Anyone who goes to the Los Alamos, New Mexico area now can’t help but feel the pace of life quickening as the Laboratory grows. Traffic jams build up in the mesa country at quitting time. A new Las Vegas style subdivision was thrown together quickly right next to one of the most significant archaeological sites in northern New Mexico. New roads and powerlines get sketched out on the desks of bureaucrats, wooden stakes with flagging get pounded into the wilderness. The old landscape of the Pajarito Plateau continues to get urbanized.
The Pajarito Plateau where Los Alamos sits is an ancient landscape with rich stories written all over it. One only need look to the roadside anywhere in the tuff mesa country and the obvious footprints of an ancient culture stand out. Cavates carved into cliff faces, petroglyphs on stone walls, trails leading into the past are everywhere. So significant is this landscape to the cultural past of our country that it was three times proposed as a national park before the arrival of the Manhattan Project in 1942. Not just a small section of the Pajarito Plateau, but most of the Plateau was flagged by experts as worthy of the highest protection our nation bestows on cultural and natural landscapes.
When J Robert Oppenheimer found the Pajarito Plateau for himself in the 1920s, he soon alerted the technical war establishment of its suitability for the atomic bomb project. A major historical event happened at Los Alamos as a result, with all its buildings and pollution, roads and powerlines. Yet beside and under the development of Los Alamos lies the eternal landscape of the ancient and contemporary Pueblo people. Knowing about their hundreds of years of residence here can’t help but enrich our lives today.
Look Around
Next time you are driving up the Truck Route west from the Tsankawi Section of Bandelier National Monument… pull over anywhere safe and look around. You can see cavates, little openings carved into the south facing cliffs along the road. There are hundreds of them, and they date from 1200 to around 1500. On a mesa above the road a large ruin of a once bustling village lies in silence. Long-silent rails carved in the rock by repetitive footsteps over hundreds of years cross the mesas and valleys all around you.
There are hundreds of miles of prehistoric trails on the Pajarito Plateau. From the big Pueblo ruins above Ghost Ranch to Cochiti Pueblo to the south, the ancient Pueblo people walked between more than 30 large villages and tens of smaller villages that today are protected on LANL land, US Forest Service, and National Park Service as well as Bureau of Indian Affairs reservation land for at least 3 current Pueblo communities. As you drive the roads know that you are crossing old trails and passing near old villages that were the core of a vast complex of agricultural life for more than a thousand years right here.
Visit Tsankawi Section, Bandelier National Monument, and hike some of those old trails worn in the bedrock. Look out at the landscape as the old culture saw it. Stand at the ruin of Tsankawi Village and know that the next canyon north had a big village (Otowi) and more cliff dwellings. Other big villages lie to the north and Tsirigue village next to the guard gate at Pajarito Road were bustling communities until around 1450.
You can go to Bandelier National Monument, hike the loop that most tourists hike and see the cliff dwellings dating to the 1200s. Hike into the back country and look at Yapashi, another big village that lies in a line with Tyuonyi in Frijoles Canyon and San Miguel Pueblo in ruins beyond Capulin Canyon. The beautiful landscape passes underfoot, full of mystery and human imprint.
Aside from the natural wonder of the place, its volcanic origin, its ecological uniqueness, you can stop and feel the old culture that lived here, in this place, on foot, growing food from the dry land, for hundreds of years. How far away we’ve gotten from the perspective of those people. They lived right here with little knowledge of the world beyond their horizons. They could only talk to a person who was right with them. They were directly dependent on this immediate landscape.
Rushing around as we do today with our fossil fuels, vehicles, world traded plastics and media piped to our eyes anywhere we go… it is very easy to be ignorant of the sacred nature of this area. It is easy to join modern life here, just as we might in Cleveland, Ohio. Why notice the cliffs? Why wonder at the presence of the National Park Service, sent here to protect world class artifacts that are under our feet anywhere we go on the Pajarito Plateau.
Tom Ribe
