On one five mile hike, about twenty metates. Most were the simple Archaic type, but did even the Ancestral Pueblo use that casual style when hunting and traveling light? The materials were always to hand.
Nine of them:
Also one Ancestral Pueblo type, broken. So often metates are broken. Were they perhaps broken ritually to mark some event?
Lately the temperature has been perfectly reptilian.
On a sandy mesa-side, Hosteen Cheii. Proper behavior is to give him water; if you don’t have water, use spit.
And cooling it in the shade of a juniper, a pretty prairie rattler. Proper behavior is to back off in a hurry.
It stands in the middle of one of the linked plazas of a remote, dusty, fallen Pueblo complex that was abandoned, probably because of drought, sometime about 1200 C.E..
It’s not a grave. Ancestral Puebloans didn’t do graves with headstones.
It looks shrine-ish. The unassuming shrines of the Pueblos are often a careful pile of stones.
…a Giant Sequoia.
In the sand of an arroyo, roadrunner on the left—all those little Xs—coyote on the right.
...three metates. Archaic, given their location, on earth once much wetter than it is in these times of drought.
Each is pecked to roughen its grinding surface. Use has rubbed the first into a bowl that exposes the thin strata of its sandstone, now spalled by frost and rain. All are broken.
The third in situ in a messy prehistoric living room, now cross-trodden by cows:
See July 5 post. What are they?
Like the circle in the earlier post, this one was in the wrong place and with the wrong doorway opening to be a hogan ring. Its lichened stones were next to the collapsed foundations of a Puebloan fieldhouse, ca. 1300s (my best guess; post-Chaco). But it didn’t have the sunken center typical of a kiva depression, and seemed too small for that as well.
Beautiful potsherds.
Remember to turn potsherds face down again to protect the paint.
Still too hot for more than a short hike, but there had been rain; there’s hope for a cooler season. The gaiters need mending:
…but—next to the fallen foundation of a Navajo hogan—that old blue enamel coffee pot may be beyond repair.
I’m not great at identifying projectile points, but my best guess is that this is an Armijo point (Late Archaic, about 2,000 B.C.) and an atlatl point rather than an arrowhead. It was about an inch long, and, interestingly, had had a “field repair.” The original delicate serration had broken along one edge, spoiling its symmetry, and someone–the original owner? a later finder?– had resharpened the broken side with plain bifacial knapping. Like a slightly tippy Christmas tree, it looks wonky but serviceable.
I’m not great at identifying flowers, either. But the desert was blooming.
New Mexico has been deep in drought, but about a week ago we had a day of rain. Unusual, because April is wind month; our rains arrive in the summer monsoon.
A few flowers are April bloomers regardless. Like this cactus with its incipient blooms, and twenty desert daisies.
BETSY JAMES: Worldbuilding and Wilderness 