FROM CATASTROPHE TO CULTURAL CROSSROADS
After living in the area for three centuries, the Ancestral Puebloans fled this area in northern Arizona when the nearby Sunset Crater Volcano erupted almost a thousand years ago. After the ash settled, the cinders that spread for hundreds of miles created ultra-fertile, moisture-conserving soil, drawing the people back within a few decades of the catastrophe. They planted large crops and constructed a new community with stone buildings spread across the area.
Their resurgence in the area only lasted a little over a hundred years, and by 1225, Wupatki was abandoned. No one knows for sure what pushed them away. Some theorize that they had overfarmed the land, others think there was a prolonged drought. Whatever the reason, they no longer inhabited the beautiful structures they created one stone at a time.
ARCHITECTURE EMERGING FROM THE EARTH
The multiple structures around Wupatki National Monument are primarily made of red sandstone. Walk up to one of these buildings and you’ll see the thin, flat blocks of the local Moenkipi sandstone that give the pueblos their distinct red color. From a distance, it appears they emerged organically from the landscape itself.
The Wupatki Pueblo contains over 100 rooms that overlook a central courtyard. Archaeologists estimate that approximately 85-100 people lived in this single structure. The monument protects over 2,600 structures across 35,000 acres, but only five structures are accessible to the public without a ranger: the main Wupatki Pueblo, Lomaki and Box Canyon, Wukoki Pueblo, the Citadel, and Nalakihu Pueblo. Within a day’s walk, several thousand people lived in this area.
WHERE WORLDS CONVERGE
There are a couple of unique features at Wupatki Pueblo worth noting. One is the ball court. Ball courts were popular features across many Mesoamerican communities, and the Hohokam of southern Arizona brought them north, where they can be found across the Phoenix Valley. The ball court at Wupatki is the northernmost ever found, making this remote location a bridge between distant cultures.
Not far from the ball court is a natural blowhole where air rushes out of a hole in the ground. The land in this region contains many earth-cracks, fissures, and vents. Some of these vents reach the surface, allowing this underground system to breathe. Temperature and atmospheric pressure alter air flow through the underground caverns, sometimes bringing air through this blowhole at a speed of up to 30 miles per hour. Researchers sent chemical tracers through the cracks and found some of it showing up at other blowholes 25 miles away, revealing a vast, a vast hidden world.
ANCIENT WHISPERS IN THE WIND
During my first visit here, I walked out to the Lomaki Ruins. I was alone, and the only sounds were the wind and the sound of my footsteps on the broken stones of the path. As I stepped close to the walls and looked at the placement of each stone and the mortar that was used to hold them together, I felt like the divide between the past and the present grew thin. I imagined the lean, hard-working bodies of the builders, watching someone bend to select a specific stone to fit the spot he was working on, setting it on a layer of mortar, and wiggling it to get it settled exactly into the spot where he wanted it.
As I leaned closer, hoping to see a fingerprint in the gray mortar, something else happened. It was as if the people who built this place were whispering in the wind, expressing appreciation that I took the time to notice their craftsmanship, which still stood hundreds of years later.
It should be no surprise that I had that experience. Although this place is no longer occupied, the Hopi believe the people who lived and died here remain as spiritual guardians. While people no longer live here, it hasn’t been truly abandoned. Ancestral Puebloans from many tribes return to Wupatki every year to enrich their personal understanding of their cultural history. I felt honored to hear their ancestors whispering on the wind.
PLANNING RESOURCES
To plan your trip to Wupatki National Monument, CLICK HERE to visit the official website. Be sure to check the events calendar for events and presentations. Your entrance fee also covers entrance to Sunset Crater Volcano National Monument and Walnut Canyon National Monument for up to seven days.
Beautifully written.
I have visited nearly every Sinagua site. Even remote ones between Clarkdale and Sedona far north of those towns. I tried to visit them all by the dates of inhabitance, but I had already been to many before in my childhood. I first visited Montezuma Castle in the ’60s when I was a child. We actually were allowed to climb into the ruins back in those days. I have studied history and archaeology and still take courses today, in my mid 60s. I have never agreed with the orthodoxy of much of the teaching about the reasons these dwellings were abandoned. I have a different understanding of human nature and man’s inhumanity to man than the professors and their Idealism and their almost worship of those peoples. Wupatki was always one of my favorites. But the last place I visited was Walnut Canyon. The last inhabited place of the Sinagua peoples before they vanished into history. This place pretty much summed up my beliefs and also makes it hard for the orthodox professors to keep up their beliefs. The people of Walnut Canyon were obviously, continuously under attack by invading peoples. Every inch of the place shows this. From the way it was located on an oxbow-like peninsula in the canyon, to the concentric multiple-wall fortifications, to the scars of battles and the presence of arrowheads throughout the fortifications. Even the way they made the cliff dwellings. The dwellings were built like bunkers to protect the people from attack. The dwellings faced all points of the compass, not just south to get the winter sun, as does almost every other cliff dwelling in the southwest. Evidence at Walnut Canyon also points to a possibility that the Sinagua did not disappear but became the Hopi people. They had primitive Kachina-like dolls at this site. You mentioned the ball court at Wupatki. The same game played in the arena at Chichen Itza and all-over southern Mesoamerica by the Olmec, Maya, and Aztec peoples. This shows direct contact with those people. As does Parrot feathers from Central America that were found at multiple Sinagua sites. Sinagua, Anasazi, Mogollon, Hohokam and many other ancestral Puebloan peoples all disappeared around the same time. I believe that the drought was part of the reason, but that invasion and warfare by the people from Mesoamerica was the biggest cause. Navajo National Monument has three of the greatest cliff dwellings in the Southwest. Two rival Cliff Palace in size- Keet Seel and Betatakin. I have visited these sites too. These sites were tucked away in a hidden canyon surrounded by harsh desert and were also obviously built for a defense from invaders.
I grew up in Page amongst the Navajo and Hopi people and still count many as my close friends. But I don’t share that ideological belief that I have seen in every professor I have ever met, learned from or was acquainted with. They all have that attitude that these people were more noble and greater than the people today. I believe they were the same as us, with the same weaknesses and evil tendencies. Warfare was just as much if not a greater part of these people than it was of any people from Europe, Africa or Asia.
I too have sat amongst the ruins by myself and felt a connection to the people that inhabited the area of my people, long before us. I have run my fingers in the finger tracks in the mortar of those people from long ago and felt a kinship. I have also heard them singing their funerary rites on the wind as they lost loved ones. My family is now into the 8th generation of people living in Arizona. I am fifth generation. We came to Arizona over 175 years ago. My ancestors lived here before modern technologies and had to scrape out a farming and ranching living with the same backbreaking work that ancestral Puebloans did, in the same harsh desert environment. I grew up singing our funerary rites to my dead ancestors and hear those still on the wind. And I always thought about what a hardscrabble life that they had and about how they had to fight off the people that were attacking them. That was the Apache people, that raided into the towns and homes and farms and ranches of my ancestors. The Apache that killed women and children of those towns and ranches. My kin were amongst those butchered by Geronimo and his raiders. I don’t have any reverence for that man as I have seen among many college professors. They lack perspective.
But I do respect your feelings of kinship and hearing those voices on the wind…
Thank you for sharing your knowledge, insight, and experience. These are not just places to visit for an Instagram selfie. They are filled with deep, rich history, and if we sit with these places and listen, we might learn and connect with the land and the culture in ways that take us by surprise.