History On the Rock – Of the Rock – In the Rock

We don’t value our ignorance enough.

Ignorance is really good to have

if it’s combined with curiosity. 

Alan Alda

A’ts’ina Pueblo Ruins (1275-1350 CE) – Ancestral Zuñi People

On top of the two-hundred-foot El Morro Cuesta

Driving to El Morro National Monument on the old seldom-used highway 53 is beautiful and peaceful.  At a tad over 7,200 feet (2,220 meters) of altitude, you leave behind dry, scrawny junipers interspersed with aromatic piñons, to immerse yourself in tall, lush, vanilla-scented ponderosa pines.  Gaining elevation shifts everything from drier and dustier to greener and fresher.  I was lucky that, this year, the monsoon season had been particularly good in this part of New Mexico, wild flowers abounded.

What A’ts’ina would look like if completely uncovered

Only a few of the 875+ rooms were excavated

El Morro is a castle-like natural rock formation emerging from a plateau of scrubby high-desert plants.  Displaying a few ponderosas at its defensive base, the sandstone bluff juts two hundred feet above the adjacent land.  El Morro is a cuesta, a long formation gently sloping upward, then abruptly dropping off at one end, unlike a mesa (aka table) which drops off at both ends.

Two-hundred-foot wall of El Morro Cuesta

El Morro = The Headland

Travelers on the ancient east-west trade route relied heavily on El Morro’s source of water, a natural pool of runoff and snowmelt.  Today the twelve-foot-deep pond bathes wild flowers, cattails, and native grasses on its tiny shore.  It provides a year-round, reliable source of fresh water in an otherwise parched environment. It is located on the eastern side of the cuesta where its tall stonewall offers shade most of the day. 

Watering hole protective wall

Greenish water of life, spent cattails

Considering the much less accommodating terrain nearby, including the El Malpais Badlands (more on next post), it is not surprising that this was the stopping/camping space of choice for people traveling the Acoma-Zuñi trail over at least 1,000 years or so.  It was the only sure water for about forty miles (65 km) in any direction. 

The cuesta is split by a deep and lush box canyon

Before the days of interstates and automobiles, the journey from Albuquerque to this area near the Zuñi Reservation (about 150 miles, 240 km) typically took 9-10 days.  Imagine the relief weary travelers must have felt when they finally reached this small shady oasis after walking or riding a horse/mule across mountains, desert, and lava rocks for so long.  The water was not just refreshing, it was, at times, a lifesaver.  

We can be fairly certain that without this pool, Spaniards and Americans would not have stopped and left inscriptions on the rock, attesting to their presence.  Ancestral Puebloans may not have settled here.  El Morro would not have been made a National Monument and I wouldn’t have been a visitor here! 

In the words of Captain Gaspar Perez de Villagra in 1598: 

‘When by great effort I arrived at the foot of some lofty cliffs at which I sat down,
and then saw that there was a quiet tank of cold water, above whose crystalline waters,
almost blind, I was with difficulty conquering the great madness of the insatiable thirst which overwhelmed me, when trembling, all exhausted, the wet liquor injected strength.’

Clouds gathering over El Morro

On top of El Morro, in the late 13^th century, people built an 875-room pueblo, so inaccessible to outsiders as to rival Acoma (a nearby New Mexico pueblo that is regarded as the oldest continuously inhabited community in the United States, for more than 2,000 years!). After only a couple of generations they moved out.  

A’ts’ina or Atsinna (Place of Writings on the Rock or Where Pictures are on the Rocks) is called Inscription Rock by Anglo-Americans.  The visible ruins of about twelve rooms (uncovered and reconstructed in the 1950’s) comprise only a small percentage of the original village site, the rest remaining unexcavated for preservation.  Thought to have had 1,000-1,500 residents, it was larger in size than the better-known Pueblo Bonito in Chaco Canyon (see previous post on this blog).  Despite its grandeur, it wasn’t used for very long.

Stunted growth of beautiful bonsai-like pine

Archaeologists believe the Zuñi people constructed A’ts’ina between 1275-1350. Although they aren’t in consensus about why the ancient Puebloans chose to build on an inaccessible cuesta top only to abandon it a couple decades later, a common theory is that a period of drought and famine created a need for a defensible position close to a reliable water supply. When the drought ended, they moved back to the desert floor, because living on top of a cuesta top was treacherous. 

Corn and other crops were grown in irrigated fields down on the nearby plains; the surplus was stored in well-sealed rooms in the pueblo against times of need.  The grinding bins and firepits remain today.  The pool at its base was often used too, as small hand-and-toe steps on the cliff face attest. 

But what an archeologist found at this site raised additional and interesting questions, the controversial answer below is seldom, if at all, presented.

Impressive wall at inaccessible end of the cuesta

America’s Culture of War by Tim Folger, Discover Magazine, April 2003: 

After three decades spent studying sites in New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, Arizona, and northern Mexico, Steven A. LeBlanc, the director of collections at Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archeology and Ethnology, is convinced that most archaeologists have completely misread the region's archaeological record. Many of his colleagues even deny that a bloody battle was fought here. Instead, they attribute the deaths to accidental burning or ritual sacrifice. 

Archaeologists have long believed that the pueblo-dwelling corn farmers who populated the southwest before Europeans arrived in the 16^th century were a peaceful people. On the contrary, LeBlanc argues, prehistoric warfare in the Southwest was common, prolonged, and at least as deadly on a per capita basis as the most violent conflicts of the 20^th century. Much of what we take to be characteristic of pueblos today, the magnificent, haunting cliff dwellings, the sophisticated architecture, is testimony to intense warfare and the deaths of entire tribes.  

Clear evidence of prehistoric conflict can be difficult to discern in other parts of the world, but the arid climate and sparse settlement in the Southwest have left pueblo ruins, cultural artifacts, and even human remains remarkably intact. ‘My real interest is, how did people live in the past on a worldwide basis?’ says LeBlanc. ‘What the Southwest provides us is probably the best-worked-out archaeological database in the world. We use it as an example, a place to test ideas. But ultimately, it's not unique; it's not even particularly bloody. It's no different from anyplace else in the world.’ 

‘When I first began studying this, I asked, Was there any warfare among prehistoric cultures? Now, of course, my conclusion is that that's a completely stupid question. The real question that any archaeologist has to face is, Was there any peace?’ 

‘About the second day we were at El Morro, we walked over the site and could see evidence of burning – everywhere. So we began to excavate. We found rooms like this,’ he says, pointing to a slide showing the freshly excavated interior of a room at the pueblo. Broken pottery litters the floor, probably smashed when roof beams collapsed in a fire.

‘The people obviously ran out the door in a hurry,’ says LeBlanc. ‘Everything was sitting on the floor just like they left it. Virtually every room in this site, which consisted of 20 distinct little pueblos, ranging from 5 to 10 rooms to maybe 30 rooms, spread out over a long ridge, had been catastrophically burned.’ 

Natural fires in a stone pueblo quickly burn out or the community extinguishes them, usually before more than one room is damaged. The torching of an entire pueblo, LeBlanc's team concluded, must have been an act of war. LeBlanc and his crew also noticed that many walls they excavated were missing large numbers of stones. This puzzled them until they uncovered a much bigger pueblo, consisting of 500 rooms and enclosing a central plaza, just a few hundred feet away. The second site was completed no later than 1279. According to tree-ring dates, the neighboring smaller pueblos were burned in 1276. 

‘What I believe happened was that the survivors dismantled those small scattered pueblos, which were not defensible, and they basically built a fortress,’ LeBlanc says. ‘These people were very afraid of something.’ At first, he recalls, ‘I explained it in terms of a very local, accidental kind of thing, like the Hatfields and the McCoys, that didn't have any broad explanation.’

Only in the last several years has LeBlanc come to believe that El Morro represents just one episode from an era of violence that swept the Southwest, and probably much of North America, at the close of the 13^th century. The evidence for widespread catastrophe is overwhelming, he says, from palisaded Iroquois villages in New York to fortified sites in the Pacific Northwest.

‘It took me 25 years to come to grips with what was really going on,’ he says.

Casual visitors to the site will learn none of this, it is too controversial, and the omission is not a surprise.

Beautiful Mexican Hat flowers along road to El Morro

So it seems like El Morro always existed and always will.  The 'writings on the rocks' weave a multicolored tapestry of the people of New Mexico.

1100-1400: Ancestral Puebloan people live in villages on top of the sandstone rock.  Some of the rooms of these villages are visible today, as well as hundreds of petroglyphs carved into the face of the rock.

Oldest and least numerous are petroglyphs from the Anasazi people

Neat row of bighorn sheep, 1000-1400 CE

1539-1774: Lured by tales of golden cities, the Spanish begin numerous expeditions into what is now New Mexico.  The first Spanish/European inscription carved at El Morro is that of Governor Don Juan de Oñate in 1605; the last is dated 1774, and there are no inscriptions clearly from the Mexican period. 

1846-1906: US military expeditions come to the area, followed by emigrants en route to California.  Many of these American’s names are carved on the rock during this period.  In the 19^th century, the Americans who passed by El Morro tended to be part of either military campaigns against Indians, survey teams charting possible rail routes and the position of the new national border, or emigrant trains headed west.  The fact that it is often difficult to distinguish scientific expeditions from military campaigns, since the army employed surveyors, geographers, artists, and other specialists to study and document the newly acquired territory, is a perfect example of the relationship between knowledge production and power.  

Inscription Rock

1906-Present: El Morro is preserved as a National Monument.  Today, people travel here along some of the same routes that have been followed for hundreds of years. 

In the decades that followed, the route became a common thoroughfare, and routine records of passage were inscribed on the rock. 

In total, there are more than 2,000 inscriptions and petroglyphs. Given the impact of erosion on sandstone, there’s no way of knowing when this tradition started; however, cumulatively, El Morro serves as a monolithic stone tablet, documenting three distinct periods: 

• Ancestral Puebloans from up to 1,000 years ago
• Spanish conquistadors from 1605 to around 1800
• American settlers and soldiers from 1800 until 1906  

Military and evangelical expeditions also passed by.  Some of these inscriptions chronicle the work of colonization: exploration and the subjugation and missionization of Indians.  Inscribing their names in this rock was similar to erecting a flag (or cross), leaving an indelible reminder that they had been there, that they had claimed this place.  Colonization involved not just acts of exploration and conquest, suppression and domination, but also a wide array of symbolic assertions of power.

Protective fencing still allows you to get close

Sign at inscription rock: ‘Carved into the soft sandstone cuesta is a lingering history of the American Southwest.  The names of the celebrated, the infamous, the legendary, and the unknown are immortalized side by side where they would otherwise be separated by time, class, and ambitions.  Their inscriptions are carved alongside petroglyphs left by people who lived here more than 700 years ago.’  Like a sandstone guestbook…  Resting in the shade of the bluff, they added their messages to the rock.  

I love the various styling/font of each signature/name.   It is fascinating to see inscriptions dating back fifteen years before the Pilgrims even landed!   A time before settlers hit Plymouth Rock!  

Imagine, if you can, on the East Coast, a naturally occurring megalith rising from the flat land of Florida. In addition to the petroglyphs of prehistoric inhabitants, this rock wall is inscribed by members of the parties of Christopher Columbus, Juan Ponce de León, and Andrew Jackson as they passed by. Such a historically significant monument would rank in United States history right alongside Plymouth Rock.  By contrast, El Morro faded into the backwaters of Southwestern history when the railroad line was built 20 miles to the north. El Morro's water supply no longer needed. 

The first known historical mention of El Morro is found in the journal of Diego Pérez de Luxán, chronicler of the Espejo Expedition, which stopped at the landmark for water on March 11, 1583.

Don Juan de Oñate, 1605

Oñate’s inscription is the oldest Spanish inscription.
He carved his name in the rock 15 years before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock.
As first governor under Spain, of New Mexico,
he visited El Morro in April 1605 while traveling home to
San Gabriel from an expedition to the Pacific coast. 

The inscription, carved in Spanish, reads: 

“Pasó por aquí, el adelantado Don Juan de Oñate
del descubrimiento de la mar del sur a 16 de Abril de 1605.”

Translated:

“Passed by here, the adelantado Don Juan de Oñate
from the discovery of the sea of the south the 16th of April of 1605.”

Despite the elegant, careful carving of this pronouncement, some historians now think the explorer did not actually reach the Gulf of California, as it is now known.

General Don Diego de Vargas,

who conquered for our Holy Faith and for the Royal Crown,

all of New Mexico, at his expense,

was here, in the year 1692.

Compared to our life spans, El Morro seems timeless.  Geological and erosional forces will, in the long run, dismantle these sandstone layers, but the protective, hard rock layer at the top has delayed the process longer than on the land around it, which once rose as high. 

Some of the most gracefully carved of the inscriptions were made on August 23, 1859, when an Army expedition led by Lieutenant Edward Beale passed through, establishing a new route from Texas to California. This group included several Egyptian camels being tested as pack animals, an idea that came to nothing. Their wrangler, P. Gilmer Breckinridge, also left his signature on the rock. 

In 1857, the army experimented with camels for desert transportation.  Thus did a caravan more Arabi than American passed by El Morro.  Trying to solve the water problem on the route from the Mississippi River to California through Southwest desert.  Buying 33 camels in Egypt and Turkey, they took on three Arab handlers, sailed back to Texas, and began training.  When the westward expeditions started in 1856, the officers reported their camels superior to horse and mule trains.  Another 41 camels were added to the corps in 1857.  ‘The camels are coming’ read a newspaper headline when these exotic beasts pulled an express wagon in Los Angeles in 1857. 

Their approach made quite a stir among the native population, most of whom had never seen the like.  Camels could pull a load over a mountain where mules balked, ate cactus, and could live well where our domestic animals would die.  Civil War ended the camel corps.  Most of the animals were sold at auction, and some ended up in zoos and circuses.  Some simply escaped. As late as the early 1900’s, sightings of feral camels might still be reported from Mexico to Arkansas.  (My husband heard many stories of camels in Arizona when he grew up there) …

Trail work was being done by Native Americans when I visited

Beautiful upgrade of this small park

From here, a visitor now can look out at today's landscape, but can also look into the past. Perhaps the imagination will stir up the dust of a thirsty caravan coming from the east, the oxen straining against their heavy wooden yokes, the tired horses surging forward to the promise of water. 

The shift of mainline transportation (train) north of the Zuni mountains ended the historic function of El Morro as a watering place and camp on the long trail between the Rio Grande and western deserts.  In some ways, this is what makes this place yet more special, few visitors and a stronger sense of remoteness.  

Lucky to be here during a particularly wet monsoon season

Small pool above the Sandstone Bluff of El Malpais

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