road (CR) 7900, and CR 7950.

Cummings at his lab in Kinishba. Photo by Tad Nichols used by permission of the Arizona State Museum.

One of my first tours to venture out of the general Tucson Basin area was to Kinishba. The name means “brown house” in Apache (Inde′). It is one of the more important sites in the history of archaeological study at the University of Arizona. When Byron Cummings was lured from Utah to Arizona he immediately began to upgrade the museum collections and archaeological program at his new school. One of his first acts was to begin a program of field training in archaeology for university students.

Excavations were initially begun at a site a few miles east of Tucson called University Ruin. The land was donated to the college by the owner and digging went on there for several seasons. The university still maintains that site and recently archaeological research work by Paul and Susan Fish has been resumed.

Cummings was interested in taking his students farther afield, both figuratively and in actuality. He discussed his intentions with others and secured permission to begin work at a large late pueblo on the Apache reservation near White River. That pueblo was Kinishba.

Kinishba had everything he was interested in: it was remote, the potential for research was enormous and it was located in the temporal and regional frontiers between the Anasazi and what would come to be known as the Mogollon Culture.

Kinishba is a huge site. At one time there may have been as many as a thousand people living there. There are several room-blocks on both sides of the draw that provides water for the site. Room-blocks are clusters of contiguous living rooms that surround a plaza or open area and they can rise up several stories. Cummings chose the southern rooms to focus his excavations on for several reasons. One, it promised to be of more than one story, also the walls seemed most intact. Finally, there was a tantalizing architectural anomaly that attracted him. The southern room-block appeared to him to feature an unusual entry: an ‘L’ shaped corridor that lead into the plaza.

My first visit was back in the 1970s. I had heard of the site and in my inimitable fashion I decided to go there, trusting that I could find it with little or no directions. I knew it was near White River and that it was close to the road. Luck held for me, there was actually a little, very unobtrusive sign pointing to the dirt road turnoff. The site is visible from the highway if you know what to look for. After that it came down to the correct navigation of a few turnoffs and I found myself at Kinishba.

The road in is dirt but very passable in all but the most extreme weather conditions. Looking northwest. Photo by M. Severson

My first visit back in the late 70s found the old museum still occupied by a family that watched over the site, the ruins in fair shape and lots of ceramic debris scattered across the area. I was charmed. Dean Cummings had put a great deal of effort into Kinishba, hoping that by showcasing the site he might be able to wrangle National Park status to protect his protege in perpetuity. His reconstruction included some very speculative features. Though some say there was little evidence to support it, he built his second level on the south ruin. Even more troublesome to other professionals Cummings rebuilt the southern part of the room block with the postulated, ‘L’ shape, covered entrance, a feature that was unparalleled in any other southwestern prehistoric pueblos.

Kinishba seen from across the wash looking east. Photo by M. Severson

The site itself is large, like many late Mogollon pueblos, with three room-blocks;  two on the east side and one on the west side of the wash. After the 1100s there was a move towards aggregation of populations in the region and for a time some pueblos got larger.

Kinishba may have been one of the sites that benefited from this period of growth.

Over the years I made many trips to Kinishba, and while I was always happy to get there, the tour itself became problematic. The distance involved made it a very long day tour and I had no other sites to include other than historic Ft. Apache to turn the tour into an overnight one. I finally solved the apparent quandary by adding Grasshopper and Point of Pines and making it a three-day, Field Schools of the University of Arizona trip.

Unfortunately, over the years another concern arose. From the first trip to to my last I watched the slow decline of the restored ruins and historic buildings that Cummings had constructed. For a time after his retirement in the late 30s Cummings lived at Kinishba in the museum and while there he oversaw it and the other structures though it was difficult because of his original stricture that authentic materials were to be used on the stabilized ruin wherever possible, there was little he could do to prevent steady degradation of the site. After ten years Cummings was too old to stay any longer at Kinishba and he relocated to Tucson and caretakers moved in. They stayed until sometime in the 70s when the site was basically abandoned.

This is the deep wash cut that divides the blocks of room at the site. Upstream a short distance is a spring. At the time of occupation in the 1200s the draw may have been a steady stream running south to the White River, making Kinishba a very attractive location despite it’s rather high elevation. View is south and the main ruin is in the upper left corner. Photo by M. Severson.

Once that happened the end result was fore-ordained. Year by year, the site became more unstable and occasional incidents of vandalizing exacerbated the decline. My last trip to Kinishba as a tour guide was in 2004. I arrived on an overcast day with a group of five. What I saw broke my heart. There had been a fire at the museum, the building was a ruin now too. I saw graffiti and worst of all the reconstruction that Cummings had done was almost entirely collapsed.

While I was there an odd thing happened. I was wandering the ruins of Cummings outbuildings behind the museum; his garage, the guest houses, and his shed when I clearly heard the distant call of an owl from up the draw. While there was only dim sunlight due to the cloud cover, it was daytime and I could not remember hearing an owl call out like that during the day. Intrigued I left the group and followed the calls which continued to sound in a random fashion. Working my way up through the dense junipers and various shrubs that grew along the edge of the draw I found that I wasn’t getting any closer to the sound of the owl. After ten minutes or so I gave up and turned back.

I did not hear the owl again.

The roof in the foreground left is what remains of Cummings laboratory that he constructed in the second story of the ruins. You can see collapsed roof beams and construction debris scattered over the site. Photo by M. Severson.

After that visit I wrote to the Heritage foundation on their website that was asking for nominations of historic American sites that were in desperate need of protection. Fortunately my voice was not the only one heard. In the end Kinishba received some long overdue attention and today, it at least looks cared for. The White Mountain Apache Tribe, despite the fact that the site is not part of their cultural heritage, have helped with the process by establishing and maintaining a museum and foundation that oversees Ft. Apache, Kinishba and cultural heritage sites of the people. 1) If you want to see an excellent set of photos of what the site looks like today go to Randall Schulhauser’s Hike Arizona site. 2)

If you want to visit the site, make sure you go first to the museum in White River where you can get a day pass by paying a nominal fee that will help continue to provide the over-watch and protection of Kinishba. Despite all the abuse of time and man Kinishba remains one of my favorite places because it combines potential for prehistoric and historic archaeology research and it represents a major site that was occupied at a time of great change in the southwest.

1) http://www.wmat.nsn.us/fortapachepark.htm

2) http://hikearizona.com/decoder.php?ZTN=864

One of the most famous archaeological sites in the southwest is Chaco Canyon. Chaco lies in northwest New Mexico somewhere between Gallup and Farmington. Actually Chaco Canyon is not a site but a district containing thousands of archaeological sites and it is recognized as a World Heritage Site.

I will be taking you to some of the lesser known places in Chaco Canyon in some later posts but for now I am stopping at an outlier about 50 miles south of Chaco and it is one that is integrally related to the prehistoric cities of the canyon.

Outliers in the professional archaeologist parlance are habitation sites that are somehow connected to a larger sphere of influence but located somewhere outside it’s core.

Driving from Gallup, exit at Thoreau (pronounced ‘threw’; it’s named for a former railroad man) as if to take the short cut to Farmington, New Mexico. Traveling by this back road toward the Bistii Wilderness, and eventually Farmington, as I am sure you have done many times, you may have noticed in passing an interesting rock formation east of the highway near Crownpoint. It looks much like a natural spire of sandstone when seen from the road traveling 70 plus miles an hour. Closer inspection though, discloses that while it is a stone spire, it is of man-made origin.

The Navajo (Dine′) have named it Kin Ya’a — the Tall House.

The Tall House, notice how the shadow makes it look like a natural formation. Looking east. Photo by M. Severson

It represents the remains of what must have been an imposing structure in its day. Archaeologists refer to it as a ‘tower kiva’ because there appears to be a ceremonial significance to the interior room at the top of the tower. Modern kivas are ceremonial rooms in pueblo towns and by the referential process of archaeological interpretation, archaeologists have identified these rooms as being ceremonial in ancient pueblos also. Tree ring dates place the building of Kin Ya’a around 1100 AD.

Generally kivas make up a small percentage of the overall rooms in a village. Tower kivas are a unique structure even among these less common specialized rooms because rather than being subterranean as  are most prehistoric kivas, they rise several stories into the air.

One theory is that building a kiva so high up gives it a stronger connection to the realm of the sky and therefore increases the viability of any prayers for rain that originate there. Since it appears that some tower kivas may be several of the structures stacked one atop the other, they may also replicate the four worlds of pueblo myths.

Tower kivas are not exclusive to sites that are linked to Chaco Canyon but they are most commonly found in Chacoan towns. The one at Chettro Ketl, the second largest town in the canyon, has some interesting stone projections that appear to allow for entry by those adventurous souls brave enough to ascend the exterior of the tower in that manner. A more likely function is to illustrate to the people when it was time to re-plaster the exterior walls. When the rock projections start to show it’s time to start mixing more plaster.

The Chettro Ketl tower kiva has been excavated to illustrate the amount of work that went into the foundations of the structure. Not surprisingly it sits upon an impressive stone base excavated more than twenty feet into the Chaco soil. West of Pueblo Bonito, the compact town of Kin Kletso has two structures that appear to be tower kivas. If you are interested in learning more about Chaco you can go to the NPS site. 1)

Here in a close-up of remains of the tower kiva interior wall where you can see the reddish coloring of oxidation on the sandstone bricks indicating that the structure probably burned. Looking north. Photo by M. Severson

Most archaeologists agree that the tower kiva at Kin Ya’a has a very specific reason for its placement at this particular Chacoan town. But because they are archaeologists they don’t all agree on what that reason is. It all depends on who you talk to.

This site is unexcavated, which means all the information is still there waiting for future improvements in archaeological techniques. Looking northeast. Photo by M. Severson

The purpose of the structure may have long been open to debate but I like the signal tower aspect that has been presented in many discussions. The idea is that fires built atop the kiva could be used to signal other sites far away, especially at night. Kin Ya’a lies along the Great South Road out of Chaco, in fact the road bisects the pueblo diagonally.

To read more information on Kin Ya’a and a nice interpretive reconstruction painting go to the NPS brochure 2).

If you want to go to Kin Ya’a I better tell you my story.

Anyone traveling to Chaco today normally enters by the Pueblo Pintado road between Bloomfield and Cuba, NM;  built a decade or so ago to facilitate visitation to the remote site. Back in the day, a generation or more in the distant past, this adventurous explorer used to enter the canyon by the south road at the old trading post (TP) turnoff and return the next day by the Blanco TP or Nageezi TP road. I have always been a lover of bad roads.

Exploring the site, Chaco road is in foreground. Exploring the site, people are standing on the ruins of multistory rooms. A portion of a Chaco road is in the foreground, the tower kiva to the right of picture. Looking west. Photo by M. Severson

Of course, while on tour, I also wanted to stop and see Kin Ya’a since I drove right by it. Not bothering to get directions, (Don’t say it!) I felt I could find my way to the site. After all, I am a trained archaeologist. I’ve surveyed hundreds of miles of desert without getting lost. I can surely find my way to a stone spire that anyone can plainly see.

Yep.

On my first attempt I wound up in a local front yard somewhere south of Kin Ya’a. Sitting there slightly embarrassed but unashamed I watched as a Navajo granny in long skirts came out her front door. She looked at the huge white van loaded with bil-ganas (the term Navajos use for ‘white people’) that was being driven by some big guy with a nervous smile on his hairy face. She slowly shook her head, turned around and walked back in the house shutting the door behind her

As you can tell by my photos, I did finally find my way to Kin Ya’a but I still owe that granny an apology.

The carefully constructed Chacoan walls usually had a visual pattern to the layers of sandstone. Then they were covered by plaster and never seen by the people who lived there. Looking northwest. Photo by M. Severson

1) http://www.chaco.com/park/brochure.html

2) http://www.nps.gov/chcu/planyourvisit/upload/

KIN%20YA’%20A%20-%202005.pdf