I’ve already questioned the idea that the decline of Chaco Canyon as a regional center in the twelfth century constitutes an example of societal “collapse,” but there’s another major event in Southwestern prehistory that could conceivably qualify.  This is the large-scale and apparently complete depopulation of the entire Northern San Juan region between AD 1280 and 1300.  This cultural region, which covers large parts of southwestern Colorado and southeastern Utah, is often called the “Mesa Verde” region, after the well-known cluster of sites on and around Mesa Verde now part of major national park, but it also includes many other areas, including the recently designated Canyons of the Ancients National Monument and the Cedar Mesa/Grand Gulch area in Utah.  All of this vast area, as well as the parts of the San Juan Basin to the south that were still occupied after the decline of Chaco, seems to have been abandoned astonishingly rapidly.  The western parts in Utah were apparently abandoned first, starting around the 1260s, and all construction and other apparent activity came to a very abrupt halt throughout the region by 1280.  In some areas, such as Mesa Verde proper, construction was quite active throughout the 1270s, making the total lack of evidence for construction in the 1280s particularly remarkable.

So what happened here?  There are two main types of explanations, environmental and social, and their relative popularity has varied over the years.  The environmental explanation depends largely on the striking coincidence of the abandonment of Mesa Verde with the so-called “Great Drought” of AD 1276 to 1299, one of the earliest major climatic events to be identified in the tree-ring record.  The near-perfect alignment of the drought with the final abandonment of the area is indeed remarkable, and this explanation has been pretty popular and remains so today, but there is considerable evidence that there was more going on.  For one thing, while all of the Southwest is in some sense marginal for agriculture, within that context the northern San Juan is one of the most productive and reliable agricultural areas.  Indeed, much of southwestern Colorado is used today for commercial farming, largely using dry-farming methods not all that different from those used in antiquity.  The Mesa Verde area gets plenty of rainfall, and while a short growing season can be an issue at the higher elevations, throughout most of the region it is not generally problematic.  Models of agricultural potential based on tree-ring data have generally shown that the carrying capacity of the Northern San Juan greatly exceeded any plausible estimate of its overall population throughout prehistory, although that doesn’t necessarily mean that individual communities would always be able to support themselves on the land they happened to have.

Social factors, then, are probably involved along with the drought.  There is definite evidence for a considerable amount of violence during the thirteenth century in this area, and settlement patterns become increasingly defensive over time.  There is also an increasing diversity in public architecture among the various communities, suggesting that traditional religious or ideological structures may have been breaking down and being replaced by new ones.  A strong tendency toward settlement aggregation, perhaps due to defensive considerations, may have played a role in these religious trends.  Furthermore, all of this may have been influenced or set in motion by deteriorating environmental conditions; environmental and social factors were not necessarily separate things.

So where did the people go?  The general assumption is that they mostly went to the northern Rio Grande Valley, which sees a remarkable increase in its population right around AD 1300, just as Mesa Verde is emptying out.  This is a bit problematic, however, since there is relatively little evidence for people with obvious Mesa Verde cultural traits showing up in the Rio Grande at this time.  This may be because people were emigrating away from Mesa Verde in small groups and assimilating into existing Rio Grande communities, or it may have been because people were changing their cultures as they moved, perhaps abandoning the old social institutions that had been ineffective in preventing the abandonment and adopting new ones that seemed to work better.  It’s hard to say, really, and this is a topic of ongoing research.  One interesting effort recently has been the Village Ecodynamics Project by Washington State University and Crow Canyon Archaeological Center, which has used agent-based modeling and other innovative techniques to try to understand the culture history of the Northern San Juan.

Okay, so that’s more or less what happened.  Does it count as a “collapse”?  Let’s look back at Jared Diamond’s criteria for collapse:

1. Collapse involves a major loss of population.
2. Collapse involves a loss of complexity.
3. Collapse occurs over a large geographic area.
4. The changes brought about by collapse persist for a long time.

In this case 1, 3, and 4 are pretty obvious.  The Mesa Verde region was totally depopulated, which is about as major a loss of population as you can get.  It’s also very large, and the changes that resulted from the abandonment of the region and the influx of population to the Rio Grande have persisted to the present day; many aspects of Mesa Verde culture notable in the archaeological record were not brought to the Rio Grande, and are not present in the modern Pueblos there.  Since Diamond apparently considers only one of the first two criteria to be necessary, he probably would consider this a collapse, but most other collapse theorists, including Joseph Tainter, consider loss of complexity to be a more important consideration than loss of population, so let’s look at complexity in the Mesa Verde case.

There basically isn’t any evidence for significantly complexity in Mesa Verde before its abandonment or in the Rio Grande afterwards.  Unlike the Chaco case, the villages in the thirteenth-century Northern San Juan seem to have had relatively egalitarian social structures, at least economically and probably politically as well.  This is not to say that there were definitely no disparities in political power, but that they were likely masked and subverted by an egalitarian ideology that prevented massive accumulation of wealth and power.  This is the case in the modern Pueblos, where despite some possible inequalities in power and political influence among different clans or societies the overall ideology has enforced a general economic equality.  This seems to have been the case in the thirteenth-century Northern San Juan as well, and it could have been in part a reaction to the perceived excesses of the Chacoan era, although it’s noteworthy that a certain amount of Chacoan influence seems to have persisted, especially in the Totah area around Aztec, albeit without much evidence for the economic inequality that marked the Chacoan era itself.

Mesa Verde doesn’t get mentioned in the collapse literature as much as Chaco, although sometimes the two are kind of muddled together incoherently, and for good reason.  What we seem to be seeing at Mesa Verde is a period of societal difficulty that resulted in depopulation and migration, a common pattern in Southwestern prehistory.  While there were some changes in society during the abandonment and migration that make it difficult to tell exactly where the people ended up, these changes don’t seem to have been related to any change in the overall complexity of the society, which remained about as complex as it had been before.

One of the biggest things to happen in Southwestern archaeology recently was the dramatic arrest in June 2009 of 24 people, most of them from Blanding, Utah, on charges of illegally excavating and selling artifacts from public lands.  The resulting criminal cases have been going on ever since, and they’ve mostly resulted in either plea deals or very light sentences after conviction.  Keith has done some reporting on this issue, including an interesting interview with Winston Hurst, an archaeologist from Blanding who has been put in a very awkward position by these events.  I was covering developments in the cases pretty closely for a while, but then things slowed down and recently I haven’t been keeping as close an eye on the cases as I was before.  One case I did follow with some interest was that of Bob Knowlton, an antiquities dealer from Grand Junction, Colorado.  He initially pleaded not guilty, but, like some other suspects, has recently changed his plea to guilty as part of a plea bargain under which the charges seem to have been reduced to two misdemeanors associated with the sale of a single artifact.  He claims to have purchased that artifact, a “cloud blower” pipe from Big Westwater Ruin near Blanding, from the family of Lamar Lindsay, the archaeologist who supervised excavation of the site,which is on BLM land.  It seems Lindsay, who worked for the state of Utah, discussed the pipe in his report on the site, but it somehow never ended up in the Utah Museum of Natural History with the rest of the artifacts from the site.  If Knowlton is telling the truth, it seems that Lindsay kept the pipe, and after his death someone in his family sold it to Knowlton.

This points to one aspect of these cases that doesn’t get discussed much: the role that some “professional” archaeologists have played, and probably continue to play, in the illicit antiquities trade on both the supply and demand sides.  These days archaeologists tend to portray themselves as “scientists” interested in knowledge as opposed to the “pothunters” who are only interested in material gain.  There’s quite a bit of truth to that characterization in the present context, but the distinction is pretty recent.  Some prominent Southwestern archaeologists of the early twentieth century began their careers as pothunters, and both they and other archaeologists continued to collect antiquities, often without much regard for their origin, well into the recent past.  I think it’s pretty likely that there are still archaeologists out there who do the sort of thing Knowlton is implying Lindsay did, i.e., keep particularly nice artifacts for their own collections, and there are probably even more who buy artifacts from others without paying too much attention to where they came from.

Even beyond that sort of thing, however, there’s really not all that much difference between “professional” archaeology and pothunting, as many Native Americans (and Craig Childs) would be quick to explain.  Both involve digging up artifacts and keeping them; the main distinction is (theoretically) that archaeologists keep careful records of what they find and make that information available to the scholarly community through publications.  Another distinction is that many artifacts from professional excavations end up in museums where the public can see them rather than in private collections, but given that the vast majority of the artifacts actually end up in the back storage facilities of museums rather than on display, this is something of a distinction without a difference.  I do think archaeology is worth doing, and that the information gained through excavation makes an important contribution to human knowledge, but let’s not kid ourselves about what’s really going on here or get up on any high horses.  If archaeologists want to convince the general public that what they do is good and what pothunters do is bad—and judging from both the opposition to archaeology among many tribes and the lenient sentences being handed down to the Blanding defendants, they are nowhere close to convincing enough people of either—they need to start doing a much better job of explaining the difference.  As Winston Hurst explained in Keith’s interview, if it continues to just seem like a dispute over who gets to dig up and keep artifacts, local people or government archaeologists, there’s no way the government is going to win in the court of public opinion.

That’s the title of this counterintuitive post from Jonathan Thompson, the editor-in-chief of an environmental magazine. He riffs off a brewing controversy over spectacular places in the Southwest that might soon be nominated as National Monuments.

Except it’s not some off-the-cuff riff. Thompson writes a poignant meditation on the complicated feelings he has about a quintessentially Western issue. It’s so pitch perfect I don’t even want to quote from it. I just encourage anyone with his own soulful remembrance of a landscape to read it.

After you’ve done that, I’ve got something else for you to consider. So head over to Thompson’s piece, then come back.

Okay, if you’ve ever spent time hiking or camping in the Southwest, particularly southern Utah, chances are you’re acquainted with a legendary nature writer, who, in the best damn book introduction I know of, reels the reader in with this kicker:

Finally a word of caution:

Do not jump into your automobile next June and rush out to the Canyon country hoping to see some of that which I have attempted to evoke in these pages. In the first place, you can’t see anything from a car; youv’e got to get out of the goddamn contraption and walk, better yet crawl, on hands and knees, over the sandstone adn through the thornbush and cactus. When traces of blood begin to mark your trail you’ll see something, maybe. Probably not.

In the second place, most of what I write about in this book is already gone or going under fast. This is not a travel guide but an elegy. A memoir. You’re holding a tombstone in your hands. A bloody rock. Don’t drop it on your foot–throw it at something big and glossy. What do you have to lose?

Well, if this iconic book left its mark on you, as it did with me, then you know I’m quoting from Ed Abbey’s classic. And you also probably know how deeply influential that book has been since it was published in 1967. How the hordes that now descend annually on Arches National Park (and, to a lesser extent, Canyonlands), make a mockery of Abbey’s mournful testimonial from four decades ago.

Yet what he felt to be already lost was surely true to him.

Still, where does that leave the rest of us who came after? Those of us who perhaps went there because of Desert Solitaire? I can only tell you that I keep going back, and that I now bring my own children too.

And one last thing. If you’re wondering about the enchanting spell of a landscape, how it sometimes takes hold in the mind,  in the case of Abbey and Desert Solitaire, consider this interesting supposition from a biology professor:

When Edward Abbey signed and dated the author’s introduction to Desert Solitaire, he appended the location as Nelson’s Marine Bar, Hoboken.  After his first term as a seasonal ranger in 1956, Abbey left Arches National Park for Hoboken, New Jersey, where his wife and son were living.  On his ostensible last day at Arches, Abbey wrote in Desert Solitaire:  “After twenty-six weeks of sunlight and stars, wind and sky and golden sand, I want to hear once more the crackle of clamshells on the floor of the bar in the Clam Broth House in Hoboken.  I long for a view of the jolly, rosy faces on 42nd Street and the cheerful throngs on the sidewalks of Atlantic Avenue.” I’m uncertain how much of Desert Solitaire was composed in Hoboken or whether any of the author’s introduction was written in one of the city’s bars.  The earliest surviving outline of what would become Desert Solitaire dates from July 1962, when Abbey was working as a welfare caseworker in Hoboken.  The possibility that Desert Solitaire, one of the most beautiful books about the Colorado Plateau, was conceived and composed in Hoboken is fascinating; it raises the question how one place influences our view of another.  Abbey’s longing on city streets and in Hoboken bars must have elicited a memory shadowed by distance, shifting subtly the tones of the sandstone landscape of Utah.   I am curious about the desires we fulfill in prose rather than place.

That might take us into the realm of nostalgia, which is deserving of another post some other time…

UPDATE: Gambler’s House weighs in with a thoughtful post. Some mighty interesting recollections of attitudes towards Abbey, too.

Been in Southern Utah since saturday, frolicking–a new word my four year old son has learned on trails in Arches National Park. Blogging will be light for a few days.