Fremont Cannibalism

Fremont River, Utah

Today is Cannibal Christmas (for previous installments see here and here), and this time I’d like to discuss some instances of alleged cannibalism well beyond the boundaries of the Chaco system or even the Anasazi culture area. These assemblages are in sites belonging to the poorly defined Fremont Complex of Utah, which is roughly contemporary with Chaco and included people practicing a range of lifestyles including varying amounts of maize agriculture. Beyond those two features, however, the various groups included under the label “Fremont” display so much internal diversity that it has been very difficult for archaeologists to determine what, if anything, the “Fremont Complex” corresponds to in social reality. One widespread characteristic of Fremont groups, however, is evidence of contact with and influence from Anasazi groups to the south, most notably in the adoption of agriculture and pottery but to some extent in other phenomena as well.

It’s possible that whatever practices are behind the mysterious assemblages of extensively mutilated and burned human bones known from Anasazi sites such as Cowboy Wash in Colorado were among the Anasazi influences on the Fremont as well. A paper reporting on assemblages like this at Fremont sites in central Utah was published by Shannon Novak and Dana Kollmann in 2000, around the same time that the Cowboy Wash papers and Christy Turner’s Man Corn were also published and drew considerable attention to the issue of Anasazi cannibalism. That context is important for understanding Novak and Kollmann’s interpretation of the Fremont sites, which explicitly takes Turner’s interpretations as a starting point and presents the Fremont evidence as incompatible with them.

To recap, Turner argues that the cannibalism assemblages in the Anasazi are are associated specifically with the rise of Chaco as a regional system, and further that the driving force behind all of this was Toltecs from central Mexico coming up to Chaco and establishing a violent, hegemonic tributary system involving extensive warfare and cannibalism. (I should note that I have not read Man Corn myself, and this interpretation of Turner’s ideas is based primarily on summaries by other authors who are critical of them, so it’s possible that this is a misrepresentation of Turner; in any case, this is certainly what Novak and Kollmann take Turner to be saying.) This theory is problematic for a whole bunch of reasons, and Novak and Kollmann present some more.

According to Novak and Kollmann, there are three Fremont sites with evidence of cannibalism: Backhoe Village, Nawthis Village, and Snake Rock Village. They are all in close proximity to each other in central Utah (near modern Richfield), and were occupied around the cultural peak of the Fremont period, around AD 1000. This makes them roughly contemporary with the florescence of the Chaco Phenomenon to the south, although it’s important to note that Fremont chronology is mostly based on radiocarbon dates and is less precise than the tree-ring based Anasazi chronology so it’s hard to demonstrate very close correspondences between events in Fremont and Anasazi sites. This will be important in interpreting these cannibalism assemblages, as discussed below.

Although Novak and Kollmann mention three sites with evidence of cannibalism, their paper contains a detailed discussion of only one, Backhoe Village. This is the site with the largest number of cannibalized individuals, eight, compared to three from Nawthis and two from Snake Rock. Backhoe also has a fairly secure context and was carefully excavated, as opposed to Snake Rock, where looting had disturbed the remains and rendered their context unclear.

The assemblage at Backhoe was clustered in a single pithouse and was initially interpreted by the excavators as a secondary burial (otherwise unknown for the Fremont) burned at some point by the same fire that burned the roof timbers found above it. Novak and Kollmann question this interpretation and argue instead that this assemblage instead shows the same signs of cannibalism found at Anasazi sites to the south, including cutmarks and burning. Methodologically they focused on reconstructing the processing sequence applied to the remains, which is an interesting approach that I haven’t seen applied in other analyses of cannibalism assemblages (though it’s possible I just haven’t noticed it). The patterns they found, especially for skulls and long bones, were consistent with the people having been killed (in some cases with “a series of heavy blows to the face”), scalped, dismembered, and roasted. Four men, two women, and two children were represented in the assemblage. This evidence looks convincing to me, and I’m quite prepared to accept the interpretation that this is an instance of cannibalism much like those documented at Cowboy Wash and elsewhere.

Novak and Kollmann then go on to situate their results in the context of Turner’s Chaco-based theory of Anasazi cannibalism. They argue that these sites were well beyond the Anasazi culture area, which is true (there are Fremont sites in close proximity to the Anasazi frontier, but these sites are considerably further north), and that as small agricultural hamlets, they would have little to offer the Chacoan tribute system, which is more questionable. After all, many of the Anasazi communities within the Chacoan sphere of influence were also pretty small and wouldn’t necessarily have had much to offer in tribute. All these communities were growing at least some amount of corn, and at a minimum could have contributed that. The sheer distance from Chaco to central Utah is a better argument against simply extending Turner’s theory to include these assemblages, I think.

Fremont Shield-Bearing Warrior Petroglyph, Moab, Utah

In contrast to Turner’s theory, Novak and Kollmann tentatively propose that this is perhaps an example of a behavior diffusing from the Anasazi to the Fremont and perhaps acquiring new meanings along the way. This would certainly not be a surprise, given all the other behaviors that appear to have undergone the same process. They note the prominence of warrior motifs in Fremont rock art as context for violence within Fremont society. Finally, they situate the evidence for violence among the Fremont within a pattern of rising violence in the Southwest in general:

Escalated violence within the American Southwest around AD 1000 is apparent, and this violence appears to have reached further north than previously identified. What we may be seeing in the Anasazi Culture Area is perhaps merely the culmination of widespread and endemic warfare. Fortification of Anasazi villages, evidence of numerous trauma deaths, and the butchering of men, women, and children imply more than simply accusations of witchcraft. Violence between neighbours can be vicious, and real and imagined atrocities often accompany this conflict.

Fair enough in terms of explaining these specific assemblages, but from a broader southwestern perspective this looks a little odd. Escalated violence around AD 1000? In most of the Southwest the period from about 1000 to 1150 is actually considered remarkably peaceful, and in the Chaco area this is sometimes explained as some sort of “Pax Chaco” in which the influence of Chaco led to a period of widespread peace. (It is hard to say which way the causation goes, however; maybe the peace was instead a necessary condition for the rise of Chaco in the first place.) Obviously this is in contrast to Turner’s interpretation of the rise of Chaco as involving widespread war and cannibalism in a Mesoamerican fashion, but that interpretation has basically no support in the archaeological record. Almost all of the well-dated and firmly established cannibalism assemblages date to AD 1150 or later, and the earlier ones are generally earlier than AD 900 and date to an earlier period of extensive evidence for warfare and violence.

So what’s going on here? One possibility is that we’re seeing the consequences of the mismatch in chronological precision I mentioned above. “Around AD 1000″ may mean very different things at Fremont and Anasazi sites. At the Fremont sites, dated primarily by radiocarbon, this could refer to a period of a couple hundred years, in which case it might extend as late as the post-Chaco period of cannibalism and violence (0r as early as the pre-Chaco one). At Anasazi sites, on the other hand, with their very precise tree-ring dates, “around AD 1000″ would generally mean very close to the actual calendar date of AD 1000, maybe within twenty or twenty-five years. This is a considerable difference in precision! It’s also noteworthy that “around AD 1000″ is also more or less the conventional date for the “peak” of Fremont settlement and cultural development from roughly 1000 to 1300, so its being applied here could just mean that these sites date to that period, within which the level of violence rose throughout the Southwest (which is certainly true).

Linear Roomblock at Coombs Village (Anasazi State Park), Boulder, Utah

That said, however, there does actually appear to be a fair amount of evidence that there was in fact a considerably higher level of violence in the Fremont region than elsewhere in the Southwest even in the “Pax Chaco” era. A general summary of Fremont archaeology by David Madsen and Steven Simms discusses some of this evidence. Madsen and Simms describe the period of 1000 to 1300 as one of “demographic fluidity” involving the apparent abandonment of certain parts of the Fremont region and intensified settlement with defensive features in others. This appears to have begun at least in some areas as early as AD 900 and is most noteworthy in the eastern Fremont area on the northern Colorado Plateau, where there also seems to have been a breakdown in the traditional boundary between Fremont and Anasazi along the Colorado River and the expansion of sites with Anasazi features north of the river. It is not clear to what extent this reflects a migration of Anasazi people as opposed to increased Anasazi influence on local Fremont people, but it’s clear that something was going on along the Anasazi-Fremont boundary during the height of the Chacoan era. It’s noteworthy that one site Madsen and Simms mention as having granaries built in a characteristically Anasazi form is Snake Rock, one of the same sites that has a cannibalism assemblage. The puzzling Coombs Village site (now Anasazi State Park in Boulder, Utah), which is clearly Kayenta Anasazi in culture but located very far north in traditionally Fremont country, also dates to around this time. In fact, as Joel Janetski notes in a paper on Fremont long-distance trade, there is some evidence of pottery exchange between Coombs and Snake Rock, about 50 miles to the north.

The upshot of all this is that there was clearly extensive contact between the Anasazi and the Fremont during the Chacoan era, and there is some evidence that it was not nearly as peaceful in this area as it was in the Anasazi heartland at the same time. The much “blurrier” chronology of the Fremont sites makes it frustratingly difficult to pin down exactly what was going on in Utah at the same time as the various important events in the history of Chaco, but these indications that Utah was “out-of-phase” with areas to the south in some ways is, I think, potentially significant for understanding the history of both.

It’s also worth noting that while the actual Anasazi interacting with the Fremont were from the Kayenta and Mesa Verde cultural “branches” rather than the Chacoan, there is reason to think that at least some people at Chaco would have had a keen interest in events in Utah. For one thing, the Janetski paper on Fremont trade notes that while long-distance trade goods like turquoise and shell are much rarer in Fremont than in Anasazi sites, they are present among the Fremont to some extent, and there is some evidence that the turquoise found at some Fremont sites came from the same sources as that at some Anasazi sites, including Chaco. Janetski interpreted this as indicating that the Fremont turquoise came from the Anasazi, which is certain one reasonable interpretation, but he also mentions evidence that some of the Fremont turquoise came from sources in Nevada, which more recent sourcing has confirmed for some of the Chacoan turquoise as well. Maybe, instead of getting turquoise from the Anasazi, the Fremont were giving it to them as part of a wide-ranging trade network. This might even explain why so little turquoise is found at Fremont sites, if they didn’t actually have much interest in it but used it to trade for Anasazi goods that they did want. Interestingly, Janetski also notes that most of the turquoise in Fremont sites appears to date to after the period of its most common appearance in Anasazi sites from 900 to 1100 (which is driven mostly by the vast amounts found at Chaco), which could be explained if the Fremont, having relatively easy access to turquoise from trading partners in the Great Basin, began holding on to it once Anasazi demand weakened with the decline of Chaco.

Edge of the Cedars Great House, Blanding, Utah

Much of that is speculative, but if the Great Basin was in fact one of Chaco’s main sources for turquoise, and if some of the trade routes for that turquoise went through the Fremont, Chaco would have a clear interest in the Fremont area. It would certainly have had contact with some Anasazi groups near the Fremont frontier, as there are communities showing Chacoan influence in Utah north of the San Juan River (though not as far north as the Colorado, as far as we know), with Edge of the Cedars in modern Blanding being a clear example. This area would presumably have been the source of whatever migration or influence extended north of the Colorado in this area after AD 1000, so a Chacoan connection is not as implausible as it might seem at first glance. Further west Chacoan influence is harder to see among the Kayenta Anasazi, but some level of contact is at least possible.

It’s not clear what implications this possibility of Chacoan involvement in Utah would have for the cannibalism assemblages Novak and Kollmann discuss, however. For one thing, I think Turner is just wrong that cannibalism in the Southwest is associated with the rise of Chaco; it seems to correlate more closely with its fall. Also, the specific sites in question seem to be beyond the reach of any plausible Chacoan direct influence, although at least one clearly had some contact with the Kayenta Anasazi at Coombs. They could also have been involved in the turquoise trade, of course, and according to Janetski small amounts of turquoise were found at Snake Rock and Backhoe. The lack of any known cannibalism sites between these and the better-known Anasazi examples also limits the extent to which we can figure out what was going on. Interestingly, Novak and Kollmann note that one other site, Turner-Look, which is near the Colorado-Utah border and hence much further east than the other sites and much closer to the Anasazi cannibalism assemblages, has been suspected in the past of having evidence for cannibalism, but they say a recent reanalysis has found no such evidence, although there is some evidence for violence. If more Fremont sites with assemblages like this begin to emerge, especially further east, it might be possible to get a better sense of how this all fits together.

Janetski, J. (2002). Trade in Fremont society: contexts and contrasts Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, 21 (3), 344-370 DOI: 10.1016/S0278-4165(02)00003-X

Novak, S. A., & Kollmann, D. D. (2000). Perimortem Processing Of Human Remains Among The Great Basin
Fremont International Journal of Osteoarchaeology, 10, 65-75

 

The Circle and the Cross

Quartered Circle at Three Rivers Petroglyph Site

Today is a momentous day, of course. As the winter solstice, it marks the fourth anniversary of this blog. It also might be an important date in the Maya Long Count (although opinions differ). It’s not the end of the world, which should be apparent by now. In recognition of the Maya date and my general practice of blogging about archaeoastronomy on significant celestial events, I thought I’d write about a couple of papers focusing on a Mesoamerican symbol with apparent astronomic significance and a thought-provoking connection to the Southwest.

The first paper, published in 1978 in Science, was written by Anthony Aveni and two co-authors (one of whom appears to have been one of his students). Aveni is a prominent figure in archaeoastronomy, especially of Mesoamerica, and was one of the first researchers to do careful measurements of astronomical alignments at ancient sites. In this paper he and his co-authors discuss a symbol found at several Mesoamerican sites consisting of a cross concentric with one or more circles, with the arms of the cross usually extending beyond the circle(s). These symbols were usually made by pecking a series of dots into either a rock face or the floor of a room, and their alignments appear to have often been significant. They are most common at Teotihuacan, where they were generally oriented with the arms of the cross aligned with the city’s street grid. This orientation had led some earlier authors to interpret them as surveying marks used in laying out the streets. The authors of this paper consider that interpretation a possibility, but not necessarily the only one. There are other examples of these symbols in sites near Teotihuacan that have other orientations, some of which seem to align with prominent landmarks on the horizon that may have been used in astronomical observations.

Aveni et al. also make a big deal out of the number of dots from which these figures are made, which is quite consistent in many cases with the total often tantalizingly close to 260, the number of days in the pan-Mesoamerican ritual calendar. There may be something to this, but as is often the case with these numerological theories there’s a question of how close is close enough. (This also applies to alleged astronomical alignments.) They kind of throw a whole slew of interpretations at the numbers of dots in various parts of various examples; some of these may be meaningful, but it seems doubtful that all of them are at the same time.

A more interesting pattern is the geographical distribution of these apparently rare symbols. While they are most numerous in and around Teotihuacan, they are also present surprisingly far afield: as far south as the Maya cities of Uaxactun and as far north as the area of Alta Vista near the Tropic of Cancer. While widespread, these are all areas known to have been influenced by Teotihuacan during its period of greatest power, and the authors make the reasonable suggestion that the pecked cross symbol was associated with this influence. In trying to interpret its meaning, they note similarities to diagrams of Mesoamerican calendars (which are indeed intriguing), as well as the previously mentioned idea that they were orientational devices for surveying, and even the resemblance to descriptions of the holes pecked into house floors as boards for the game patolli in Conquest-era sources. It’s quite possible that they were all of these, of course, or that different examples had different functions. The main conclusion the authors come to is that they are associated strongly with Teotihuacan in some fashion.

An article in American Antiquity two years later made an effort to flesh out what that connection might have been. Written by the Mayanist Clemency Coggins, this article interprets the cross-in-circle motif in Mesoamerica as an example of a larger class of “four-part  figures” that are associated primarily with the sun, especially with its daily cycle through the sky as well as its yearly cycle. Coggins notes various examples of Maya hieroglyphs and other symbols that have the form of quartered circles or crosses and pushes back against earlier interpretations of them as referring to the cardinal directions. Indeed, she argues that the Maya didn’t even really have a concept of “cardinal directions” comparable to the European one: instead, they had two directions that mattered, east and west, where the sun rises and sets, with accompanying symbolism. The areas in between sometimes had symbolism associated with them, but they usually functioned as stand-ins for “up” (north) and “down” (south), which were much more symbolically charged. Coggins sees the quartered circle as representing the daily movement of the sun and as properly interpreted vertically rather than horizontally. Thus, the four points stand for sunrise, zenith, sunset, and nadir, not east, north, west, and south. The position of the sun at zenith (directly overhead) was an important phenomenon for the Maya and probably other Mesoamericans; it only happens in the Tropics and is a foreign concept to societies in temperate zones.

Coggins interprets an early structure at Uaxactun, a pyramidal platform with four stairways, as a symbol of this four-part idea. She argues that its function was likely as a solar observatory, as the three small temples to the east line up with the positions of the sunrise on the solstices and equinoxes viewed from it. This same group of buildings is also noteworthy in that three stelae erected there commemorate the endings of twenty-year periods known as k’atuns, and two of them are the earliest known examples of stelae marking this sort of calendrical event. (Or at least they were at the time Coggins was writing; I don’t know if this is still the case, but if earlier k’atun-marking stelae have been found since then that would undermine her argument somewhat, as explained below.) The event we are (maybe) observing today is the ending of a much longer cycle known as a bak’tun, but is conceptually similar. Coggins distinguishes these “calendric” celebrations and monuments from “historic” ones tied to important events in the lives of kings. She argues that the latter were the focus of all previous monuments and indicate a focus on royal dynasties and the private rituals of the nobility in Maya political life, whereas the celebration of the end of a k’atun and the erection of a monument commemorating it is a more public, popular, universal sort of ritual less focused on the glory of particular lineages and kings.

Highly Elaborated Quartered Circle at Three Rivers Petroglyph Site

But what does all this have to do with quartered circles? Well, Coggins notes that shortly after these two stelae were erected in Uaxactun (in AD 357), another stela at Uaxactun shows an individual with non-Maya costume and weapons more associated with central Mexico, which at this time would have been dominated by Teotihuacan. This stela also refers to the nearby city of Tikal, which is well known to have seen extensive central Mexican influence at this time, including a king named Curl Snout who was apparently at least partly Mexican himself. This is also the period when the pecked cross at Uaxactun discussed by Aveni et al. was likely made, and here we see some supporting evidence for their theory that the pecked crosses are associated with the expansion of Teotihuacano influence. The first k’atun ending stela at Tikal was erected by Curl Snout and marks the first k’atun ending of his reign (in AD 396). Coggins concludes from this association between Mexican influence and the celebration of k’atun endings that the latter practice was introduce as part of the former phenomenon.

She supports this idea in part with the clear evidence that the god Tlaloc was of considerable importance to these Mexicans in the Maya country, which is unsurprising since he was probably the most important god at Teotihuacan itself. Tlaloc is a god of rain, which was very important to agricultural people in the Valley of Mexico, which is high and relatively dry (at least compared to the lush Maya Lowlands). He was associated as well with the celebration of the solar year, the cycles of which are closely connected to seasonal changes in rainfall patterns among many agricultural societies. This may account for the prevalence of the pecked cross/quartered circle motif at Teotihuacan, if as Coggins implies it symbolized not just the solar day but the solar year as well. Apparently some of the Tlaloc images in Curl Snout’s tomb at Tikal had similar symbols on their headdresses, so the association between the god and the symbol seems well-supported regardless of its origin. Coggins interprets Curl Snout as having introduced a Tlaloc cult to Tikal, presumably from Tenochtitlan, which involved the celebration of the solar year and the sidelining of the old rituals of the established noble lineages that had previously been the focus of Maya official religion. This cult apparently also included the celebration of the twenty-year k’atuns, though Coggins never gives a good explanation for why this would have been the case.

Over time the Mexican kings apparently became assimilated to Maya culture, and Tlaloc was similarly conflated with the Maya rain god Chac, but the celebration of k’atuns continued and by Late Classic times it involved special complexes of paired pyramids with four stairways each, much like the early structure at Uaxactun but on a much grander scale. These were paired on the east and west sides of a plaza and apparently used primarily for the celebration of k’atun endings. The north and south sides often had smaller structures with celestial and underworld symbolism respectively, consistent with the idea that they represented zenith and nadir. All of this is best known from Tikal, but Coggins notes that there are some indications from other sites such as Uaxactun and Yaxha that similar processes of Mexican influence and a shift to k’atun celebration occurred similarly.

That’s the story Coggins tells, anyway. It’s an interesting one, and somewhat convincing at least in some of its broad strokes, but I can’t help thinking that Maya archaeology has come a long way since 1980, especially with a better ability to understand the writing system, and I wonder if Coggins’s historical interpretations, based on essentially art-historical methods, still hold up. In any case, the association between Teotihuacan, Tlaloc, and the quartered circle is the key thing I take away from this paper, and that probably holds up better than the political history. The association is important because there’s another place that is known for its quartered circles, one which is not mentioned at all in either of these papers. That’s probably because it’s very far away from both Teotihuacan and Tikal.

Complex Panels at Three Rivers Petroglyph Site

Three Rivers in southern New Mexico is one of the most spectacular petroglyph sites in the whole Southwest. It’s one of the most important locations for rock art of the Jornada Style, associated with the Jornada Mogollon culture that existed in south-central New Mexico and adjacent West Texas from about AD 1050 to 1400. Unlike the rock art of the Anasazi area further north, including Chaco, which was highly stylized and repetitive, Jornada Style rock art is astonishingly naturalistic and elaborate. It is full of lifelike human faces and masks, animals with fully realized eyes and teeth, and imagery that is often remarkably Mesoamerican. The examples of parallels to Mexican art are numerous and fairly obvious, and not very surprising given the Jornada’s southerly location and proximity to the very Mesoamerican-seeming center of Casas Grandes, which flourished during this same period. What’s more surprising is the similarity between the Jornada Style and the later Rio Grande Style further north, which contains many of the same symbols and stylistic conventions. This implies that the Jornada served as a conduit for Mesoamerican ideas to the later Pueblos. Polly and Curtis Schaafsma have argued, convincingly in my view, that the kachina cult that is so important among the modern Pueblos originated among the Jornada, citing the masks and other symbols in Jornada rock art as their main line of evidence.

Kachinas are rain spirits, and as Polly Schaafsma notes in her book on Southwestern rock art, the kachina cult bears many notable similarities to the Tlaloc cult in Mexico. And, indeed, one of the most common motifs in Jornada rock art is the goggle eyes that are among Tlaloc’s standard attributes further south. Other Mexican gods such as Quetzalcoatl appear to be present in the Jornada petroglyphs as well, and Tlaloc is surely not the only deity who was transmitted in altered form to the Pueblos, but given the importance of rain in the arid Southwest the appeal of a rain cult is obvious.

What about the quartered circle? As we saw from the first two papers, this symbol was certainly associated strongly with Teotihuacan, where Tlaloc was the most important god, and it was probably associated to at least some degree with Tlaloc himself, whose popularity in Mexico lasted much longer than Teotihuacan’s political power and cultural influence. And yet, the quartered circle is virtually absent from the Southwest. Simple crosses, often outlined, are common, but they are generally interpreted as stars and typically associated with the Feathered Serpent, which is probably a version of Quetzalcoatl. The cross and circle, however, is almost never seen in the Southwest, except in one place: Three Rivers.

Two Quartered Circles at Three Rivers Petroglyph Site

Schaafsma says in her book that what she calls the “circle-dot motif” is actually the most common element at the site, citing an obscure unpublished manuscript. It’s not clear how she defines this motif, as there are many petroglyphs at Three Rivers that consist of circles surrounded by dots, with the inside of the circle sometimes blank, sometimes filled with a larger dot, sometimes filled with a series of concentric circles, but often filled with a cross. (The illustration in Schaafsma’s book for this motif shows one of the crosses.) These quartered circles, usually but not always surrounded by dots, are very prominent at the site. What’s striking about this is how unique they are to this one site, especially given the importance of similar symbols in Mesoamerica as documented by Aveni et al. and Coggins. Aveni et al. actually mention some similar symbols in the rock art of California and Nevada, but they seem to have been unaware of the Three Rivers examples. The dots are especially interesting, given that the Teotihuacan examples are made of dots. That isn’t the case here, but the dots are clearly important. They give a solar feel to many of the symbols, especially those with concentric circles, which ties in to Coggins’s interpretation of the symbol as reflecting the passage of the sun. And remember those Tlalocs with their goggle eyes, present at Three Rivers as well as at virtually every other Jornada Style site. They clearly show not only that Mesoamerican religious symbols could and did travel this far north, but that the specific god associated with the quartered circle elsewhere was among the most prominent examples.

So what’s the explanation here? I confess that I don’t have one except to suppose that this symbol was of particular importance to the people who made the petroglyphs at Three Rivers, probably primarily people who lived at the contemporaneous village site nearby. I think it’s quite likely that this was a symbol particularly associated with that community, or perhaps with a specific social group within it, and that it is ultimately connected in some way to the symbols further south. Note that some of the pecked crosses described by Aveni et al. were quite far north in Mexico, some near the Tropic of Cancer and one described in a nineteenth-century source as being near the US border (though its exact location is unknown). The latter in particular would probably more or less close the geographic gap between the others and Three Rivers, while the examples near the Tropic of Cancer may have been associated with the nearby site of Alta Vista, which was occupied at a time that would fill much of the temporal gap between Teotihuacan and Three Rivers as well. It’s certainly hard to come to firm conclusions about things like this, of course, and the fact that the quartered circle doesn’t appear to have spread from Three Rivers to any other Jornada Mogollon groups or to the later Pueblos is problematic. Still, it’s a fascinating little glimpse into the complexity of the past and the possibilities that emerge from careful study and an open mind.

Aveni, A., Hartung, H., & Buckingham, B. (1978). The Pecked Cross Symbol in Ancient Mesoamerica Science, 202 (4365), 267-286 DOI: 10.1126/science.202.4365.267

Coggins, C. (1980). The Shape of Time: Some Political Implications of a Four-Part Figure American Antiquity, 45 (4) DOI: 10.2307/280144

Introducing Alaska: Conclusion

Sunset over Mount Susitna from Anchorage, Alaska

Overall, the five books on my reading list were all very interesting and I’m glad I read them. Their usefulness to someone interested in Alaska but not in my specific situation varies, however. I think the most useful single book on the list as a general introduction to Alaska is McPhee. Also good as a general introduction to the Arctic, but not focused on Alaska specifically, is Lopez. For those with a more historical interest in the state, Marshall is great; conversely, for those more interested in the idea of how someone might live “off the grid” in the Alaska wilderness, Proenneke would be a better choice. Finally, Miles is good for those interested in the details of National Park Service history, a small group to be sure but one probably heavily overrepresented among my readership.

I’ve read a lot more about Alaska than these five books, of course, but I’ve decided that further discussion of Alaska is probably best suited for a different blog (or possibly more than one). From now on this blog will focus specifically on the prehistory of the Southwest and related issues, although I will of course let my readers here know of any additional blog projects I start on other topics.

Introducing Alaska: Lopez

Sea Ice, Barrow, Alaska

The fifth and final book on my reading list was Arctic Dreams by Barry Lopez. This book occupies a distinctive place on the list not so much because of its subject matter, which overlaps various of the other books to varying degrees, as because of its tone, which is quite different from all the others. The tone here is not journalistic or scientific but literary, with extended passages of lyrical reflection on landscapes and ecosystems that make reading it a very different experience from the other books. Lopez writes novels in addition to his nonfiction, which puts the tone into its proper perspective, I think. It’s a very interesting book in a variety of ways. The focus is on the North American Arctic as a whole, so Alaska plays a role but considerably more attention is given to Canada, which encompasses a larger geographic area and has been more central to a lot of the history Lopez describes as context for contemporary issues. Nevertheless, the issues Lopez discusses in the Canadian context generally have parallels in Alaska (as well as in Greenland, and for that matter in the European and Siberian Arctic, which Lopez barely mentions), and it makes sense to discuss the Arctic as a whole despite its internal diversity.

Despite the aforementioned literary tone, this is definitely a work of nonfiction, which might be classed as popular science for want of a better category. Lopez describes various aspects of the Arctic, mostly focusing on the animals, the landscapes, and the indigenous peoples, with an overall emphasis on the fragility of all these systems and the way they are threatened by modern Western society and its recent interest in industrial development in the North. This fits right in to the tradition of environmentalist writing represented by the likes of Rachel Carson and Edward Abbey, but Lopez gives it his own distinctive stamp. He is clearly enchanted by the landscapes and wildlife he sees, and worried about how they will fare in a world of oil drilling and strip mining, but he also clearly recognizes the ambiguities of the situation, the importance of the perspectives of indigenous hunters even when their ideas might be incompatible with those of white environmentalists, and the inevitability of a certain amount of development given the prevailing circumstances. He points to previous incidents of inadvertent environmental destruction in the Arctic, such as the devastation of whale populations by nineteenth-century whalers, as important cautionary tales for those who would ponder tapping the resources of the North, but he stops short of a blanket demand that no extraction take place. He recognizes the power of industry at the same time that he fears it, and seems to ultimately offer only a caution to be careful and consult with the locals before making any hasty decisions. He makes a big deal out of a visit the CEO of an international shipping company happened to make to an Inuit hunting camp while he was staying there. The CEO had heard about reports that the company’s ships were disturbing the wildlife the hunters depended on, and he asked them about the issues and listened to what they said. This obviously sounds like a publicity stunt, but Lopez interprets the way it was done as an important contrast to the superficial way such stunts are usually done, and points to it as a hopeful sign for the future. Whether he was right to do so is unclear, but it’s an interesting, nuanced approach to issues on which he clearly has strong opinions.

Lopez published this book in the mid-1980s, and from the perspective of today one of the most striking things about it is that for all his pessimism about the environmental future of the Arctic he never once mentions anthropogenic climate change. The idea of global warming was certainly around at the time, but it had not yet emerged as a major concern even in environmental circles, and the threats to the Arctic environment that Lopez describes are all the result of human actions on ecosystems that are fragile but otherwise stable. Nowadays it seems pretty striking that threats to the Arctic environment could be envisioned this way; the effects of climate change are already quite apparent in Arctic regions, and such effects as melting permafrost and accelerated coastal erosion are already having substantial effects on communities in Alaska and elsewhere. Furthermore, some of the effects of climate change, such as lower sea ice extent (which hit a record minimum this past summer), open the door to increased shipping, mining, and other industrial activity in the Arctic. These are precisely the local threats Lopez focuses on in the book, but there they look like isolated phenomena, whereas now they seem to be part of a larger and more dire picture. Obviously this is not really a criticism of Lopez. He wrote when he did, and his perspective was based on the information then available. It’s only now, with more information and a changed perspective, that climate change looks like such a major background presence shaping a changing North.

Overall, this is an interesting book, and a useful supplement to the others I read. I can see why it was at the bottom of the list: it doesn’t focus on Alaska specifically, and the part of Alaska it does relate to is a relatively small part of the state (though a very important one). As a stand-alone volume, however, it would probably be a better choice for the general reader than some of the others that ranked higher on my list.

Introducing Alaska: Marshall

Aerial View of the Brooks Range

The fourth book on my reading list was Arctic Village by Bob Marshall. Marshall was an important figure in the wilderness movement of the early twentieth century and one of the founders of The Wilderness Society, and John Miles discusses him in this context in his book, but Arctic Village actually has relatively little to say about Marshall’s wilderness advocacy. Instead it is a detailed sociological study of the upper Koyukuk River area in the central Brooks Range of north-central Alaska in the early 1930s, focused on the community of Wiseman. Marshall came to the Koyukuk more or less on a whim and stayed for about a year, ostensibly to study tree growth at the northern tree line as part of his PhD studies in forestry at Johns Hopkins University, but as he admits right at the beginning of the book he didn’t end up learning much about the trees because he spent most of his time hanging out with and learning about the people. The book is the result of that learning.

It’s a fascinating book in a bunch of ways, and probably the most interesting to me of the five on my reading list. Marshall had a very specific agenda in writing it, which was essentially to present the society of Wiseman and the Upper Koyukuk as a sort of utopian “civilization” that could serve as a model for society in general. His methods were those of social science rather than history or memoir, and the book is full of numbers and statistics. These are generally of dubious value for generalizing beyond the Koyukuk itself, but the amount of work Marshall put into collecting and analyzing them is impressive. Marshall himself comes across as something of an odd guy. He was a committed socialist and atheist, and he emphasizes the aspects of Koyukuk society that align well with these ideologies and downplays those that don’t. To his credit, however, he does include and acknowledge the data that conflicts with his overall thesis, although he doesn’t emphasize it. A few portions of the book are in the form of narrative or dialogue, but most of it is the sober recitation of statistics. Marshall clearly wanted it to be taken seriously as sociology, and it seems that it was. It was an enormous commercial success among general readers as well, which ironically led to a surge in tourism to Wiseman that quickly changed the character of the society Marshall had extolled.

The society Marshall describes is basically that of a small community of gold miners and others providing services to them during a “bust” period in the boom-and-bust cycle that has long characterized the economy of Alaska. There are fewer than 200 residents in the huge area Marshall covers, a small fraction of the number during the “boom” period of the 1910s in this area. Marshall’s attempts to portray this society as a “civilization” at all, let alone one that could serve as a model for people everywhere, are therefore quite unconvincing. He argues at one point that the Koyukuk might be able to carry on without any contact from the larger society for as much as a couple of years, which I think just emphasizes the extent to which this was a distant, frontier appendage of a much larger civilization rather than an alternative to it.

This impression is intensified by the realization, amply documented in Marshall’s detailed demographic tables, that the society he describes is mostly composed of older white men, mostly those who originally came in earlier gold rushes and ended up staying for various reasons. This group is supplemented by a sizable minority of Eskimos, who are also not indigenous to this specific area but came from other parts of northern Alaska following the gold miners and the opportunities they presented to supplement a fundamental hunting-and-gathering economy with occasional wage work. Marshall describes both the white and Eskimo populations in  considerable detail and romanticizes both to some extent, although there is no obvious reason to discount the accuracy of his data. One point he emphasizes is the relative lack of racial prejudice, which would have been a considerable difference from most of the US at the time. It’s worth noting that the fact that  nearly all the women in the area were Eskimo may have had a significant impact on the white miners’ opinions about the Eskimos, and Marshall does in fact go on at some length about the attractiveness of the young Eskimo women.

Overall this is a fascinating snapshot of life in rural Alaska at a certain point in time, as well as a largely unintentional glimpse into the psyche of an important figure in the modern wilderness movement. I liked it a lot, although others might find the extensive tables and lists a bit much.

Introducing Alaska: Proenneke

Aerial View of Port Alsworth, Alaska

Moving from the general to the specific on the issue of wilderness, the third book on my reading list was One Man’s Wilderness by Sam Keith and Dick Proenneke. The authorship of this book is somewhat complicated; basically, it was based on the journals Proenneke kept in the late 1960s while building a cabin at Twin Lakes in what later became Lake Clark National Park and reworked into a book by Keith, a writer who was a friend of Proenneke. Keith’s influence can be seen especially in some of the earlier passages where Proenneke describes at length events that took place over the course of weeks. This part doesn’t seem much like a diary. Most of the book, however, does feel like it has been taken mostly verbatim from Proenneke’s journals. The time period covered is roughly one year, during which Proenneke built his cabin almost entirely from scratch, using only hand tools.

This is a classic work in the Alaska wilderness literature. Proenneke filmed himself building the cabin, and the footage he produced later became the basis for an accompanying PBS documentary called Alone in the Wildnerness. Between the book and the documentary, Proenneke has become a household name among the sorts of people who know about wilderness and national parks in Alaska. It’s an interesting read just to see what it took for him to survive in the rather harsh conditions he encountered with very few resources at his disposal. From the time period covered by the book it’s not apparent what would happen to Proenneke (it ends as he leaves Alaska to care for his sick father back in Iowa), but he ended up returning to the cabin and living there for over 30 years, until he got too old for the rigorous lifestyle. When Twin Lakes became part of the newly created Lake Clark National Park in 1980 Proenneke was allowed to stay, and his cabin is now one of the most popular sites in the park.

It’s worth noting, however, that there are some odd things about this book. Unlike most other people who have come to the Alaska wilderness from elsewhere, Proenneke was not seeking gold, furs, or any other material gain. He came to Twin Lakes to retire after having worked as a ranch hand and laborer for many years, most recently in Kodiak. There is therefore a certain lack of grounding to his account of building the cabin and all of his daily activities. It’s interesting to read about everything he had to do to live out there, but it’s never clear just why he’s there. Ultimately he seems to just be there because he loves the wilderness so much, but still, that’s a hell of a commitment to wilderness making him do all that work for that alone.

It’s also noteworthy, in the context of the story John Miles tells about wilderness and the national parks, that Proenneke’s idea of wilderness doesn’t really match up with the concept of wilderness enshrined in the Wilderness Act, promoting by organizations like The Wilderness Society, and now protected by the National Park Service and other agencies. Proenneke didn’t just visit the wilderness; he lived there. Indeed, he moved there and built a cabin, which is in some ways the diametric opposite of the wilderness ideal of a land untouched by human activity. And yet, rather than a villain appropriating the wilderness for his own use, Proenneke is seen today by wilderness advocates primarily as a hero and a role model. There’s a definite tension here that I don’t think has ever been resolved.

Also, it’s worth noting that for all his rhetoric about getting away from it all and rejecting the modern world Proenneke arrived at Twin Lakes in an airplane. That plane was piloted by Babe Alsworth, a legendary bush pilot who moved to the shores of Lake Clark in the 1940s and founded what would become the community of Port Alsworth, which is now totally surrounded by Lake Clark National Park and the site of the park’s field headquarters. Alsworth continued to bring Proenneke’s mail (including supplies he had ordered) and to stop by from time to time to check on him. Proenneke did live off the land to a considerable degree, but he was nowhere close to self-sufficient. He talks about all of this in the book, but he never discusses how he paid for it. He must have saved up quite a bit of money in his working days.

Proenneke also doesn’t really put his own effort into the context of the times. To be fair, there’s no particular reason to expect him to do so, but it’s worth noting what else was going on at the time. The 1960s and 1970s were a time when many people (often called “rusticators”) were flocking to Alaska to live in cabins in the wilderness, and Proenneke was both part of this movement and an inspiration for later stages of it, largely through Keith’s book, which was originally published in 1973. The people John McPhee saw living like this on the Yukon near Eagle in the mid-1970s were also part of the general trend. Proenneke knew many of the other rusticators in his area, but they don’t show up in the book, and the impression it gives is that he was completely alone out there aside from Babe Alsworth’s occasional visits. That may well have been true for that first year, but it definitely was not for thirty years after that during which Proenneke remained a fixture of the region.

Overall, this is a good book, and a short and entertaining account of the Alaska wilderness and what it takes to live there. I didn’t make it out to Proenneke’s cabin while I was working for the Park Service, but I did get to Port Alsworth and other parts of the park. It’s a beautiful area, well worth a visit for those who can afford the (substantial) cost of getting there. This book definitely only gives a narrow perspective on Alaska and excludes a lot of important things, but taken for what it is it’s a good read.

Introducing Alaska: Miles

Crescent Lake, Lake Clark National Park

The second book on my reading list was Wilderness in National Parks: Playground or Preserve by John C. Miles. This book is pretty different from all the other books on the list in a number of ways. For one thing, it’s an academic monograph rather than a work of popular nonfiction. In addition, it’s not exclusively about Alaska, but is instead a general history of the concept of “wilderness” in relation to the National Park Service. Alaska is an important part of this story, so Miles devotes two whole chapters to it, along with occasional mentions of Alaska parks in other chapters, but this is definitely a general work rather than a specifically Alaska-focused one. For both of these reasons, it wouldn’t be high on the list of books I would recommend to someone looking to learn about Alaska in general.

It was, however, a very useful book for me to read while working for the Park Service. The issues Miles discusses are at the heart of National Park management in Alaska (more so than in many other parts of the country), and the history he describes is crucial to understanding why Alaska parks are the way they are and why the NPS manages them the way it does.

The crucial idea to keep in mind in any discussion of wilderness and National Parks is that “wilderness” has a very specific meaning in the context of federal land management. While in popular usage it generally refers to land that is simply undeveloped and has a vaguely “wild” feel to it, for federal agencies it refers specifically to land designated by Congress as part of the National Wilderness Preservation System following the specifications in the Wilderness Act of 1964. Designation as wilderness adds a number of restrictions to what a federal agency can do with a specific area of land. It only affects federal land already managed by one of the land management agencies: National Park Service (NPS), Forest Service (FS), Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), and Bureau of Land Management (BLM). The exact restrictions vary by agency, but in general they are intended to keep the agency from building roads or permanent structures, and for some agencies they also restrict what sorts of activities the agency can permit outside entities to do. For example, the FWS is generally able to permit mining on National Wildlife Refuges subject to various conditions, but no mining is permitted in the parts of refuges designated as wilderness. (Mining is prohibited in National Parks in general, so wilderness doesn’t add any additional protection to park lands in this case.)

Because the mission of the NPS is fairly narrow and oriented toward preserving natural conditions, wilderness designation does not have as much effect on National Parks as it does on other federal lands managed by agencies with missions that can at time conflict with preservation. The main effect it has on NPS lands is to prevent the Park Service itself from developing roads and visitor facilities, as well as limiting the methods park managers can use to carry out certain operations. Miles chronicles the way this came about, which includes the extensive development of roads and facilities in the early decades of the agency’s operation and the resulting backlash among many conservation organizations which eventually led to the push for the Wilderness Act, which the NPS strenuously opposed at the time. Despite the Park Service argument that it was doing a good job of preserving wilderness in parks and that additional protection was unnecessary, the act eventually passed, and the agency grudgingly carried out the evaluations of park lands for wilderness designation that it mandated.

Where Alaska comes into this story is that in the aftermath of the Wilderness Act and the designation of wilderness in many existing parks attention in conservation circles turned to Alaska and the potential for designation of wilderness areas on a scale unimaginable anywhere else. There were a few National Parks already in existence in Alaska before statehood in 1959, but a series of events following statehood led to a major push in the 1970s to establish many more, and to make them primarily wilderness parks.

First, the Alaska Statehood Act provided for the federal government to convey a huge amount of land to the State of Alaska. The state began to make its selections of land it wanted, but as this process went forward in the 1960s concern began to rise among both conservationists and Alaska Natives that the state was selecting lands that each group considered important for its own purposes, and it was likely that the state’s ultimate plans for these lands would conflict with those purposes. The discovery of vast oil reserves at Prudhoe Bay on the North Slope in 1968 added a heightened urgency to the settlement of land claims, which was a necessary condition for building the pipeline that would be essential for getting the oil to market. The Natives were in the strongest position to negotiate at this point, and the result was the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971 (ANCSA), which settled Native claims in an unprecedented way that involved the setting up of a series of for-profit corporations to provide a continuing income for Native groups. These corporations, like the state, were entitled to designated amounts of hitherto federal land, and they began making their selections just as the state had.

ANCSA also contained some provisions for certain lands to be withdrawn from selection to be studied for their potential to remain in federal ownership as conservation areas. Many conservationists thought these provisions were overly weak, but studies went forward over the course of the 1970s. (The river trip McPhee took in the Arctic and described in his book was part of this effort.) The culmination of this effort, and a continuing lobbying effort by conservationists, was another law, the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act of 1980 (ANILCA). This act designated many new National Parks and Wildlife Refuges, expanded the boundaries of some of the existing ones, and additionally designated much of this land as wilderness.

Miles devotes a lot of attention to ANILCA and the periods both before and after its passage because this was a new direction for wilderness in the parks. Instead of trying to stave off development of the few remaining remnants of wilderness in Lower 48 parks, ANILCA designated intact, pristine areas of wilderness in blocks of millions of acres each. (Of course, none of this land was quite as pristine as wilderness advocates sometimes implied, but it was still much less impacted by human activity than almost any parkland anywhere else in the country.) The scale of this effort was unprecedented, and the people who came to Alaska to work on it were quite sincerely devoted to the wilderness ideology and enthusiastic about their achievements. That helped set the tone for park management in Alaska, which has continued to have a strong wilderness focus and to strenuously avoid talk of development or increasing opportunities for visitor access.

Needless to say, this makes planning for the parks in Alaska a rather different enterprise than planning for parks elsewhere. Mostly it consists of planning to do nothing, which leads to the inevitable question of why plan at all. In the rare cases when there is a compelling reason to plan for physical changes in the parks, the number of bureaucratic obstacles to navigate is impressive. This was one of the biggest frustrations of doing this work for me, and one of the main reasons I think that job was not the best fit for me. I’m glad these lands are being protected as wilderness, and I’m glad someone is working on continuing to keep them that way (at least most of the time), but I’m also glad that someone is no longer me.