Nor did all of the ancient people find the secret of maize. Some who found eastern gateways in the mountains spread themselves out on the great plains where for long succeeding centuries they continued to rove as hunters, governed by solstice and the growing seasons of animal feed. In time the wanderers heard of the plateau cities and their riches stored against hunger and the hardships of travel. Raids resulted, and battle, devastations and triumphant thefts, leaving upon the withdrawal of the nomads new tasks of rebuilding and revival according to the customs of the farmers who long ago had given up the bare rewards of the chase for hard but dependable and peaceful cultivation of the land.
If there was little regular communication between the scattered cliff cities of southwestern Colorado, northeastern Arizona, and northern New Mexico, and if there were local differences between their ways, still they solved common mysteries in much the same fashion and in their several responses to the waiting secrets of earth, sky and mind, they made much the same fabric of life for people together.
2.
The Cliffs
The fields were either on the mesa top above the cliff cities or on the canyon floor below. At sunup the men went to cultivate their crops. Corn was planted a foot deep, and earth was kept piled up about the stalks, to give them extra growing strength and moisture. Every means was used to capture water. Planting was done where flood waters of the usually dry stream beds came seasonally. But there were long summers without rain. The winter snows filtered into porous sandstone until they met hard rock and found outlets in trickles down canyon walls. The people scooped basins out of the rock to collect such precious flow, from which they carried water by hand to the growing stalks. The mesa tops were gashed at the edges by sloping draws which fell away to the valley floor, like the spaces between spread fingers. Between the great stone fingers the people built small stone dams to catch storm waters running off the plateau. Occasionally springs came to the surface in the veined rock of the cliffs and were held sacred.
Seeds were planted and crops cultivated with a stick about a yard long which could poke holes in the earth or turn it over. The prevailing crop was red corn, and others were pumpkin, beans and cotton. Wild sunflowers yielded their seeds which were eaten. When the crop was harvested it became the charge of the women, who were ready to receive it and store it in baskets which they wove to hold about two bushels. Flat stone lids were fashioned to seal the baskets, which went into granaries built by the men. Part of the seed was ground between suitably shaped stones, and part was kept for planting. If meal was the staff of life, it was varied by meat from wild game including the deer, the fox, the bear, the mountain sheep and the rabbit.
As they lived through the centuries learning how to work and build together, the ancient people made steady and continuous progress in all ways. If their first permanent houses had only one room with a connecting underground ceremonial chamber and storeroom, they increasingly reflected the drawing together of individuals into community life in a constantly elaborated form of the dwelling. The rooms came together, reinforcing one another with the use of common walls, and so did families. The rooms rose one upon another until terraced houses three and four stories high were built. The masonry was expert and beautiful, laid in a variety of styles. The builders were inventive. They thought of pillars, balconies, and interior shafts for ventilation. They made round towers and square towers. And they placed their great house-cities with an awesome sense of location, whether on the crown of a mesa or in the wind-made architectural shell of a long arching cave in the cliffside. The work was prodigious. In one typical community house fifty million pieces of stone were quarried, carried and laid in its walls. Forests were far away; yet thousands of wooden beams, poles and joins were cut from timber and hauled to their use in the house. From the immediate earth untold tons of mortar were mixed and applied—and all this by the small population of a single group dwelling.
The rooms averaged eight by ten feet in size, with ceilings reaching from four feet to eight. There were no windows. Doors were narrow and low, with high sills. The roof was made of long heavy poles laid over the walls, and thatched with small sticks or twigs, finally covered with mud plaster in a thick layer. The floor was of hard clay washed with animal blood and made smooth, in a shiny black. Walls were polished with burnt gypsum. Along their base was a painted band of yellow ochre, taken as raw mineral from the softly decaying faces of the cliffs where great stripes of the dusty gold color were revealed by the wearing of wind and water. Round chambers of great size and majesty were built underground for religious and ceremonial use. Many cities had a dozen or more such rooms, each dedicated to the use of a separate religious cult or fraternity. One had a vault with a covering of timber which resounded like a great drum when priests danced upon it.
In the ceremonial kivas men kept their ritual accessories and the tools of their crafts. They made tools out of bones—deer, rabbit, bird, and of deerhorn and mountain sheep horn. Their knives and hunting points and grinding tools and scraping tools for dressing skins and gravers for carving and incising and axes and chisels for cutting and shaping wood and mauls for breaking rock were made out of stone.
Baskets were woven for light, mobile use at first, when the people kept moving, and as they found ways to settle in their cities they continued to use baskets for cooking, storage and hauling. But more durable and more widely useful vessels could be made out of clay; and so the women developed in connection with domestic arts the craft of pottery. Their early attempts imitated the construction of basketry, with long clay ropes coiled into enclosing form which was not smoothed over on the surface. But for greater comeliness and better protection against leakage and breakage the surfaces of pots were eventually made smooth and fired with glazes. Natural mineral pigments gave each locality its characteristic pottery style—now red clay, again ochre, white gypsum, iron-black.
In warm weather the people lived naked; in cold they wore fur-cloth and feather-cloth robes and leggings, and dressed skins. Thread was made from yucca fibre. Both men and women wore ornaments created out of beads—stone, shell, bone. Feather tassels, bright with color, hung from garments. Small pieces of chipped or cut turquoise were put together in mosaic for pendants and bracelets. Fashion had its power, modifying out of sheer taste rather than utility various details of dress. The sandal fringe of one period was missing from the next.
For hundreds of years this busy life with all its ingenuities, its practices whose origins lacking written record were lost among the dead ancestors, its growing body of worship of all creation, its personal and collective sorrows, its private and communal joys, rose and flourished with the affirmative power of living prophecy. Were they being readied to imagine a greatness beyond themselves in the future? Already they had found for the material face of life a grace and beauty whose evidence would endure like the mountain stuff out of which they had made it. The people grew their nourishment on plateaus that reached toward the sun. They put about themselves like garments the enfolding substances of cliffs. They looked out in daylight upon breathtaking views of intercourse between sky and ground, where light and shadow and color and distance in their acts of change made in every moment new aspects of the familiar natural world. Amidst the impassive elegance of mountains, valleys and deserts they fulfilled their needs with intimacy and modesty in their use of natural things. With no communication through