On September 31 I visited Aztec ruins, a misnamed ancestral Pueblo community that was built over a 200-year period ending around 1300 AD, when the buildings were abandoned for unknown reasons. Various hypotheses have been offered—cultural decline, war, drought, over-use of the land resulting in degradation. Whatever the reason the ancestral Pueblo abandoned the area, however, they left behind a number of artifacts that have allowed researchers to deduce elements of their daily lives.
The ancestral Pueblo, it seems, made great use of local flora and fauna—rabbitbrush for dyes, piñon for pitch, cottonwood for construction, yucca for fiber, and so on. They fired pottery and built religious centers. But living local wasn’t their aim or lifestyle.
The brochures I picked up at the site note evidence of both local living and far-flung trade. On the one hand, the inhabitants of the area made extensive use of native plants, such as sagebrush, juniper, globe mallow, yucca, and cottonwood. On the other hand, they imported a wide variety of materials from as far as 500 miles away (if not farther). They imported necessities like salt and some lumber, but they also seemed to have had a taste for exotic trinkets like macaw feathers, turquoise, and seashells. They could produce their own pottery just fine, but there is still evidence that they imported thousands of decorated pots.
For me, this ties in thematically not only with what we’ve been studying in class but with what I’ve seen in my extracurricular readings as well. In our assigned readings, we’ve seen a lot of exhortation to live local—Farewell, My Subaru was an entire experiment in just this, and Sand County Almanac gives me a similar impression, what with its emphasis on using the local land for such basics as firewood and nourishment.
Regardless of how eco-friendly local living is, though, it seems to be much harder to actually manage than it would seem. A recent article in the New York Times takes on the trend of passive building, in which the idea is to construct houses that require little in the way of air conditioning and heating because air isn’t allowed to escape. These houses can be built, and they do lower energy bills—but in the case of a couple in the article, building such a house required importing a boiler and window glass from Europe. Some things—like a particular type of boiler—just aren’t made locally. And if you need particular medical equipment, for instance, you will probably have to have it shipped in from elsewhere.
Even the ancestral Pueblo, living in a time when trade and travel were arduous and dangerous, didn’t want to content themselves with living local. To me, this speaks to a fundamental exploratory drive in human nature, a desire to see things from beyond daily experience, a need for exoticism and change. And I don’t think we can just erase or brush over our desires and needs for things that can’t be found locally. This question is: how do we minimize the damage?
A Revisiting
I originally decided to visit Aztec Ruins because it sounded cool and because it was close to my relatives in Farmington—I could take as long as I needed at the site and then spend the night with a relative instead of worrying about a motel or about driving back. My Mom and Dad and Uncle had recommended the place, so I figured it would be a good field trip target.
When I arrived at the ruins, I first had to pass through a building to buy tickets. As soon as I entered, a huge feeling of nostalgia hit me. I had been here before, probably when I was much younger. My Mom didn’t remember taking me—maybe my Aunt had?—but I had definitely visited the place before. All of a sudden I remembered the video center and museum to the right of the entrance desk; I remembered the layout of the ruins; I remembered the dirt and the plants and the trail guide.
As I went through the site I kept remembering little things. Oh yeah, I remembered: the doorway ceilings really are low! But last time I was here I was so short I could run through them easily, and thought it was hilarious to race through the rooms at full speed while my parents lagged behind, trying to get through the doorways without cracking their heads open. (Many of the doorways in the ruins are lessthan five feet high, and my Dad is six foot two.)
I remembered being annoyed by the glass windows that prevented access to the inner rooms, because as a kid I didn’t want to just see the ruins, I wanted to be in the ruins, all of them, including the carefully closed-off inner rooms that had remnants of woven doorway mats still hanging over them like shrouds. I remembered that I had wanted to get down into the kiva pits but couldn’t; I’d wanted to climb the walls but wasn’t allowed. The closest I could get to exploration was in the set of connected rooms near the end of the trail, with doorways so low and narrow my parents couldn’t physically pass through, so for once I felt like I alone got to see those recesses. There wasn’t much in them, to be sure, that was different from the other rooms; but they were special because they were mine.
So I found those rooms again, and like before, they resembled the official trail rooms in most respects. But they still felt special because they didn’t have guidebook numbers or explanations; we were allowed in but not led in, so they still held some of that same explorer’s mystique, even though doubtless thousands of other people before me had squeezed through the doorways just to see what lay beyond. In the very last room, cut off from the official trail, a sunflower plant was growing in a corner beside the doorway. If you weren’t physically in the room, you’d never see it.
Brochures provided by the US Park Service:
Native Plants
Resources Near and Far
Ceramics at Aztec Ruins
Aztec Ruins National Monument: Administrative History of an Archeological Preserve (http://www.nps.gov/azru/historyculture/)
Articles:
Can We Build in a Brighter Shade of Green? (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/26/business/energy-environment/26smart.html?ref=earth)
Beautiful pics - great story!
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