Preservation by Superstition

June 15, 2007

When my buddy and I visited the Native American site Aztalan we wondered about the source of information for the restored enclosure wall, composed of a series of tree trunks settled vertically into the ground (see Aztalan video). Aztalan flourished about 1150 AD, so I figured archeologists had discovered traces of wood or pits in the earth. But amazingly the enclosure had been perfectly visible at the time of the first American visitors.

The map included by Increase Lapham in his The Antiquities of Wisconsin (1855) clearly shows the enclosure wall running around the site. In his descriptive text Lapham details the composition of the enclosure, which he calls a ridge. He provides its dimensions: 631 feet at the north, 1,419 at the west, and 700 at the south. So the entire enclosure was still there.. albeit in a weathered and damaged form.

At some point after 1200 AD Aztalan was abandoned.. and the site lasted in decent condition for another 600 years. There were other Native American groups in the area.. some of whom may even have been hostile to the Mississippian culture that had maintained this outpost so far to the north. But the site remained intact.. until modern Americans came and plowed the land over and clumsily dug into the mounds. Because of all this latter day damage the site has had to be largely restored.

I found a parallel example this week in my reading of Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West by Hampton Sides. The book tells the sprawling story of Kit Carson and the American presence in the Southwest. At one point Sides describes an American military incursion into Navajo land. This included the first American survey of Chaco Canyon and its great houses left by the Anasazi. These ruins were in nearly pristine condition as the Americans explored and recorded them. But that seems odd: why would the later Navajo countenance the ruins of a past civilization to stand untouched? That is counter to the impulse that I comment on here.

But Sides provides an answer:

...[the Navajo] refused to go into the great houses, believing they were places of evil and death.

[The Navajos] would remain masters of this region, living their roving kind of life in the midst of these crumbling rock cities, incorporating stories about the ruins into their own mythology, but always leaving them alone. [216]

So the reason they left these ruins alone is that they were connected to deeply held superstitions.. spirits and death and the like. So the magnificent ruins were just left to stand in their land as a testimony to a past culture. It is not a far stretch to assume that Aztalan was mostly left alone for similar reasons.. and thus lasted over 600 years as a ruin in the landscape of another culture.

Which just goes to show how convenient superstitions can be. One could see them as a natural human mechanism for preservation of the past. Maybe the most natural response for humans is not to destroy the past.. but to fear its power.. and steer clear of it.