I’ll never forget losing two clients somewhere in the 164,000-acre Canyons of the Ancients National Monument in southern Colorado. On a glorious May morning, the two friends walked too fast ahead of the group I was leading for the Smithsonian Associates Program. The couple
disappeared, and the other members of the tour were worried.
Anxiously, they asked, “Will you find them?”
I explained that Canyons of the Ancients was a new BLM national
monument proclaimed by President Bill Clinton. He’d set it
aside because it has the highest known density of archaeological
sites in the nation in a rugged landscape that “offers an
unparalleled opportunity to observe, study and experience how
cultures lived and adapted over time in the American
Southwest.” That was all well and good, but folks on the tour
wanted to know if I’d find their two friends.
“Sure,” I said, and pointed to the sky where four
turkey buzzards slowly circled. “We’ll find them, but I
can’t say when.”
We found the strays in about
10 minutes, and after that the group stayed close to me. Canyons of
the Ancients seems to inspire people to roam. It’s a stunning
setting with its multi-colored sandstone layers, hidden small cliff
dwellings and the palpable presence of a missing people now called
Ancestral Puebloans.
Unlike Mesa Verde National Park,
which attracts 600,000 yearly visitors, Canyons of the Ancients
hosts only 45,000 annual visitors in its vast outdoor museum with
no asphalt paths, interpretive signs or excessive rules. Potsherds
and arrowhead flakes remain in place. I’ve encountered
visitors on foot, on horseback, and on mountain bikes, often with
canine companions. I’ve dubbed one extremely remote ruin the
“invisible ruin” because it can only be seen with
binoculars in very special light. And that’s what the Canyons
are all about—exploration, discovery, and understanding the
prehistoric past slowly as awareness of the landscape increases in
different weather and light.
It’s a fairly pristine
desert landscape. When former Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt
recommended national monument status for the area to President
Clinton, he said, “this landscape offers us a chance to study
an entire culture, one that may have been as rich and diverse as
the one we have today.” He argued that archaeological sites
should not just be protected individually, “but rather as
part of a landscape or ‘anthropological
ecosystem.’” He said, “The real science on these
landscapes doesn’t come out of digging out a room and
extracting a few pots. The real discoveries today come from asking
the deeper question of ‘How did communities live in spiritual
and physical equilibrium with the landscape?’”
That’s a question we’d still love to answer.
But here’s the rub: Over 85 percent of Canyons of the
Ancients National Monument is leased for oil, gas, and CO2
exploration, and revenues from those fluid minerals are a vital
part of the budget of Colorado’s Montezuma County. The
Anasazi chose a beautiful place to live and farm, but it happens to
lie atop the largest carbon dioxide dome in the world. Ironically,
even though CO2 is the chief culprit causing global warming,
corporations drill for it because the gas is pumped deep into the
earth to force the last drop out of aging oil wells.
In the last half-century, 190 wells have been drilled within the monument’s boundaries, but future plans may call for as many
as 1,000 new wells. All will bring accompanying roads and
inevitable damage to archaeological sites. In Canyons of the
Ancients, America’s prehistoric past and its energy future
are about to collide.
There’s no doubt that the monument represents world-class resources, yet federal land managers and the public need to think about drilling impacts into the next century — and beyond — as the American appetite for energy increases. It is to be hoped that Canyons of the Ancients and the Bureau of Land Management will help re-define the protection of archaeological resources on a landscape-level in the 21st century.
We have a lot to learn from the Ancestral
Puebloans. Estimates are that there were more of them living in
what is now Montezuma County in the year 1200, than there are
residents living there now. And they somehow survived in the arid
Southwest for 800 years.
Given our heavy water usage and
demand for energy, how many centuries will we be able to survive
and thrive?
Andy Gulliford is a contributor to
Writers on the Range, a service of High Country News
(hcn.org). He is a professor of Southwest Studies and
History at Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado.
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
