Bandelier National Monument offers the perfect blend of strange wilderness beauty and human interest with the mysterious cliff dwellings of long-gone Pueblo people. Early Pueblo people lived across this landscape for hundreds of years. Then they faded away, moving to villages by the Rio Grande. What happened? What can we learn about life today from Bandelier’s history?
I get two questions from the hundreds of people I have guided through the ruins in Frijoles Canyon. What animals live here and why did the people leave? Both questions relate directly to our lives today. The long-gone Pueblo people of Bandelier have urgent lessons to teach us. We can hear their lessons if we stop and listen to the wind whistling through the walls of their now silent villages.
Though beautiful beyond compare, Bandelier National Monument is a harsh environment. Dry and with a short growing season, the park’s canyon bottoms offer a rare refuge from the open mesa tops, dotted with pinon and juniper and blown by cold winter winds. The canyon floors often have flowing water that wicks out into the soils around the streams, feeding a wide variety of deciduous trees and shrubs. The humidity is almost always below 20% and even in good years less than 15 inches (about 40 cm) of rain and snow fall a year.
Pueblo people lived in what is now Bandelier National Monument from around 800 BCE to 1500. Their culture evolved from hunting and gathering to an agriculturally based culture, with large, fairly stable villages.
The Puebloans lived by dry farming and gathering native plants and animals. (They had better soils than exist today at Bandelier. Sheep grazing between 1880 and 1930 caused topsoil to wash away before the land was protected by the National Park Service.) The Pueblo people understood that pumice granules in local soils held moisture. They planted corn, beans, and squash in the sub-drainages on the mesa tops, waiting for rain to urge the plants skyward. Their rituals sought to connect directly to the forces of nature that would help the crops to grow, the rain that would allow them to survive another year.
For hundreds of years, people on the Pajarito Plateau relied mainly on native plants and animals. They knew about growing corn but didn’t seriously become farmers until the time that people were leaving Chaco Canyon and migrating into the Rio Grande Valley, around 1100. Then they farmed and their population would rise and fall with the coming and going of normal drought cycles.
Archaeologists have searched the ruins of Bandelier-area villages for clues of what people were eating 900 years ago on the Pajarito Plateau. They found bones of the same animals we see today with some exceptions. Bison and pronghorn no longer live near Bandelier and the wolves and grizzly of that era are gone as well. Wild turkey was a key part of their diet. They also gathered all sorts of wild plants and processed and ate them.
They depended on the weather and the limits of the water supply. They had to live near a creek for drinking water. Notice how many Pueblo ruins in northern New Mexico stand near dry washes today. Where did the streams go?
They harvested wood with stone axes and as the years went on, they had to travel farther and farther from the villages to find wood to burn. Likewise for game… longer trips to find game to hunt, trips that in later years brought them into other group’s territories.
So why did they abandon the Pajarito Plateau in the 1500s? Tree ring data shows serious drought gripped northern New Mexico in the late 1400s and early 1500s. The creeks may have run dry, game was scarce, firewood was used up. The Puebloans moved down to the banks of the Rio Grande and either joined existing villages that spoke their languages or established new villages. Cochiti Pueblo was the destination of people from Frijoles Canyon south and the contemporary Tewa Pueblos north of White Rock Canyon were the new homes of the people north of Frijoles Canyon.
What does this have to do with us?
Today we no longer depend on our local environments for survival. We import and eat food from all over the world. We burn fossil fuels for all aspects of our lives from farming (including petroleum-based fertilizers) to fuel trans-oceanic freight ships, and to fuel trucks and trains. We package our food in plastic made from oil. The whole world supplies our needs and the whole world is now under severe stress from a climate heavily damaged by these economic activities.
The Puebloans abandoned a worn-out landscape for a new wetter land along the Rio Grande. Slowly, the land on the Pajarito Plateau recovered from their extractions. Though they had new problems along the river (flooding for example), they had a new place to start a new heavily agricultural lifestyle based on the big river at lower elevation.
Our society has nowhere to move. Humans inhabit virtually all habitats on earth. We are overpopulated and have stressed the world environment with pollution and over-exploitation. Global warming will cause sea level rise that will make many big cities around the world uninhabitable in the next few decades.
All over the Southwest there are abandoned Pueblo villages. They could move on because their population was small, and their needs were modest and in line with their environment. There was plenty of open land to move into.
Our situation is very different today. We can’t move on. We must restore the land we use now and shift our economic model to line up with the demands of our stressed earth. Can we stop buying billions of dollars of plastic items from China? Can we shut down all coal plants and phase out oil and natural gas use in the next 15 years? Can we stop using petroleum-based fertilizers and eat far less red meat soon?
Can we become a functioning community?
Tom Ribe
