A pottery "kiva" jar. Mesa Verde style.
Diameter at mouth, 4-1/2"; Maximum diameter, 13-1/3"; Height, 9-1/2".

Man in the San Juan Valley

THE AZTEC PUEBLO. (continued) Aztec, at the height of the Chacoan occupation, must have been a fascinating sight. On a sunny summer day, the plaza and rooftops would have been a busy swarm of activity—mothers nursing and tending their young, grinding corn for tortillas, preparing meat for the stew pot, making baskets, and molding clay pots for later firing. Old men basked in the sun or instructed the young boys. Most of the men and older boys were busy tending the corn, beans, and squash in the fertile fields surrounding the pueblo. This was exacting work, since each plot, clan by clan, had to receive its carefully husbanded share of water from the irrigation ditch that ran along the slope of the high terrace just to the north of the pueblo. At times during the day, hunters would straggle in happily if burdened with game, sadly and slowly if empty-handed after a fruitless chase. Occasionally a wandering group of strangers would pass by with items to trade. They were made welcome and fed, and the whole plaza took on a festive air.

At night the pueblo must have presented a vastly different appearance: dark, mysterious, and quiet. Here and there a small dying fire cast a flickering glow upon a brown adobe wall. In one or two of the kivas, a faint light through the hatchway in the roof indicated preparations under way for a ceremony, or perhaps a special highly secret meeting of one of the clan societies. If you looked closely you might make out one of the sentinels, silhouetted briefly against the night sky as he shifted position. But the pueblo was silent—a silence only broken by an occasional dog's bark or baby's wail—until, shortly after the morning star appeared, the hunters crept quietly out of the pueblo, and as the star faded, the broadening morning light heralded the approach of another day in the life of Aztec pueblo.

But something happened. For no reason we can ascertain today, the pueblo was abandoned by its first occupants. Presumably, this was a fairly fast exodus, but one in which the people had time to take most of their treasured possessions with them. There is no evidence that they were driven away by invaders, or by any other major catastrophe such as fire, flood, or pestilence. We do not know if they left en masse or perhaps more gradually, as they arrived, in clans and groups. If a few hardy souls stayed behind, or if a few weak stragglers couldn't make the trip, there is no evidence. All we know is that by about A.D. 1125, or perhaps 1130, the pueblo was empty. For almost a hundred years the great structure stood alone, untended and uninhabited. Perhaps the local people occasionally used a loosening beam from the structure, or gathered up a few blocks from the slowly crumbling walls, or helped themselves to any readily useful articles left behind, but otherwise they and any passing wanderers seem to have left the place alone.

For years the wind blew the sand into the open doorways, through the widening cracks in the walls, past the sealed doorways, down through the floors, until even the deepest and most inaccessible rooms had a layer of 4, 6, or 8 inches of fine sand deposited over them and whatever secrets they held. Rats and other rodents infested the place and little disturbed the brooding silence except for their piping squeals. Occasionally weakened beams gave way or a wall here and there crashed down as its plaster and rubble fill were washed out by rains and melting snows. Bit by bit the old pueblo slowly crumbled.

Why and how the first great pueblo was built by a Chaco-like people and then suddenly and for no apparent reason abandoned is a real mystery. Strangely, this abandonment seems to agree roughly with the time at which the Chaco area itself was being depopulated. In Chaco Canyon, an arroyo, much like the one which exists today, was cutting its way backward up the canyon, and this arroyo-cutting would have made it impossible for many of the inhabitants to continue to flood-irrigate their fields. It may have been the basic factor involved in the general abandonment of the great communal dwellings of the Chaco Canyon around A.D. 1150, no doubt coupled with a certain amount of strife and considerable periods of drought.

But this would not have been true at Aztec. The Animas River is a perennial stream, and there is no apparent cause for the abandonment of the pueblo by the Chaco-like people, unless for some reason they decided to leave Aztec because the last of their kinfolk in Chaco were leaving that area.

In fact, it could better be proposed that some of the first groups, which had to leave Chaco Canyon about 1100 because of the incipient arroyo and its accompanying loss of irrigation water and generally lowering water table, might actually have moved to the Animas and established Aztec. Perhaps a rather coincidental event may have occurred at Aztec which caused its abandonment just as Chaco Canyon was almost depopulated. The early settlers in the Animas recall evidence of a prehistoric canal flowing along the lower slopes of the terrace to the north of Aztec Ruins, somewhat lower than the modern one. This canal took off on the right bank of the river, several miles upstream from the pueblo. A major shifting of the river, a swing of the main stream against this old river terrace on the right bank, would have effectively cut the canal at a point below which the people could not take off water to irrigate their fields and in a manner they could not repair. Such a disaster would have forced them to move to other cultivable fields; if none were available nearby (and they may have all been taken up by other local groups), they would have had to go far away. They couldn't return to Chaco Canyon or other areas near there, for these places too were being depopulated. So perhaps they followed some of their Chaco kinfolk who were intermittently migrating in groups to the Rio Grande, or to the Hopi country. In these new areas, mixing with the local population, they lost their distinct cultural identity. We can look at the modern Pueblo Indians of today and wonder if perhaps some of their long ago ancestors may not have actually lived at Aztec or in Chaco Canyon.