We're now heading out of New Mexico towards.

Hidden in the Four Corners region are markers from ancient solar calendars.

Seeing these relics on just the right day, offers glimpses of the artistic life of some of the first Americans.

The edge of this rock can be aligned with those standing stones that we've seen.

like Pueblo Bonito.

You look at the rock there.

Of course getting there can be half the fun.

Major funding for The Desert       Speaks was provided by the Kemper and Ethel Marley Foundation.

Additional funding was provided by Desert Program Partners and by Arizona State Parks.

Living in the open and coast of the land like the ancient Anasazi, makes people aware of the power of the sun; its behavior, its seasons and their affect on our lives.

The Anasazi were skilled observers of celestial events and became some of the most sophisticated ancient astronomers.

I'm joining a group from Crow Canyon Archaeological Center in Colorado in search of what's left of their cosmological record.

The Four Corners area is the heart of the Anasazi culture including our starting point along the San Juan River.

To help us understand what we're seeing our veteran trip leader and renowned archaeologist Gwinn Vivian and lifelong astronomer John Fountain.

This trip is essentially designed to bring people to places where we know that prehistoric peoples recorded movements of the sun.

June 21st, Summer Solstice.

The sun's straight up, hot and blazing.

So it's a pretty tough time of the year, maybe the hottest day.

We've got ten hours of sun on the river.

But there's hope.

Cause when the solstice come, the old timers knew and maybe we know the rains can't be too far away.

The San Juan is a desert canyon river and it sometimes got treacherous deep places and bad currents.

Sometimes you have to take a risk in life and so I'm going to do it.

There it is, the San Juan at its deepest.

If too many people drink out of it at the same time, the level goes way down.

The first stop on our two-day river trip leads us to a panel of Anasazi rock art and plenty of speculation.

The images are up high now and it's most likely that whoever did them was standing on the ground.

This is eight hundred years of erosion.

It's eroded the slopes down.

Sometimes you see figures with a little bird or a dog or something on their shoulder like a spirit helper.

So there's various things about this panel that suggests that these are Shamen.

These are not stick figures at all.

You can see the arms, the legs, the hands, fingers on the hands and your don't see that practically at all in later human figures that appear in Anasazi rock art.

There's a yucca plant.

There's some bighorn sheep.

There's some corn plants, more of those lobe circles.

There's quite an assortment of things.

There's an ET figure that proved that the extra-terrestrials were here in Basketmaker times.

Does that look like ET to you up there?

No, but he's got the long arms.

Sometimes we don't want something to look too human.

Right.

Exactly.

One of the ways to translate the freedom in a graphic image would be floating upside down.

There's multiple kinds of ways to explain these but they all come back to some kind of trance state.

Various archaeologists have looked at those figures and felt that they represented some kind of out-of-this-world kind of being that was important to their culture.

Well at about forty-five minutes from here to where we will walk over to River House.

On this stretch of the San Juan, the walls are pretty far apart.

The river tends to meander, move back and forth.

It brings a lot of silt and drops it as it meanders.

That makes for fertile fields and the Anasazi, the people before 'em, found it was great for raising corns and beans and squash.

So then we'll be able to take a short walk up to River House.

From the cool river it's a half mile hike through the heat.

It's the largest archaeological site on the San Juan River.

River House was a habitation site.

We find evidence of storage units here.

We find kivas and we find a good number of rooms.

All of which come together and tell us that we are dealing with a habitation site here.

.the palm of the hand was painted with those designs.

The ceramics at River House and the architecture at River House say 'Mesa Verde.'

Basically this reflects the fact that these rooms, the kivas, were built by Mesa Verde people.

Probably a group of related families occupied River House in which you have clans which come together, individual clans are responsible for different ceremonies during the year, the whole idea being that the bringing together of those ceremonies provides a benefit for the entire community.

The panels at Butler Wash are petroglyphs which are pecked into the cliff.

We have also pictographs including a red and white wavy figure that may be a snake figure.

And then behind us a whole set of white hands.

We see here a representation of the idea of the sky.

The people have made dots and little plus signs on the overhang to represent the idea of the sky.

Not actual constellations because we know what constellations were important to them and we do not find those here at all.

We find no match with the sky.

We do find a cluster of spots up there that is suggestive of the Pleiades which we know to have been very important to them though.

Throughout the southwest and even into Mesoamerica the sky serpent is very important and he's often represented as having ?

or horns moving upward into the sky and so is quite consistent with this interpretation of a planetarium ceiling.

The rest of the stops on our trip don't involve wading through rivers.

Fifty miles east of our take out on the San Juan is Hovenweep National Monument, not too far from the national park at Mesa Verde for which the ancient inhabitants are now named.

Here, a few days after the solstice, if we're lucky, we'll see how the rays of the sun intersect the mystical Anasazi spiral.

My guess is they selected sites like this so that they could bring a large crowd out and tell a story and have an audio-visual, a multi-media presentation.

And if it was cloudy on the important day, they could bring the folks back the next day and still show the same event.

We have many examples of solar markers that are not terribly precise but are in a very public area where lots of people can see, where the acoustics are fairly good, but some of the more precise ones are tucked away in places where only one or two people can see them at a time.

Hovenweep not only has solstice markers but some mighty fine architecture as well.

This is a Hovenweep collection of tower sites that are representative of a probable movement of Mesa Verde peoples from the east.

These people were Ancestral Puebloans or some people called them Anasazi.

Tree ring dates put them here from about 1230 to 1280.

Probably they were here up until about 1300.

Archaeologists have really argued about what function these buildings may have served to the pre-historic people that lived here.

There's some fairly good evidence that they were located at the heads of canyons for defense of springs.

The middle 1200s was a period of time when things were getting rather dry.

Springs were a very important resource.

Here on the mesas of the high deserts of the southwest there's only about eight to ten inches of rainfall of year.

That's not much to make a tree grow.

There is one tree though that does real well here.

And that's the ever present, very common, Juniper tree.

Not only is the sweet-smelling Juniper wood the finest firewood anywhere, but the bark which is easily pulled off the tree could be twisted and made into rope, into cord, into thread, into string and from this ?

Juniper bark, garments still exist today that were woven hundreds of years ago.

These people had a series of rituals, much as we do, that changed through the years.

Religious ceremonies that were performed at different times of the year and knowing when the sun was in different positions during the year helped them to mark those times of the year when those ceremonies should be carried out.

In many places in the southwest we have structures with apertures or holes like this which allow the morning sunlight to shine through to a distinctive place on the far wall at the solstices.

Here at Hovenweep Castle we have the opposite situation where sunlight shines through at sunset.

I think that archaeologists have tended to possibly over exaggerate the relevance of some of the observations that archaeologists have made.

We can't get into the minds of the people who lived in the past and a lot of this is based upon our supposition as to what may have happened in the past and some of it may be mere coincidence.

Just twenty miles to the northwest of Hovenweep is Montezuma Canyon, home of the Cold Bed Ruin.

I was hoping to see impressive architecture and cliff dwellings, as they were at one time.

Instead it looked like scattered piles of rocks.

Fortunately, Gwinn and John have done their homework.

I think that probably some of you as we've walked up here have thought that there really isn't any order to it.

In fact, these buildings were very well laid out and defined.

And this is one good example where you can see the outer wall of this complex of ruins and kivas.

The deep depression over there is a kiva.

Whether or not this represented a certain segment of the society that was living here, we really can't tell.

But it's a line of evidence that archaeologists could follow and look for differences in ceramic production between this group of ruins and the group of ruins that we've just come over as we've walked up here.

Some of these pillars are leaning and some have actually fallen over.

Yes, but if one measures along the base of them, one finds a remarkably north-south alignment.

So this suggests an astronomical use.

They could have been incorporated into the architecture of the nearby ruins but we have an indication that they might have been used to measure the position of the sun at different times of the year.

There's more going on here than just an alignment of these rocks.

We have a gun site here that allows us to line up the position of the sun at various times of the year.

So here we must be looking west.

That's right.

The edge of this rock can be aligned with those standing stones that we've seen and those would mark certain times of the year when the sun is low in the sky.

And you believe that?

Well, I believe that that's a very strong possibility given that those stones are accurately aligned to the north.

But they could be part of the architecture of the ruins behind it.

So how would you verify this?

Well, first we take simple compass measurements and if this looks like it's productive, then we do a survey to see if the directions that we're looking in are consistent with the sun at various times of the year.

That'll tell you whether they knew what they were doing here.

That's right.

The problem that we have is that these stones are old and have tilted and we don't know exactly how they were placed originally.

The Coal Bed Ruin has a number of examples of really good Mesa Verde pottery.

This is a Black on White.

You really know it's Mesa Verde Black on White because of the black marks on the top of the rim.

It probably, because it's so white on the background, was produced at Mesa Verde.

This is what was probably produced locally because the background is gray with the Black on Gray.

They also were producing the cooking ware such as indented corrugated.

There's another example of the indented corrugated and there's a lot here.

Here's yet one more of the Mesa Verde Black on White that's become pretty much faded.

So you find this whole range of this type of ceramics but they all are Mesa Verde Black on White.

In addition to the ceramics that we find here, these people were producing a lot of lithic stone tools out of a kind of material that's local, it's called Brushy Basin chert or Morrison chert.

And what's really intriguing is this material which is mined here was traded to Chaco.

One hundred and fifty miles away in New Mexico is Chaco Canyon.

This was the apex of Anasazi culture with a collection of apartments, observation sites, roads connecting outlying villages and, above all, a demonstration of engineering accomplishments and astronomical achievements.

We have over three hundred solar markers documented throughout the southwest marking the equinoxes, the solstices and the cross quarter day, the day halfway in between the equinox and the solstice.

In Chaco we probably have almost more evidence for that kind of marking of the movement of the sun than any other single well known archaeological site in the southwest.

The Anasazi people are the ancestors of Puebloan peoples who we find today in villages such as Zuni, in New Mexico, the Hopi Pueblos in Arizona and the Rio Grande hill peoples.

The primary form of subsistence was as farmers.

They were always hunting.

They were always gathering.

But I can say that most, sixty percent or seventy percent of their food they depended upon being farmers.

Because great houses have a lot of standing architecture, that is the walls are standing and you can see them, we have much better evidence in those buildings for using buildings to mark different phases of the movement of the sun.

We're standing right next to the southern most wall of the great house Pueblo Bonito.

And it forms an east-west alignment with great precision and then right down the middle of the great house we have a wall that goes exactly north-south.

And so this building is very carefully aligned along the cardinal directions.

This is consistent with the pre-occupation that Chacoans seem to have with directionality.

In the southeast corner of Pueblo Bonito we have an unusual architectural feature which points toward the winter solstice.

Whether it was a true observation point or not is open to question because we don't know whether there was a wall obstructing it.

But certainly it points in that direction but it would not make a precise device for observing the event.

The winter solstice represents the end of a cycle of the sun's motion.

It's a metaphor for death.

By the same token, it's a metaphor for rebirth because from now on the sun is rising higher in the sky, later on the plants will come back and a new cycle of life begins.

Originally I think archaeologists thought that noting the pre-historic documenting of the solstices, both the summer and the winter solstices, was related to their planting cycles.

That they used this as a way of telling them when they should plant in the spring.

More archaeologists now feel that it may not have been related that closely to the planting cycle but was important for carrying out a series of rituals which were scheduled throughout the year.

They were using particularly the sun to develop a calendar to remind themselves of when they should be carrying out these rituals.

People have been in Chaco Canyon for at least two thousand years.

They came from various points around the San Juan Basin.

They came from the south, they came from the north.

We see them occupying the canyon until the middle to the late 1100s at which point there's a general exodus out of the canyon.

It was almost certainly abandoned because of a drought.

And it simply became ultimately too dry for them to farm successfully.

When you're in Chaco, normally if you're on the north side of the canyon, what you're gonna be pretty much seeing are the great houses.

If you cross to the south side, you'll see the great kiva of Casa Rinconara and a number of small house sites.

The light is coming down from the top and it's going to shine right into that little square right over there.

They either accidentally got it just right or they created the alignment in the first place.

It's a perfect illustration of the basic technique for sun watchingóbringing the sun indoors and then being able to mark it on the opposite wall and this isn't unique to the southwest by any means.

So it has the power, it has that kind of energy.

People come and see it, they're impacted by it and at least in part when they would create such things, that's a part of the reason.

It's like an artistic expression of our true relationship with the rest of the world.

And so it's supposed to have a powerful impact and this does.

Whether it was intentional or not is almost beside the point.

They're amazing the way they angled everything.

They had it all figured out.

You get a feeling here of what used to happen.

So yeah, there was some connection.

This is often related to the idea of the sun impregnating the earth, an expression of appreciation for the fertility of the earth or perhaps hoping for improved fertility in the future.

And how better could you memorialize the sun, pay homage to the sun, than using its light in a special way during your ceremonies.

They had the sophistication to do it.

Whether this was just a coincidence, what we observed today, or whether it was carefully planned and there was an aperture out here, we don't know.

This morning we'll be taking a walk up the canyon to Penasco Blanco to look at the super nova pictograph.

The Chacoans were sophisticated architects and accomplished astronomers.

But they are also human beings with time on their hands.

And they liked to carve in this soft sandstone.

Some of these symbols are probably very important culturally for them.

Others are just doodlings that may have come along the last thousand years.

If we look carefully, we can probably see what they had on their minds.

A hand, crescent, star.

Okay.

All right.

I have little comment on a hand except that this is a way of personalizing a drawing.

But what we're seeing here is an image of the crescent moon, which is very rare in rock art.

We see next to it a ten-pointed star which we believe is a representation of the crab super nova when it exploded in 1054.

We know the moon, crescent moon was very close at that time.

It is also possible that it was a long period comet which was only visible in the northern hemisphere.

There is precedent for this sort of thing.

But we can't say what it was with certainty.

Super nova events are really very rare events.

They happen only once every couple of hundred years and certainly people who were sky watchers, as we know these people were, would have taken note of it immediately.

The millennia of human habitation of the high desert of the southwest culminated in four hundred years of dazzling art, architecture and astronomy.

An ongoing drought drove the people away, ended their accomplishment and studies by the astronomers.

We can only speculate what these scientists knew but it was a result, not of miracle or mystery, but of decades and decades of careful studies of the sun and observations of the heavens above.

The colonial city of Alamos in northwest Mexico has plenty to offer visitors.

There's Spanish legacy and rich natural treasures.

Perhaps most interesting, the traditional knowledge from some of the area's longest residents, the Mayos.

Next time on The Desert Speaks.

Major funding for The Desert       Speaks was provided by the Kemper and Ethel Marley Foundation.

Additional funding was provided by