Touring Deep Time, Part 2

As I wrote in PART 1 (you did read Part 1, didn’t you?)

On our recent tour through New Mexico and Arizona, my wife Molly and I found ourselves in the presence of some deep time. And by “found ourselves” I mean “planned our trip to be.” The trip included Ghost Ranch, a Presbyterian camp and conference center near Abiquiu in northern New Mexico, the Chaco Culture National Historical Park a couple hours west, Meteor Crater near Winslow, Arizona (which has its own little time loop), and the Grand Canyon in northern Arizona. An unscheduled but anticipated stop at Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, AZ, fit into the scheme as well. Each site confronted us with history on scales from human generations to older than human civilization, to a significant fraction of the age of Planet Earth.

Chaco Canyon

Our next stop was the Chaco Culture National Historical Park. This is a Native American and World Heritage Site that served as the center of a vast economic, political, and religious sphere of influence reaching as far as California and Mexico from 850 to 1250 CE (in the Common Era). I have wanted to visit Chaco for years since I learned about it, because it has a number of sites and architectural elements that are aligned with celestial events such as the solstices and equinoxes. So it’s an ancient astronomy site, and as an astronomy enthusiast, that’s fascinating to me.

In the book In Search of Time: The History, Physics, and Philosophy of Time by Dan Falk (© 2008 by Dan Falk, McClelland & Stewart Ltd., Toronto), the author describes other similar ancient astronomical sites and warns against calling them observatories, because that suggests a level of study and intention associated with modern scientific endeavor that we can’t assume or confirm for an ancient culture. It is most likely that the ancients were concerned primarily with the agricultural and subsequent religio-cultural times the heavens revealed more than the nature of the heavenly bodies themselves. Nevertheless, the accuracy with which the Chacoans and others were able to mark those celestial events with stone and architecture is remarkable.

The Chaco Canyon complex is enormous, much larger than I had imagined. Pilgrims and traders who travelled hundreds of miles on foot to get there would have been rewarded with an impressive expanse of urban hustle and bustle. Five great houses have been identified in the canyon, each covering dozens of acres. Over four hundred smaller structures have been found using modern technology like ground-penetrating radar and lidar but remain unexcavated. The great houses appear to include a mix of apartments, religious buildings, and perhaps governmental offices or shops, or both, everything you would need for a large crowd gathering for festivals in a capital city. The stonework of the architecture is exquisite with tightly-fitting, thin, flat stones laid expertly and held with a mud mortar. Much of this, as beautiful as I found it to be, was in its day covered with plaster to present a clean, bright facade to the public.

I was confronted with my modern bias when I found myself thoroughly surprised at the sophistication of the structures for people who lived twelve centuries ago. My bias comes into sharper focus when I consider the cathedrals of Europe that were built in the same era. I’ve been taught to expect that for white Europeans such building projects were normal and expected but that Native Americans were just living in animal hide tents and stick huts. It ain’t necessarily so. History, it seems, has more stories to tell than we often get to hear.

Keep going! See also: Part 1, Part 3, Part 4,