I’ve been working on an essay about the Dune movies but, like many things I intend to write for this newsletter in a short and breezy way, it has become long and complex, and not ready for this week. (Sorry to disappoint the three of you who follow me on Notes or look at my Instagram stories.)
Instead, a short missive about my visit to Chaco Culture National Historical Park yesterday, plus some notes on things I’ve been reading at the end.
For over three centuries, from the 800s through the 1100s, Chaco Canyon in the northwest part of New Mexico was the political, administrative, and cultural center of a civilization that stretched into what is now Arizona and Colorado, and had trade routes reaching to the Pacific Ocean and central Mexico.
They built “great houses” with rectangular rooms (some stacked five stories tall), elevated plazas, and round structures called kivas. The largest of the great houses, Pueblo Bonito, had over 600 rooms and 40 kivas:
While there is widespread agreement that the scale of building, and the similarity of Chacoan architecture throughout the greater region, implies a highly-organized civilization, there is no agreement (and little indication) as to what degree Chaco society was hierarchical and based on coercion, or horizontal and based on cooperation.
Regardless of the details of their social structure, they clearly paid close attention to the importance of ceremony and ritual, which were the purpose of the kivas, the largest of which could have held hundreds of people:
To support their extensive trade routes, the Chacoans built roads across the desert plateau and stairs into the canyon cliffs. In addition to trading for luxury items like chocolate, seashells, copper bells and exotic birds, they brought almost a quarter of a million timbers over 60 miles from the Chuska Mountains to the west. These timbers played an important structural role in their architecture, and had to be imported from afar as no trees suitable for use as lumber grew in Chaco Canyon.
Incredibly, the Chacoans apparently used neither pack animals nor wheeled carts — each timber would have to be carried by a gang of men on a journey that would take days.
Before the advent of vehicles powered by fossil fuels — railroads, steamships, automobiles, airplanes — travel was far from the pleasurable diversion it is often treated as today, and was overwhelmingly engaged in only for purposes of trade or migration. Now, we travel faster than our goods, most of which are relegated to cargo ships and rail, and our civilization’s tourist routes reach just as far as our trade routes, if perhaps not into all of the same corners of our global economy.
I have to admit I felt a little uneasy about being a tourist in Chaco Canyon. Native peoples around the southwest consider it a sacred site, an important part of their own histories.
To some degree my unease was alleviated by the strict prohibitions against entering most of the structures. Well-marked trails take visitors around the outside of the great houses, and through limited parts of the larger ones. The trails are uni-directional, which provides a comforting sense of ritual, that we are submitting to the will of a greater authority, even if that authority is only the National Park Service.
Native oral traditions differ in their assessments of the nature of Chacoan society, whether it was a place to meet and trade on an equal basis with other peoples, a place where rituals tied diverse peoples together, or a place of domination, greed and inequality. This is hardly surprising; after all, New York, our contemporary great center of commerce and ritual, has been described as all of those and more, and in less than a century was transformed from America’s greatest experiment in egalitarian social democracy to, as historian Joshua Freeman put it in his 2000 history Working-Class New York, “Trump City,” a place that celebrates ritz, wealth, celebrity and privilege.
As I was walking among the great houses, it occurred to me that I don’t believe I have ever been around anything this ancient that was made by human hands. There are, of course, far more ancient structures in the world, such as in Rome, where I did travel when I was 18, with my father. But I have no memory of whether we visited anything older than St. Peter’s Basilica (built in the 16th century), and I can’t ask my father, as he passed away almost two decades ago. The dead keep their secrets.
As I drove across the Colorado Plateau north of Chaco Canyon, I could see why people in that area would be driven to see what lay beyond the horizon — you can see not only the Chuska Mountains to the west, but the snowy Rockies to the north and the distinctive ridgeline of Ute Mountain to the northwest.
I also started seeing more and more fossil-fuel infrastructure. New Mexico is the second-largest producer of crude oil in the country, and it also produces quite a lot of natural gas.
The pipes and tanks and derrick pumps became larger and more frequent as I continued up U.S. 550 to Farmington, where I stayed last night. A couple from New Mexico who I met on the trail at Chaco described Farmington to me, not admiringly, as “like a little bit of Texas here in New Mexico” — an oil town. It was a pleasant enough place to stay, but is clearly a bit of Trump country in this otherwise “blue” state.
Fossil fuels were discovered in New Mexico only a century ago, and the industrial use of oil dates back less than two centuries.
After three centuries, the Chacoans abandoned their great houses. No one knows why for sure, but the best guess seems to be climate, with the area experiencing significant drought in the last decades of the 1100s. But there is no evidence of internal conflict or catastrophe; they were, apparently, able to just move elsewhere. As end-of-civilization tales go, it’s a good one.
As the child of a left-liberal law prof, it gives me special pleasure to report that members of my union gave a thorough drubbing to the thugs of the Federalist Society last month. Read the UE NEWS article about it written by some of the grad workers who helped organize research assistants at their university’s law school.
I finished my first novel of 2024 this past week, Yōko Tawada’s Memoirs of a Polar Bear. It is truly delightful, full of charming whimsy, imaginative observation, and occasional pathos. Tawada’s narrative inventiveness took my breath away on multiple occasions. I particularly appreciated the way she depicted the ordinariness of life in what used to be called the “Eastern Bloc” (not in the sense of depicting it as like life in the “West,” but in the sense of depicting the everyday hassles of living under socialism in the same way Western writers tend to depict the everyday hassles of living under capitalism), and her sensitive treatment of trans-species relationships.
I’ve also been reading Marilynne Robinson’s When I Was a Child I Read Books, a collection of essays. Even though the book was published in 2012, reading it made me weirdly nostalgic, perhaps because I so firmly associate Robinson’s brand of Protestant great-books liberalism with the small Midwestern towns, dominated by the state universities that Robinson refers to as “virtual city-states, distinctive and autonomous,” that I lived in for most of the first half of my life.
When I was growing up and going to grad school, Lawrence, Kansas and Iowa City, Iowa did feel a bit like city-states, proudly different from the surrounding rural areas — more liberal in the interpersonal sense of the word as well as the political one. But also I remember them still feeling very much of their host states; I never felt like I was living in an outpost of coastal liberalism. Now, of course, especially in Iowa (where Robinson taught for several decades), universities and college towns are targets of the state legislatures, which have themselves turned harder to the right, and the people I know who work at those universities and live in those towns despair for the future of their states.
I’m on vacation this week, and will be traveling around the four corners area — northwest New Mexico, southwest Colorado, and especially southeast Utah — the rest of this week, mostly hiking. I’ll be posting photos on my Instagram account, if you need more photography of the American Southwest in your life.