Birthing panel MoonFlower Canyon   click to enlarge

The Anasazi were really the most amazing people. Not only did they build a lot of neat houses, but they connected them with roads so they could go visiting and do trading and networking and other trendy mesoamerican stuff that was then making its way north. Lots of happening stuff was going on such as making Indian Jewelry, maize pounding, basket putting togethering, using sounds to form words so they could communicate with each other, it was a heady time.

Their really big thing though was the development of the art of petroglyphery, which as you know is the banging on rocks with another rock to make an image, kind of like a really slow copy machine. Although their images seem crude to us now it was the newspaper and digital photography of the time and it soon developed into a sophisticated method of imparting important information to one another. They would let others know who had visited for the solstice, what was happening in the neighborhood, who shot the biggest bighorn sheep, who was running for councilman, when the kiva services were, recipes, and Obits. It was a huge part of their lives.

As they became more and more knowledgeable they branched out into the arts, sciences, diplomacy (Don’t kill us and We won’t kill you), literature, and most importantly medicine. Medicine was really important to these people as they tended to die for little or no apparent reason. They’d just be walking along singing a song when suddenly, whammo, they were dead. This was alarming and they needed to find out the various causes of death, other than the obvious ones, like an arrow in the ear, or falling off the tops of one of their houses. They had to study what was going on. What little things were happening that they should have been paying attention to but weren’t that might make them cease to be, or dead.

This led to cataloging the various problems of their lives that tended to shorten them and when they discovered one of the these causes they wrote it down on one of their rocks. Before long there was a huge amount of medical data available to them. This is shown quite clearly in this petroglyph which has been translated by petroglyph translators as page 146 of the “Anasazi Midwife’s Manual”.

It clearly shows what we now know, is a Breech birth or as they called it in their early language “OhNoFeetComingFirstDamn” and the expectant father’s reaction to it. Breech births were considered dangerous because it was thought that the baby couldn’t see where it was going as it was coming and would therefore be clumsy and not quite right as it grew up. The other etched symbols are very likely spirit remedies and gifts left over from the baby shower.

Since this is page 146 we can conclude that were pages 1- 145 and probably beyond, maybe up into the three or four hundreds, that must have been filled with necessary, important, doctor kind of stuff. This is just more proof that early people were not as goofy as we had first thought. They had rich, vibrant lives with a strong technological base and were able to be successful in many of their endeavors. Sure you can say they screwed up sometimes, like when they went off and left perfectly good condos in a beautiful gated community to go raise neon tetras in the Amazon, but which civilization hasn’t done that.

We are just scratching the surface of the knowledge these short, squatty, little people had and finding out that they were pretty darn clever. I for one wish they were still hanging around. I’ve got questions for them and I know they had the answers. So I’m studying their messages and figuring them out. I’ll let you know when I learn something.