Drought
(This is the introduction to part one in a series)
Water collects in drops. Dew makes lenses of drops on leaves, distorting the view of the leaf and bending the light. The surface tension of the water maintains the comfortable curve of the drops. Egocentrism collects like dew.
Comfortable drops. Distorted views. Reality exists in the world inside and outside bubble. The greater reality is outside.
But that’s my view, and I beg your indulgence. I will casually attempt to break that surface tension. I want to bring the big outer reality closer to the world inside the bubble. Or visa versa.
Again I ask your patience as I draw another analogy – crap. I contend the bubble is full of sh*t, but this is not a bad thing. I understand you may find offense and may crumple this or toss the whole thing away with out finishing this sentence.
Are you still here? Very well, I’ll continue. Nothing exists a priori and we carry all our experiences, known and unknown, conscious and subconscious forward with us. A load of crap. But this is not a bad thing.
I come to the next analogy now. It’s about gardening and composting the manure and refuse to create new and fertile soil. A sound gardener doesn’t throw out the crap that accumulates. Everything is useful in a sustainable garden. Sh*t is the past that serves as the catalyst in the creation of future growth medium.
The bubble of egocentrism holds the fuel for good compost. Its contents should not be suppressed or ignored but used. Burst the bubble, but save the crap. You can’t really get rid of it, short of lobotomy, so use it.
I haven’t driven you away. Good. Now I come to some purpose. I, again with your indulgence, hope to hint at how we as egocentric human animals practice our observations of our fellow human animals. More succinctly how I observe us. I don’t presume any moral stance but instead hope to serve as a sort of surfactant, to break down some of that surface tension.
I will use my experiences to do so. It may be sh*t but it may be useful.
Everything in sight was brown. Light brown sandy background with darker clumps of dormant grasses, waiting for rain. The few stunted sagebrushes that possessed any green were thinly scattered like the checkers that remain at the end of a game.
It was the worst drought the high desert had seen in 75 years. The parched earth, plants and animals waited. This wasn’t the first drought and certainly would not be the last.
Strategies employed by our archaeological team were simplified by our modern technology. We showered in water from a well and brought drinking water almost daily from a campground 20 miles away. We kept ice in coolers and freezers in the quonset hut lab.
We had popsicles at our mid-morning breaks in the digging. We were hot, watching the afternoon clouds, hoping some rain would reach the ground.
The plants and animals could become dormant and wait. How did the people that used to live here deal with the harsh environment? Rio Puerco, a few miles away, usually flowed at the bottom of a great valley it had cut on its way to the Rio Grande. It too was dry.
A year earlier the rains came daily during the typical monsoon season. The days were hot and dry but always ended in a cool rain. The last years monsoon shut down the digging a few days (that’s another story) turning the desert floor into a great pudding. The frogs were reactivated and the grasses were knee deep in just days. The winds were cool and refreshing. The winds of the drought brought only dust. Stinging dust, often 40 to 60 miles per hour.
The dry winds trashed a few tents, splintering poles and tearing fabric. We considered future strategies of making a deal with an outdoor equipment company as a test site in exchange for a ready supply of gear we might use or, as it may be, destroy. We may yet call the National Guard to inquire if we might borrow some desert ‘combat’ accommodations.
The people that lived at the site hundreds of years before anglo contact had only the earth and each other a resources.
Their walls, floors and roofs were constructed of rock and adobe from the ground upon which they stood. Many of the walls have melted and fallen and rooms filled by the people and the dirt carried by the wind and rain. We suffered and enjoyed the desert as archaeologists in search of the past.
The Chaves/Hummingbird Archaeological Project began in 1995 when Richard Chaves asked Southern Methodist University’s professor of anthropology Mike Adler to give a look at a mound of ruins on his family’s 6000 acre ranch. The mound is the remains of walls, roofs, floors and artifacts that have melted back into the landscape. The project has since gained momentum and a handful of graduate and undergraduate students from across the U.S. and Canada. All in search of the past.
We can’t tell motivations of individuals from the past but we can reach greater insight into the processes by which the people survived in such a beautiful yet unforgiving landscape. We draw comparisons and search for contrasts. We attempt to construct a model, a frame, a glimpse if you will into another world. The past world we investigate is like a dark room, pitch black. We know that certain things are sure to exist but we only have a small penlight to navigate with. We can see very little.
We can compare the room to the room next door, or with little imagination or discipline to the room we live in and know but where we are is seldom and accurate assessment of our neighbors now or in the past.
To begin to understand the realm of possibilities of behavioral strategies the environment is the base factor. What was the landscape of the Chaves site a thousand years ago?
Our crew of a couple of dozen people brought in potable water because the well water was brackish and loaded with minerals. We consumed 50 to 70 gallons a day. Quite possibly the pueblo may have been home to more than 200 people. They might have had a different landscape.
To try and perhaps perceive their environment I decided to look into the pollen. Anyone with plant allergies can attest to the sea of buoyant pollen that envelops us all. Pollen has a tough skin or exine that often still exists where they landed hundreds and thousands of years ago. The pollen can give us a rough picture of what the environment looked like. What the sea of winds carries can be excavated and collected in correspondence with carbon dating and dendrology (tree ring dating) samples.
Comparative pollen samples of the current plant population and distribution were collected from the Cañntilde;ada de Apache as the bottom of the hill. With the drought oppressing the flowering of plants the only ones doing so were in the low spots and cachements of the cañntilde;ada. About 15 botanical samples were taken and pressed. The signature of those few flowering plants would represent, but vaguely, the environment of drought.
The collection of comparative samples will continue through many climatic changes and floral episodes.
The archaeological pollen samples were 10-centimeter cubes of soil taken in vertical columns cut in the walls of exploratory trenches. Some samples were collected from under cooking stones and pottery found on the pueblo floors. These ‘pinch’ samples might capture the pollen trapped there so many years ago. Suspicions are shared that water once flowed at the site.
The geologists found a fault line that may have directed seeping water to the pueblo’s upper plaza. They also found lacustrine deposits from what was once a marsh or pond or something pretty wet where the runoff from the pueblo and the unusually wide Cañntilde;ada de Apache meet.
A trench will be dug there in October and pollen columns will be extracted to attempt to paint a more complete picture.
The fieldwork passes too quickly, even in drought. The bounty of samples and artifacts will require months of sorting and counting and analysis, maybe in ti
me for the next field season.
With any luck it will rain by then.
