We threaded the wind- and rain-scoured mesa rims among scattered flakes and potsherds of millennia. Here and there, a firepit so old that its ashes were only a faint stain in the dun soil.
The next wind and rain will hide it again. But the metate was in plain sight, the only flat surface among boulders. The last pecking to renew its grinding surface had become dark spots, and the worn surface on the left side was a smooth bowl under the hand.
In the muddy pool of an elk footprint, frost at work.
About seven thousand years ago, a culture that the invaders of five hundred years ago called the Bajada were making tools out of basalt.
Basalt. Were they crazy? Gluttons for punishment? Basalt is hard, grainy, homely, and close to impossible to knap. But by god it’s tough. It takes a lot to break it. Maybe that was the attraction?
We have to assume that the so-called Bajada–we have no idea what they called themselves, though they were all over the Southwest–were tough. And that hunters found a reason for their choice of that difficult material.
Where you find those basalt flakes you may also find the metate where gatherers ground wild grain:
Their camp is eroding into the arroyo. But if you’re alert you can spot what’s left of the place where folks sat around knapping basalt, sharing chapatis made of wild grains, and telling stories about the next seven thousand years.
On the slope below a line of rubble that might–or, in that stony country, might not–have been a tiny ruin, was a cascade of the coarse grayware of the Late Archaic.
At first glance it seemed like a “pot drop”: the in situ remains of one vessel. But if you look closely you can see that the corrugation was done by a couple of different hands.
Not far away there was a little dance floor:
From a sandstone mesa we watched the moon slide over the sun. Later, in a vast site full of ashy firepits and burned stone, an Archaic mano echoed those lunar shapes.
Below: exposed surface, buried surface, and its thousands-of-years-old bed.
All day we spotted Archaic manos, grinding stones, whole or broken–this in terrain we’d hiked for decades. What was it about today?
First mano. Front elevation, rear elevation, then back into its nest for the next few thousand years:
More manos: Some were carefully shaped. Some were an expedient cobble, one or both sides slicked by use on a handy flat rock as metate.
Unlike more recent, Puebloan manos, which were flat and wide for grinding corn, Archaic manos–thousands of years old–were a characteristic oval. Mostly they were used to grind wild seeds: Indian rice grass, for example. Or whatever edibles the desert had to offer. A friend in Zuni said of his wild-resourceful grandmother, “Grandma eats everything.”
We set out from an altitude of about 9000′. Hiked down 800 vertical feet to the valley, where we picked up an elk trail fragrant with droppings. The grass was laid in the direction of travel, roughly northeast. We followed; the trail led us along the edge of the meadow, then abruptly back up the 800 vertical feet, through the ashy pine wood to the rim.
Never caught up to the elk. Probably they didn’t have to stop so often and sit down.
A decade ago, hiking the crest of the Manzano Mountains, I picked up an odd fossil (left):
I ran it around to all the paleontologists I knew. A worm tunnel? A beetle track? Trunk of a very small elephant? (Right.)
But not the right paleontologists, apparently, for no one could say. Heavy and red with iron, the mystery piece has roamed around my desk for years, petted and puzzled over.
Then, in the museum at Joggins Cliffs in Nova Scotia, I found Artisia (right). It’s a cast of the pith of Cordaites, a treelike plant that grew huge in what is now the Bay of Fundy–and, it seems, in what would become the Manzanos Crest Trail. I checked: Carboniferous-Permian boundary. Both places.
300 million years later, I can crow, “That’s it!”
…but in the Triassic or thereabouts, when shallow seas and river deltas inundated where now we walk in the desert, it might have been. These are the red waves of the Bay of Fundy.
And this is how the waters of time soften and embellish the work of our hands:
Bedrock metates are the oldest. They belonged to the Archaics, the first peoples in the Southwest, who became the Puebloans and still live and work here.
With a rounded mano as pestle, this one was used for the grinding of wild grasses. Corn had not yet spread up from its first cultivation in Mexico.
Season after season, a band of hunter-gatherers returned to this stone. As they arrived at their familiar camp, surely they felt, “There it is. Here we are.”
Time has filled this one with windblown sand.
WORLD-BUILDING and WILDERNESS: 