Mesa Verde

“What’s missing?” Jim the ranger asked.

There were about thirty of us sitting or squatting on the sandstone shelf. We all looked at the ruins called Cliff Palace, and somebody said, “People.”

“Too easy,” the ranger said. “Try again.”

“Wood? a woman guessed.

“Okay,” Jim said. “There’s still some wood, but most of it’s gone. What else is missing?”

I felt as stupid as my students must feel when I ask them the same question about a work of literature. “What’s missing in the story? What’s not there that ought to be there?”

“Some of the bricks are missing from the buildings,” somebody guessed, and Jim nodded.

“Where did they go?” he asked.

“Were they destroyed by enemies?” another tourist asked.

“What enemies?” Jim replied. “When we look at this place, the first word that comes into our heads is ‘castle.’ We see fortifications, so we assume the people who built it must have done it for protection against enemies. But isn’t a simpler explanation that the Anasazi might have taken down the bricks and re-used them right here? When we look closely enough, we see signs of what you might call remodeling, or redesign. Look at that tower over on the north side. What do you see that looks different about it?”

And so it went, the ranger asking questions, the tourists trying to look at the familiar sight – all of us have seen the Mesa Verde ruins in postcards or books about the Southwest – with fresh eyes.

Jim explained that the archaeologists, too, had come to Cliff Palace with preconceptions. Then someone had the bright idea of asking local tribes, the Hopi, Navaho, and Pueblo people, what they thought of the ruins. “They taught us a different way of looking at them,” Jim said.

The Hopi looked at three square holes in the uppermost level, and where whites saw windows, they saw the eyes and mouth of a kachina, a sacred figure, who was looking down on and protecting the community. The Navaho also saw a kachina, but a different sort, and in a different building, over on the north side. The Pueblo people were most interested in the arrangement of the kivas, the round underground chambers. From what they could see, the people who lived in Cliff Palace may not have been related to each other, as the Western experts assumed. Maybe this was a way station, like the Far View Lodge we stayed in on top of the mesa, where migrants could spend a short time before moving on.

I knew a little about the controversy over what happened to the Anasazi, who built these amazing structures between 1200 and 1300 A.D. then disappeared. One school of thought holds that they were wiped out in war. Another says they were forced to move because of a 25-year drought.

“But there’s no evidence of battle,” Jim told us, “and they survived even longer droughts earlier. What we think now is that these dwellings were empty most of the year, except for people too old or sick to travel. In the spring, the men went out to hunt, going far into the mountains. Women and children farmed on the mesa top. They probably all came back in the winter, because these south- and west-facing cliffs absorbed and stored heat, so they didn’t need as much fuel to cook and keep warm. So the real question is not, ‘why did they leave?’ but ‘why didn’t they come back?’”

I left Mesa Verde with my head spinning and my preconceptions in tatters. It occurred to me that learning is not always a matter of building up knowledge, brick by brick. Sometimes, it’s about tearing it down and starting over.