Travels with Cooper (2): Gila Cliff Dwellings

By Yuchitown- Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0
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We are in Hohokam territory, here in Tucson. The Gila Cliff Dwellings are in Mogollon territory, near Silver City, New Mexico.

We know, from tree ring dating--counting and comparing tree ring growth--that the Gila cliff dwellings used trees cut down from 1276 to 1287, to build homes high up in natural caves on cliff sides. We visited one open to the public, high above the Gila River.

Cooper, who is an inveterate explorer, something like Coronado, I suppose, is in the habit of occasionally lifting a leg to claim territory said to belong to someone else, was not allowed to exhaust himself by climbing up to the ruins, so he stayed in a kennel at the Ranger Station.

"Lucky Dog!", I think I heard Mari mumble at about 5875 feet in elevation.

The Mimbres families who lived in the dwelling we saw, were there for only about twenty years. As with other such dwellings in the Southwest, there is no consensus as to why they left: perhaps climate; perhaps the incursion of other people from up north.

Finally! They they are!

Timbers and mortered stones

Room with a view

Unless you want to walk
all the way back.

Some of those timbers.

Possibly to steady round-bottomed pots.

Cooper was sleeping in the kennel when finally we had focussed our attention long enough to get down to the Gila River, again. Mari said it was her turn for a nap. I found the lens cap I thought I had lost on the climb, in my pocket.

"What was the name of that place where we had lunch yesterday?", I asked Mari.

"Forget it!", she said. "I am going to rest my eyes. C'mon, Cooper."

Comments

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back: two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed! Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore. The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil. We farmed, too, of course. All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor. Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. Even when all they wanted to do w

That's all we want: fairness! Not more guns and more war! Fairness!

The five police officers who were killed in Dallas are certainly not the officers who killed innocent citizens. There is more than enough tragedy to go around. "What is happening to our country?", Mari asked this morning. I had no answer. We do have an answer. We do not want to say it. There are lots of answers, all of them pertinent. We are a racist society, like most human societies. We are a society in the midst of enormous changes-- social, political, economic--and we do not know what to do about it. We are divided unsustainably into absurdly rich, and an enormous number of crumbling middle class families, and poor. We have guns everywhere; military guns, guns just for killing people, cheap guns, heroes carrying guns into churches and supermarkets, idiots who think guns ought to be allowed in bars and schools and ball games and beauty parlors and political rallies. Our political process is almost useless. There are good people in Congress, but there

SmokeSound

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