Tag Archives: Anasazi

The Rosetta Stone

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While travelling the inner depths of Capitol Reef National Park we stumbled on to what we believe is one of the most significant finds in recent history as it relates to the progression of artistic skill in Anasazi rock art. This discovery is bound to shake the art world to its very core and set Art historians on a new path of understanding as to how the Anasazi went from being rock pounders to major artists.

If you remember your history you know that the smartest minds in the archaeology world could not begin to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphics. It was like Chinese arithmetic, really hard and it made their brains hurt, so many just gave up, feeling dumb and ashamed. They just went home, defeated. It wasn’t until some lucky guy found this stone called the Rosetta stone that had three different languages on it translating the same off-color joke into all the other languages. If we remember correctly the languages were Greek, a form of Inuit called “Inuktitut”, and of course hieroglyphics itself. That made it easy. A group of guys and one woman made up of Greek, Inuit and Egyptian scholars soon had the hieroglyphics translated and now practically anybody can just pick up something written in hieroglyphics and read it like it was yesterday’s obits. Because that was what most hieroglyphics were, stuff about dead kings, kings that were already dead, kings that were about to be dead, people who wanted to be king but changed their minds because they didn’t want to become dead, and so on. The obituaries of the day.

So what does this have to do with the art world you ask. Plenty. People who study petroglyphs, Anasazi rock art, have wondered for years “Why didn’t these guys ever get any better ?” Look at any rock depiction of Bighorn sheep. They all look exactly the same no matter when they were created. For like a hundred years these Anasazi petroglyph makers never changed how they created an image of a Bighorn sheep, or any other subject for that matter. You would think with all that practice they’d have gotten better by accident. But they didn’t. They just hammered away in the same old style.

Then the image above was taken showing what was to become the Rosetta Stone of the art world. On this newly discovered rock panel you can see there is a petroglyph in the upper right hand corner of one of the Anasazi’s favorites subjects, an undefined lump or something, maybe the start of another Bighorn sheep that they screwed up and just abandoned, (there is no erasing in Petroglyphs) and this splendid but remarkable painting of foliage in the style of Monet, Renoir, Mr. van Rijn, O’Keeffe. This was a quantum leap forward for the Anasazi, as it showed that at least one of them got sick to death of painting sheep.

*The Institute immediately sent in its crack team of art historians, restoration-ists, and gawkers to secure this painting and to analyze how it was done. They have slowly been taking this image apart piece by piece, picking at it with sharp things, rubbing it gently with 36 grit sandpaper to see what’s underneath, asking themselves “How did they do it? How did these Anasazi’s go from no-talent rock chippers to this level of  sophistication without attending some prestigious art school?” The questions kept building the more they reduced this image to a mere shadow on the wall.

Some new facts were gleaned from this process. One was that the painting was done with brushes made of wooly mammoth hair wrapped onto a slender willow switch, and another was the paint was analyzed and found to be a combination of crushed berries which were used to create the Alizarin Crimson seen in the leaves, acrylic paint from the Artist Den, some off-brand oil paint of the type found at Hobby Lobby all bound together in a matrix of Toad fat. Our experts are still trying to come up with an explanation for the inconsistencies that this brings up, but these are smart people and they’ll come up with some plausible answers. After all their jobs depend on it.

While we are hard at work figuring out all this stuff so that you don’t have to, take a moment to study the image. See how wonderfully clear the artist created the leaves and stems. Look how every leaf conforms to the rock surface it was painted onto, yet shows the brilliant colors that make this image come alive. It ‘s hard to believe that this was painted 1100 years ago.

The Institute will be studying this image plus any more we find, to discover just what new stage in the art of the Ancients this led to. We’ll have those answers and more as this story unfolds. Stay tuned.

* Note: For those of you unfamiliar with The Institute and what it does, please see the page labeled The Institute on the Menu Bar above. That should explain everything. You shouldn’t have one single question remaining regarding The Institute after reading it. None. For those of you favored few who already know about the Institute, Nevermind. Return to your daily activities. Thank you for your support.

Anasazi Garden

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When many people think of the desert the first image that comes to mind is the Great Sahara desert, or perhaps the Skeleton Coast of Namibia, or the Great Sand Dunes of the Southwestern United states, or even your back yard if you don’t water it. A place barren and inhospitable to life. A place where nothing grows and you dare not venture far from water lest you perish. Which is a pretty easy thing to do if you’re standing out there in the noon day sun with no hat, which we would hasten to add you shouldn’t do, even if you are English and that comes natural to you. We’ve noticed that whenever we’re trapped in the desert and near death we always have a vision of Joe Cocker in his bright red English soldiers jacket singing “With a Little Help From My Friends” marching on before us. This always saves us and we make it back to civilization in one piece, thirsty but alive, but then we’re experts and trained for this kind of thing. But that’s just us, your mileage may vary.

But if you are somewhere like Johns canyon, Utah and its early morning you’ll see something entirely different. A desert garden literally brimming with life. It may be different than what you’re used to thinking of how a garden should be, but then you’re in a different place than you would normally be. As you journey through the canyons you will see small gardens tucked away in every nook and cranny, one after the other until you realize that this is a veritable oasis in the middle of a desolate land.

We are always struck by how similar in feel these desert gardens are to Japanese gardens, which couldn’t be more opposite in nature. The Japanese garden being lush and green with carefully manicured plants, with small trickling streams feeding into water-lily filled ponds, compared to this dry desert garden with its carefully chosen plants, tucked in amongst the boulders, placed just so to take advantage of what ever moisture may be sent its way. The color palette of this garden with its earth tones and giant boulders selected for their color and texture and positioned to fill the space but not overwhelm it is the same in feel if not color, as you find in the perfect temple gardens of Kyoto.

Sometimes we think, that is the experts in our botanical department who are paid to think about these things, think, that there must have been an early visitation to this land by wandering Samurai gardeners who traveled the world spreading their knowledge of how to make a perfect garden where one couldn’t possibly be, teaching people like the Anasazi how to have beauty in their lives in an inhospitable place. A group of Ninja gardening warriors, as it were, dedicated to creating beauty in even the most unreceptive, belligerent landscapes. Or not. But it’s as good a reason as any for the gardens being there.

Our First-strike gardeners here at *The Institute’s World-wide Center for Horticultural Research and truck farm have been collecting gardens just like this one and transporting them root and twig, back to our Botanical center completely intact, where our own hybrid gardeners keep and protect them for posterity. We have gardens similar in size and scope to this one that we have found throughout the world and brought back here to the Institute for safe keeping and our own personal viewing pleasure. Sometimes we let the public view them but not very often. You actually have to have some kind of pull to get in. If you’re interested write us and include your bio and an 11,000 word essay on why we should even let you in the front door and we’ll get back to you if you qualify. Thank you in advance for your interest.

* Note: For those of you unfamiliar with The Institute and what it does, please see the page labeled The Institute on the Menu Bar above. That should explain everything. You shouldn’t have one single question remaining regarding The Institute after reading it. None. For those of you favored few who already know about the Institute, Nevermind. Return to your daily activities. Thank you for your support.

Let’s Go In There

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See way back in there where there’s that black doorway? Let’s go in there. There has got to be something really cool back in there. Let’s go check it out. Many times you’ve been watching one of those movies where there are a bunch of teenagers in an old spooky place and one of them says “Hey, Let’s go in the basement. What’s the worst that could happen?” Why wouldn’t there be a deranged guy with a chainsaw down there in the dark.

But that’s Hollywood and this is real life. There’s no chainsaw toting guy in there. The Anasazi didn’t have chainsaws. It’s unclear if they even had metal. The darkness of that doorway draws you in, you know you want to see what’s in there. Was it simply a storage room or was it used for a far different purpose? Are there secrets you can see on the walls, written maybe way high up where the writer had to stand on someone’s shoulders to put his message there. Maybe it was the bedchamber of some Anasazi princess that waited endlessly for the King to visit. Or a place where they kept the royal scrolls filled with the history and exploits of heroes long dead. Can’t tell standing here. We need to go in.

How come we’re like that? Cursed with an undying curiosity to find stuff out. I guess you might not be but I am. For me it is the constant desire to find out the rest of the story. You may remember Paul Harvey, the man with a million stories. He’d start a story and you would be riveted in your seat as you listened to it unfold, knowing that was more here than met the eye, or in this case the ear, as he led you down the stories’ trail. Then just as he’d get to the part that explained it all he’d go for a commercial break and you’d be left hanging there, waiting for the rest of the story. He’d always come back and tell you the surprise ending, unless you were unlucky enough to have someone change the station, or the radio signal would conk out, then you’d be stuck.

Then you’d be left waiting for the rest of the story, sometimes for days, sometimes for years. I never remember the completed stories, they’re gone from my memory. But I do remember the ones I missed the endings of. Even now to this day, decades later in some cases, I’m waiting for the rest of the story. I’ll know it when I hear it. Every once in a while I would get the answer to one of those uncompleted stories and I’d feel like I had gotten a present. The, “Oh, So that’s the rest of the story” feeling. That was always a very good feeling, a satisfied feeling.

So right now we don’t know what went on in that room back there in the dark. The story’s not finished, Let’s go find out.

On A Rock

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OnARock                                                             click to enlarge

Build your house upon a rock. The Anasazi took that advice to heart. Their buildings in Mesa Verde are still standing in nearly livable condition after seven, eight  hundred years. Well, not all of them of course. The ones built before they brought in zoning and building codes sometimes just fall down, but that doesn’t change the soundness of the advice.

People look at a scene like this and say “Where’s the rest of it? Where’s the rest of the building?” They fail to see the genius behind the Anasazi’s plan. This was never supposed to be a completed building. This is a stage prop. The Anasazi were incredible actors. They not only acted, they wrote their own plays, built backdrops, put on shows that would rival anything on Broadway today. It was why all the trails led to Mesa Verde, it was the Great White Way of its time.

There have only been fragments found of the marquees that trumpeted some of their greatest productions, such as dramas, like

Bringing In The Maize

Romeo and Juliet

My Metate, My Mano

and Mysteries such as,

Who Hit Lenny With a Stone

My Acorns Are Missing

The Case Of The Half Eaten Dog

The Encyclopedia Salesman And The Farmers Daughter

You Wanna See My Pestle

Don’t Do That Again, You’ll Get A Hernia

The comedies may seem a little coarse and unsophisticated by today’s standards, but remember these early people were living in a rock apartment building with no central heating or AC, kind of like they do in Detroit and parts of New York city. They needed some diversion.

The next time you’re visiting some ancient culture’s living conditions and you wonder “How come they did that?” or think “Jeez, I’d a never done that.” remember these folks were different than you. They were shorter. They pretty much only ate corn and the occasional dog. They got bored easy. They couldn’t just run over To Wal-Mart and get stuff, there was no Wal-Mart. Try and figure out the reason they did weird stuff. You may find out they weren’t so goofy after all.

p.146 Anasazi Midwife’s Manual

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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.

Anasazi Storm

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AnazaziStorm0278Rock Formation Zion                                                    click to enlarge

Another mystery solved. That’s what we were able to write in the Journal of Mysteries Solved, kept in our celebrated “Explorers and Natural Scientists Guys” room here at The Institute. This legendary room is the headquarters of a bunch of little-known, but famous in their own mind, group of world-renown experts that make up our division of CyrptoBotan-PaleoKayology dedicated to solving the mysteries of the ages. Very much like that upstart organization, The National Geographic Society, which has its own fancy-schmancy headquarters building in Washington does. Only we’re not some Johnny Come Lately bunch that’s only been around for a few hundred years like they like to brag about. No, we’ve been doing this stuff for a long time now. Those NatGeo guys will often come around here trying to sneak in and find out about our newest most secret projects we’re trying to get funding for just so they can get the jump on us and get stuff in their magazine before we can publish. We had that story of the Super-Collider and the Dangers of Inter-specie Mutation in the bag until they butted in. We’re out of sorts with them at the moment so enough said. We run them off as soon as we see them now. Headline grabbers.

Some of you folks who have been busy with your lives may not have heard of this new offshoot of science called CyrptoBotan-PaleoKayology. We’re proud to be able to state that we have the very first department here at The Institute. It is made up primarily of experts that couldn’t make up their minds about what their majors were and so they dabbled in a little bit in everything. We have the fields of Cryptology, Botany, Paleontology, Archeology, Welding, School bus repair, Home Healthcare advocology, Dog Walker certification, BB Stacking 101 and 102, T-shirt design for the Hooters restaurant chain, I guess that would come under Designology, Cosmetology, Zoology and “Etiquette In Line” at your local fast food restaurant (which isn’t really a science but we thought it would benefit humanity if we taught those blivets some manners. We’re looking at you, McDonalds.) represented here. Our motto is “Our experts may not know a lot but they know everything about what they do know”.

If you’ve been to Zion National Park you may have noticed this rock formation on the road to the Temple of Sinawava. At first glance it looks just like any other incredible fascinating rock formation but that’s what has hidden it mystery for so long. Beneath its gorgeous natural beauty it hides a tale of danger, destruction, doom and despair. Our CyrptoBotan-PaleoKayologists have unlocked its secrets by a little know technique called Imagineering. That where you see something unusual and say “hmm I wonder what caused that”, sit around, have a few beers, talk about it with your fellow CyrptoBotan-PaleoKayologists and come up with a theory that can not be disapproved and write a paper. Whole religions have been started like that so there’s precedent.

This particular rock formation is actually a major construct created by the predecessors of the Anasazi, a people lost in time. The class of this type of construct is called an anti or reverse pictograph because as you know a pictograph is ‘picked’ into the surface of the rock it is on while reverse or anti pictographing is made up by applying layers of stone on the surface of the rock canvas building it up until the desired image is created. It is hard to do, really hard, they are still trying to discover what the composition of the adhesive was that has allowed that applique to remain in place over the eons, let alone how a race of people barely 4½ feet tall and weighing less than 86 lbs. and couldn’t even speak English, could have lifted pieces of stone weighing about the same as a greyhound bus.

After several cases of a very strong English Ale called the Bishop’s Finger, which had been smuggled into the National park by a British member of our team, the theory began to emerge. There was a tremendous storm the likes of which had never been seen before, it swirled and twirled and rotated at an incredible rate destroying everything in its path. It uprooted trees, pulled gigantic rocks out of the earth, sucked an entire river dry and spit it out in the canyon it had just formed and then relocated a good portion of the unconsenting tribe to the nearby Sonoran desert several hundred miles away. That’s what made this a true tragedy. The storm took men, women, children, liberals, conservatives, 32nd Degree Masons, Avon ladies, members of the DAR, and others that may have been undocumented. The storm didn’t discriminate. If you were near you were gone.

This was a calamitous event, a storm of this type and magnitude had never been seen before. The people named it xqjtornadolix, which is one, if not the only surviving word, from their language. We now call it tornado because their name was impossible to pronounce and we’re scared spitless of them too. A simple little EF5 (Enhanced Fujita Scale) tornado with winds of over 200 mph will send us scampering for the storm cellar as soon as we see it. The storm that created Zion canyon was like a really big bunch of those EF5’s all rolled together.

We  think we finally got the jump on those NatGeo guys on this one. We’ll be publishing in Nature and Science magazine just as soon as they accept our paper and if we don’t run into any problems during the peer review process we’ll be pocketing that fat $300.00 dollar advance and waiting for the royalties to come streaming in. And best of all we were able to give you, our loyal readers, an advance look, not to mention the knowledge gained by seeing it first right here on our pages. No, you don’t need to thank us, sending us those large donations is thanks enough. Remember the Institute is here for you.