Description: The warehousing of Anasazi culture

From Craig Childs, House of Rain: Tracking a Vanished Civilization across the American Southwest

1.

"When archaeological crews began digging in the ruins of Chaco Canyon in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they dumped unsalvageable rubble into the wash for flash floods to carry off. From one excavation alone, led by the National Geographic Society in the 1920s, more than 100,000 tons of archaeological debris -- splintered ceiling timbers and unseated wall stones -- were hauled out in ore carts and fed to the wash, as if the workers thermselves were agents of erosion. Everything else was packed into crates and shipped in boxcars to distant museums and private collections. A startling wealth of objects left Chaco Canyon during those excavations: colorful flutes and planks of richly painted wood that once hung in rooms like banners; beautifully decorated bowls and jars found stacked neatly to the ceilings of these rooms; masses of bear paws and mountain lion claws and bird wings uncovered in ceremonial contexts." (page 19)

2.

"Looking for the artifacts removed from Pueblo Bonito, I had wandered the long halls of the American Museum of Natural History in New York, its treasures sealed in seemingly never-ending rows of gray metal cabinets. In the Peabody Museum at Harvard, I found three stories of ceramics. In a small Federal repository in Albuquerque, I went through thousands of beads in plastic cases, and painted seed jars crowded on metal shelves. In these modern storehouses I packed my journals with annotations, telling which of Pueblo Bonito's rooms contained which artifacts. This morning I put the pieces back, restocking these rooms from my imagination. I filled spaces with thousands of nested bowls, their severe geometric designs flowing from one to the next. Exotic birds went back into their burials under the floors, along with a necklace made of two thousand flawlessly graduated turquoise discs, with jet black finger rings and painted flutes. I fit ceiling beams back into position, first setting turquoise into their sockets, the hanging feathered sashes from their heights." (page 47)