There are archeoastronomers, and then there are archeoastronomers. What I mean by this statement is that there are scientific investigators who notice an astronomical phenomenon (be it an alignment, a shadow progression, or some other) and try to discern its meaning or import, and there are the pseudo-scientific pretenders who have a half-baked theory and then go to extreme lengths to force examples into fitting that theory.
I have written elsewhere about the theories of Gary David, a self-proclaimed archeoastronomer and rock art researcher who discovered Hopi petroglyphs illustrating UFOs. His main theory all along, however, has been to “prove?” that all prehistoric civilizations on Earth modeled their spatial arrangements of towns and villages upon the constellation Orion.
One ancient site that David tried to force into his overriding mold is Tyuyoni ruin in Frijoles Canyon, at Bandeliere National Monument, Los Alamos County, New Mexico. We visited Bandeliere back in 1985 but I totally missed the fact that all the ancient constructions in Frijoles Canyon were laid out according to the position of the stars in Orion.
Tyuyoni is a circular pueblo ruin at the bottom of Frijoles Canyon in Bandeliere. Measuring about 140 feet in diameter it had over 250 ground-floor rooms and was up to three stories high in places. It is estimated to have had a population of 500 or more residence at its peak in the late 1300s and 1400s (Pueblo IV). A single entrance passage allowed access into the central plaza on the east side. There are three kivas on the north side of the central plaza. (Rohn 1989:24) After 1300 there was a population increase in the Bendeliere area with “considerable construction, increased population, and improved standard of living after 1300. Black-on-white pottery excavated at Bandeliere was indistinguishable from that of Mesa Verde National Park, indicating that at least some of the new residents came from Mesa Verde.” (Wikipedia)
According to David the kivas in Tyuyoni are laid out to mirror the stars in Orion’s belt. He did not explain why he made that extraordinary claim in his 2010 paper (page 5) but I assume that it is an example of the Anchoring and Adjustment Heuristic. This is the tendency to fit all new data into pre-conceived belief systems. In David’s case that is the exaggerated importance of the constellation Orion to prehistoric populations. The three stars in Orion’s belt are not in a perfect line, they exhibit a slight arc. The three kivas in the plaza of Tyuyoni are not in a straight line, they are placed in an arc because of the curved interior wall of the structure surrounding the plaza. He also points out that while people refer to Tyuyoni as a circular construction it is not really. It can be described as “D-shaped” with rounded corners. David likens this to the shape of a bow – Orion’s bow – as if the Ancestral Pueblo people recognized the same constellations that we inherited from the ancient Greeks, an extraordinary claim for which he provides no evidence - the Anchoring and Adjustment Heuristic again.
Flute player petroglyph, Long House, Bandelier National Monument, Los Alamos County, New Mexico. Photograph Peter Faris, September 1985.
The rock art at Bandeliere is cut into the cliffs and boulders of volcanic Tuff. “Tuff is a type of rock made of volcanic ash ejected from a vent during a volcanic eruption. Following ejection and deposition, the ash is lithified into a solid rock. Rock that contains greater then 75% ash is considered tuff, while rock containing 25% to 75% ash is described as tuffaceous (for example, tuffaceous sandstone).” (Wikipedia)
Tuff is a soft rock that is easily carved, indeed, adjacent to Tyuyoni is a talus ruin along the base of the cliff known as Long House. Long House is the largest talus unit at Bandeliere stretching some 700 feet along the base of the cliff. Constructed of blocks of stone and incorporating the cliff face as the back wall of the many rooms adjacent to it with sockets for roof beams also cut into the cliff. Some units also carved extra rooms into the soft tuff of the cliff known as caveates. (Rohn 1989:28-37) The bulk of the rock art was cut into the soft tuff so it has weathered and eroded considerably. Many images are relatively high on the cliff because they were made from roof tops.
Most of the caveate walls are plastered and many are decorated with painted imagery as well.
There is a separate, unattached unit of Bandeliere with its own ruin named Tsankawi which possesses rock art which, in many cases, is more interesting that Frijoles Canyon.
On 24 January 2010, I posted a column titled “The Bandeliere Stone Lion Shrine – Life-Sized 3-D Stone Carvings” about a shrine near Cochiti that includes life sized representations of reclining mountain lions carved into the Tuff bedrock. I also showed reproductions of the stone lions that were outside the visitor center at Bandeliere. In that column I said “I have recently been informed that these reproductions were subsequently destroyed by park officials because of complaints from Pueblo peoples that having them where tourists could see them was sacriligous. Note, these were not the real images taken from the shrine, they were reproductions. How this destruction of the stone lions differs from the Afghanistan Taliban dynamiting of the world’s two largest statues of Buddha in March 2001 totally escapes me. This was also the destruction of works of art because of religious intolerance.” (Faris 2010)
It strikes me that David is doing intellectually by his forcing Tyuyoni and its kivas into his theories about Orion pretty much the same thing that the Taliban did to the Buddha statues in Afghanistan, or the Bandeliere park managers did with their destruction of the reproductions of the stone lions. Each of these instances is destroying (or misinterpreting) works of art that could be seen as the heritage of all humanity for narrow parochial closed-mindedness, and I still disapprove.
NOTE: Some images in this posting were retrieved from the internet with a search for public domain photographs. If any of these images are not intended to be public domain, I apologize, and will happily provide the picture credits if the owner will contact me with them. For further information on these reports you should read the original reports at the sites listed below.
REFERENCES:
David, Gary A., 2010 Orion Kivas in New Mexico, www.theorionzone.com
Faris, Peter, 2010, The Bandeliere Stone Lion Shrine – Life-Sized 3-D Stone Carvings, 24 January 2010, https://rockartblog.blogspot.com
Rohn, Arthur H., 1989, Rock Art of Bandelier National Monument, University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque.
Wikipedia, Pueblo IV Period, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pueblo_IV_Period,
accessed 26 November 2021.
Wikipedia, Tuff, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuff,
accessed 27 November 2021.
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