A few months ago, I was out roaming the Great Sage Plains with my Faithful Hound, Jack. We came to a series of clearings in the Sage, slightly raised hummocks that were covered with scattered rubble.
Hmm. This looked like an archaeological site.
I looked more closely at the rubble. Some of the larger stones had probably come from the ruins of the buildings that used to be here. The smaller “pebbles” I had noticed, though, were actually pottery fragments.
The pottery was very plain, simple stuff. I didn’t see any that had designs painted on it.
Scattered throughout the potsherds were what looked like old stone tools – lithics. There were a few that looked like hammer stones, others that looked like they had been used for grinding (manos and fragmentary metates).
The neatest thing, though were the little stone cutters that were scattered around.
These cutters were still very sharp. When I picked them up, they felt very natural in my hands.
From reading on Crow Canyon’s website, and at the Dolores Archaeological Record, these sites are old. They’re from at least the BasketMaker (AD 600?) period. The structures were built before the cliff-side, fortress-like ruins that have made the Southwestern US famous.
My reading says that some of these sites were used over and over again through the centuries – built, abandoned, rebuilt, abandoned…
There was a Western Harvester Ant (Pogonomyrmex occidentalis) in the middle of one of the sites. The ants had bits of pottery, lithics and old masonry scattered throughout their nest mound.
I thought this was kind of neat. The Hopi and other Pueblo Indians are descended from the Ancients who built these sites, so it’s reasonable to assume that some of the Hopi’s religious beliefs came from the Ancient Ones.
I’ve read that the Hopi believe that humans have lived in a series of worlds – the First, Second, Third, and Fourth Worlds. Between each of these Worlds, the previous World was wiped out by a cataclysmic event.
Between the First and Second Worlds, and again between the Second and Third Worlds, the Ant People sheltered and fed the Human People inside the Ant Nests, saving them from the ends of the worlds.
I like to think about those stories. This is one reason that makes I’m happy to see Ants tunneling deep into the ruins.
It seems fitting.
Sources:
The Digital Archaeological Record of the Dolores Archaeological Program.
The wonderful First People of America and Canada website. This is an extremely interesting website.
