The Road That Went Up a Hill

Abstract

This article describes several roads with apparent associations with the Bluff Great House site (42Sa22674) in southeastern Utah. These descriptions underscore the similarity of these features with other such features in the northern Southwest, including roads and road-related features in the San Juan Basin of northwestern New Mexico. The differing configurations and contexts of the Bluff Great House roads suggest opportunities to explore community organization and identity, Puebloan cosmology, and emergence narratives.

Este articulo descríbe los varios caminos antiguos que tienen aparente asociaciónes con la Casa Grande de Bluff, sitio 42SA22674, en el sureste de Utah. Estos descripciónes enfatizan las características parecidas con otras lugares y sitios in el norte del suroeste Estados Unidos, y incluyen caminos en noroeste Nuevo Mexico, en el Cuenca del Rio San Juan. Los caminos de la Casa Grande de Bluff tienen configuraciónes y contextos distintos que sugieren opportunidades a explorar el organización y la identidad de la colonia, la cosmología de los Pueblos, y naraciónes de aparación.

KEYWORDS:

• Chaco Phenomenon
• Chaco road
• Chaco great houses
• Bluff
• Utah
• Bluff great house
• Ancestral Pueblo
• Pueblo Indian cosmology
• Pueblo Indian shrines

Acknowledgments

It goes without saying that I owe a lot of my knowledge of regional roads to Winston Hurst — the man has been terrifically generous with me, and I cannot even begin to express adequately my gratitude to him. The pioneering work that Hurst, Owen Severance, Dale Davidson, Nancy Shearin, and Joe Pachak have provided with respect to road research in southeastern Utah cannot be overstated. I am also indebted to Catherine Cameron, Steve Lekson, and Richard Wilshusen for long, past conversations regarding roads and things Chacoan. More recently, I have enjoyed discussions about these features with colleagues, particularly Scott Ortman, at Crow Canyon Archaeological Center. I am also grateful to BLM archaeologists Don Simonis and Cameron Cox, and to Utah State Lands archaeologist Kenny Wintch, for their support of roads documentation. I am thankful for multiple individuals through the years for helping me document these and other roads, including Winston, Jay Willian, Joe Pachak, Nancy Shearin, and Ben Bellorado — I am sure I am forgetting some people and I beg their forgiveness. The Friends of Cedar Mesa and Abajo Archaeology have also provided support and encouragement of this research. Finally, my colleagues in Utah State Parks and at the Edge of the Cedars Museum (especially Teri Paul and Tim Smith) provided me some much needed time to work on this manuscript.

Notes

1 Informed by oral history interviews with turn-of-the-century pioneer Albert R. Lyman, Hurst chartered an aircraft in July, 1988 and flew over Cottonwood Wash and other nearby drainages and confirmed the presence of the linear features (Hurst et al. 1990). Hurst and his associates soon demonstrated the roads’ associations with great houses, great kivas and other road-related features that had been observed in Chaco Canyon and in the broader San Juan Basin (Gabriel 1991).

2 The Bluff Great House appears to have a full array of sites that form summer and winter solstice sunrise/sunset alignments as well as equinox alignments (Till 2009, 2011; Till and Hurst 2015). In addition to the alignments mentioned in this article, the great house site is aligned with unrecorded features on the summer solstice sunrise and sunset. The former consists of a trail down into the Bluff valley from the steep cliffs above the valley. The latter includes a small room built at the base of the cliffs, and a large boulder scored with multiple grinding grooves. This constellation of sites contains many more details than can be provided here.

3 The term “herradura,” Spanish for “horseshoe,” was coined during the Chaco Roads Project (Kincaid et al. 1983). The designation is an apt descriptor of this feature type, which is often described as a C- or D-shape, but may also be circular. Chaco archaeologists note an apparent tendency for the features to open to the east; however, the structures also often open onto adjacent roads or the aperture is parallel to the course of an adjacent road (Nials et al. 1987; Vivian 1997a). Another common feature of herraduras in the San Juan Basin is their tendency to occur in a “consistent topographic position”: the features are very frequently found at major topographic breaks that offer extensive views of a particular road alignment in both directions.

4 Hurst (Hurst and Till 2009:63–64) has documented a herradura with a short road swale and an associated bedrock groove to the west of the Bluff valley. The herradura is situated at the very edge of a high alluvial terrace above a drainage that leads to a large bedrock staircase that descends to a large early Pueblo II period site. The bedrock groove extends along the bottom of the aforementioned drainage, marking the apparent passage of the road alignment.

5 The Tank Mesa Road appears to be only a small part of a series of alignments that extend far to the north, and may ultimately terminate with the Red Knobs Site, which consists of a set of masonry rubble mounds that wrap around a pair of large, low sandstone buttes (Hurst and Till 2009; Till 2011). This locus includes significant Pueblo I and Pueblo II period components and boasts a great kiva as well (Allison 2004). One or more of the rubble mounds may represent modest great house structures. Hurst and I have previously suggested that the Bluff Great House may have been the southern terminus of a great loop of roads: the western portion of this possible loop lies in Comb Wash while the eastern stretch may run along Cottonwood Wash. Severance (2006) criticizes the notion of a formalized “loop” of roads, and I think he may be correct. While the western length of roads (including the Tank Mesa alignment) does likely extend from the Bluff Great House to Red Knobs, an amazing distance of about 41 km, alignments found along Cottonwood Wash may represent localized road networks associated with several individual great features found in or along this drainage.

6 Hurst (2001) documented this boulder panel as 42Sa20909. Interestingly, Owen Severance (1999: Figure 5) observes a petroglyph panel with similar content along the road alignments northern crossing of Comb Ridge en route to the Red Knobs Site. In several recent public presentations, Hurst has expressed the possibility that local Chacoan roads were used by runners in the past, noting the prevalence and importance of ritual running in modern Puebloan societies.