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| <back | home Ancient Housing and Ancient Worldview by Amy Landau When it comes to possibilities in innovative housing, the obvious impulse is to look to the future. Perhaps equally enlightening, though, is to look to the past. What can we learn from a thousand years ago? I took a fascinating time-travel journey on my last vacation when I decided to explore the ancient housing of American Indians in the Four Corners area of the Southwest. In particular, I visited Chaco Culture in New Mexico, Canyon de Chelly in Arizona and Mesa Verde in Colorado. Chaco Culture is the site of the mysteriously abandoned ruins between two high canyon walls in a remote desert setting. The elaborate remains are vaguely believed to compose a communal ceremonial/food distribution/commerce or political center of the Ancestral Puebloan people between 850 and 1250 AD. The place remains a haunting puzzle to this day, since no one is quite sure exactly what it was or why the people suddenly disappeared after 400 years. The planning and design of the Chaco pueblos are striking, and most noticeable from an aerial view. There are 30 large masonry buildings, each containing hundreds of rooms, some of them multi-level “apartment-style” structures. The Chaco masons were the predecessors to our current “natural building” movement and yet they put the Cobb people to shame. Working with no metal tools or cement, they somehow managed to shape sandstone into blocks by hand and build vast, elaborate communal buildings, held together with nothing but mud mortar. Their techniques improved over time, with patterns growing more uniform. Early houses were one-stone thick, evolving into walls with thick interiors of rubble and thin layers of facing stone. Most memorable are the rows of large, rectangular blocks evenly chinked with smaller stones. One compelling theory holds that the buildings are astronomical in nature. Spirals drawn on walls capture significant alignments of light and shadow from the sun and moon, suggesting that these principles guided the architects in construction of the buildings. An elaborate system of ancient roads spanning 200 miles radiate from the site, while no horses or known sources of transportation existed at the time to use them. (The roads could only be discerned through elaborate NASA technology flown overhead.) The exact purpose of the roads is unknown, but they are conjectured to be either routes of pilgrimage or trade leading to the center. One documentary filmmaker, Anna Sofaer, argues that every aspect of Chaco Culture was built with astronomy and cosmology at its core. I venture to suggest that our modern-day insistence on identifying a single function for Chaco may be the problem. Could the Chacoan world view have allowed for a center of utilitarian, astronomical and spiritual function to co-exist without contradiction? Canyon de Chelly (NM) and Mesa Verde (CO) are the sites of spectacular cliff dwellings from the 12th to 13th century. The Ancestral Pueblo built their homes under overhanging cliffs, in recessed areas along the towering canyon walls. Mesa Verde, now abandoned, was inhabited for 700 years. Canyon de Chelly continues to be inhabited by present-day Navajo who raise sheep and farm the green canyon floor today just as they have done for the last 300 years. When you first take in the sweeping vistas of these places, you are simply overwhelmed by the incredible majesty of colorful rock surrounding you, the 1,000-foot canyon walls and sharp drop-offs. But when you look a little closer, with the aid of binoculars, you begin to see them: what looks like traces of tiny ant-civilizations built into the creases of the cliffs. It’s a “where’s waldo” puzzle gradually coming into relief, and yet this waldo is spelled with a small “w,” only incidental, peripheral to the universe which clearly dominates. My feeling was awe at this reverse image of how humans live today. Rather than dominating the landscape, people were hidden in it. Rather than superimposing a reality of our own as we commonly do today, people were dependent on their knowledge of the earth for survival. The Mesa Verde dwellings evolved from crude dug-out pits in the ground with a single hole for smoke — to the detailed masonry work of kivas and small-roomed, multi-leveled structures. People had to climb vertical cliffs with make-shift footholds to get to their homes. They farmed corn and squash on the mesa above. They kept warm through brutal winters with fires that blackened the ceilings and their lungs, dying by the age of 35. There is no doubt that these people (like the Chacoans) had to be impossibly tough to survive at all. They struggled through the searing heat of summer and the bitter cold of winter and still managed to create magnificent art, pottery, weavings, a culture and a belief system that recognized the earth as alive. I ask myself this: how is it possible that such alternate realities can exist in the relatively short span of human life on earth? Here I am, an inhabitant of a current-day New York City where the landscape and sky is virtually erased by human artifice – pavement, buildings, cars and human domination at every turn. The suburbs with their big-box houses, tree-less manicured lawns, endless highways and car-dependence are equally, if not more, distorted. On the surface, we Americans may appear to have longer, more cushioned lives than the American Indians of the past. Yet, we are perhaps even more vulnerable to an invisible but daunting reality of our own making – the greenhouse effect: global warming and climate change. When our culture exiled wilderness, did we exile ourselves, our lives, the future of the human race? The task before us may be to re-trace the past: to find our human roots and fashion our dwellings by learning from those who lived on this land before us in an attitude of awe and reverence for the majesty of the land where they found themselves. Amy Landau is a regular contributor to HopeDance from New York. She can be reached at Amy.Landau@gmail.com. <back | top^ |