The Anasazi Project

Rough drafts of the anasazi Project are being updated continually at:

Anasazi Project Upload current draft if you care to download it and preview the work so far. It won't be on Google Video, YouTube, or anywhere else until the project is finished.

Editing: Karl G. Knudsen

Music: Kevin Macleod

Photography: Nathan Wynn, Karl Knudsen

Directing: Nathan Wynn

Throughout history, human culture, when it replaces another, destroys and skews the record of the previous cultures. They destroy the artwork, the buildings and structures, etc. The stories from one culture are taken, modified to suit, and replaced with new versions of those stories and its characters. Conquering peoples also tend to enslave the survivors from defeated cultures, drawing from their local knowledge and using what resources are leftover from them along with their labor. From what I have seen, this is also true for the Anasazi, the Ancestral Pueblo, the Navajo, the Fremont Basketmakers, etc.

I admit I am mostly ignorant of what archaeologists "know." It's kind of my whole point. I can feel like an original explorer that way. Right or wrong I make my interpretations. It is my hope that by using this approach I have much greater opportunity to stumble upon new ideas. After all, will you come up with a new theory if you already have a satisfactory theory satisfying your question? Probably not. Will I re-invent the wheel? Probably several times over. What little actual research I have done has been limited to using University libraries to figure out where I will plan my next trip. I enjoy reading the notes from the original archaeologists who carried out the excavations in the areas I have been looking at. It fascinates me to read something like:

"I was surprised that the skin softened when I washed the mummy with the hose." or "we found 18 bows and arrows, 128 arrowheads, 9 mummies. We tried to get another baby mummy out of the cave but it broke." I think of the mind set of the early explorers and wonder what they would think of my marveling over finding one single arrowhead and getting excited over it. When I find artifacts such as broken pottery I sometimes think of it falling off an overloaded horse as if it were no big deal. I think of the future generations and imagine them using some high technology to try and find even a simple pottery chard, then reveling in the find.

I don't think archaeologists know everything and they also do not make that claim. I think they have made errors in the archaeological explanations they present and those explanations become the basis for more explanation. This has obvious value and I am not quite saying "down with all prior knowledge" here but I think there is a need for someone like me. For example, at the College of Eastern Utah's Museum they have what they think are gaming pieces and I don't think they are gaming pieces at all. Instead I think they are obviously some type of note-taking. I feel like the story of the gaming pieces maybe started when an indian guy told some euro that what he had found was a gaming piece. Maybe the indian thought it looked like a gaming piece he had as a kid so that's what he thought it was. Maybe it was in fact a gaming piece, but from that point forward, everything that european dude saw with marks on it was "obviously a gaming piece." I have an alternative theory. If I were doing experiments and trying to figure out the number of days between say, planting my seeds and flowering occurring, I might use a rock and scratch it once per day, so that the following year, when we are all getting low on seeds to eat and starting to get worried about our food supply, we have an idea as to how long it will be before the seeds we're eating show up. I might want to know how many bends in the river there are before I reach my destination if I were traveling. How would I know where to get off of the river I was traveling? Maybe I'd use a rock and scratch notes from the guy who went before me and counted them? Maybe.. I'd choose a small rock that I could carry with me easily, like the "gaming pieces" at CEU's Prehistory Museum.

Archaeology is extremely speculative. I use these examples as minor examples of history being written by a few, then the students of these experts follow suit until the theory is believed as fact. A more important example of history being written by the few can be found in American, government mandated and approved textbooks which are being forced onto Americans. With each generation, the genocide which occurred in America gets more and more watered-down, more and more friendly, and less and less truthful. A lot of people, mostly campers, travelers, and other riff-raff that I meet have no idea that anyone was here before the white man. And with the influx of other people and the melting pot, the white man has been able to wash away the sins of the past by distorting it. The white man has lied about other things in his history, as is typical with a conquering people.

The destruction of the ruins and the rock art is ultimately inevitable, however, humans can stop the destruction by not walking on, going inside of, or even disturbing the soil or rock below the ruins. As I peruse pictures and video online I am appalled at the behavior that I see. People sitting on ruins, going through them and destroying them right before my eyes. Slowly but surely.

There is also deliberate destruction. This one I really don't understand, for example, the recent rock art that says "DUKE" on Kane Canyon Road. Duke, dude, what the fuck were you thinking? Did you really think it was so important that you write your name on the rock as if someone would remember you as anything but the dumbass who ruined it for everyone? Seriously.. Duke and Emma and M.K.+J.L... If I ever caught one of you people in the act, you would be lucky to escape alive. By destroying the core evidence for an entire people you are allowing corruption to re-write anything they want in the historical record and your actions affect millions and millions of people inadvertently. To the idiots who walk up to the ruins and disturb the soil, touch the rocks, remove the artifacts, you are doing the same thing, probably without realizing it. You can't get a good photo from inside the ruins because for one you don't have the right lens. All you see is a brick or two in the frame. Secondly, there's no light in there and there's nothing to see from inside that you can't see from outside. The best views are usually far away and there's little reason to get closer except to examine construction techniques or to see artifacts closer. Most people won't realize that there are artifacts everywhere and when they get even remotely close to a ruin they could be crushing them underneath their feet. When close to a rock art panel or a ruin, chances are there's pottery all over the ground and for this reason you should step from rock to rock or where you can see nothing is going to get stepped on. Don't touch the stuff. Don't take it. Nobody's going to believe you when you tell them it's some ancient tool when it's just a rock sitting in your rock box. Yes, it's valuable, but only when it's in its original location and it means nothing sitting in your box. If you really want a real pottery piece, buy it from Lin Ottinger's Rock Shop in Moab. he sells the real thing legally. Leave the ones you find there for someone to find in another 10,000 years. Your pictures will mean much more if you can tell your friends you would've gotten a better shot but you respectfully kept the historical record intact. It is of importance greater than yourself or your photographs that you not disturb what you find, at all. This usually means staying 20' back or so. This means not helping the erosion of the steep cliff that you usually find a ruin on. Not touching the rock art, causing deterioration of the desert varnish which has accumulated. This means following animal trails instead of idiot trails through desert terrain. There are more reasons to follow animal trails rather than to make your own and those have to do with safety.

Crash Course Desert Safety Tips: Things you might not know about the desert but should.

Anasazi and other ancient people lived in dangerous territory. Among these dangers are; the Black Widow spider, the deadly Hopi "Pygmy" Rattlesnake, and the deadliest scorpion in the U.S., the bark scorpion were all neighbors with the Anasazi. Deer and other animals are not stupid. If you follow them, camp, drink, and walk where they do, you are on the right path.

The Black Widow is for some reason my least favorite of these desert dwellers. You'll most often see them lurking in their webs underneath overhangs and rocks but they like to hide out in cracks in the rocks too. They don't like water, so if you're in the stream bed or near the riverbank, you probably won't see one of these bitches. At night, they like to spin a web, just as the sun is setting, and then climb down it and wait for something to eat like their mate or something, and I have a personal story as to why you shouldn't make camp underneath a rock formation for shelter.

One night my medicine man and I hiked up to a spring where we splashed around and generally refreshed in the water. We kind of got stuck up near the top of the canyon wall because of a flash flood so we decided to make camp there for the night and as our shelter, we picked out a nice overhang. I didn't like the idea because I knew it was a prime place for creatures, but I figured if he was doing it, it must be safe and I was worrying for nothing. He knew I have always had a phobia about the widows and for that reason I was surprised that he would choose such a place to camp. At any rate, I reluctantly went along. We went and made two places for our beds, right on this awesome place where we though indians might have hung out at at one time (but saw no evidence of.) and then we made something to eat and sat around talking and theorizing etc. After it had been dark for a while we decided to check out a nearby cave/crack in the rock because there we re so many bats flying out of it. "Do you remember the indian medicine of the bat?" He asked. I replied with "Oh, I did but oh, I forgot again." and he reminded me that the indian medicine of the bat is some type of a rebirth or being born into a different reality of sorts." So anyway we went up to check out the bats and bat guano and on our way back yow! Glad I had my flashlight on! I just about walked through that black widow in its web! As we walked another five feet or so there was another, then another, and another, every five or six feet or so for the length of the cliff! My medicine man was like "Look, there's one right where I was going to put my head! And mine too, we each would have had three of those nasty buggers right on us during the night. Needless to say, we packed up our stuff as carefully as possible and got out of there, both of us suffering from a bad case of the willies.

The bark scorpion. They're nearly invisible so you'll probably never see one. If one stings you, however, you might die and you'll definitely know it. The bark scorpions are the small ones that are nearly translucent. You can see them if you bring a black light with you, but without one, spotting one is extremely hard to do. Don't just sit down on a log or a rock without first checking it briefly for a scorpion or a black widow. Definitely don't go around picking up rocks without checking what's underneath them as you might find a scorpion hiding underneath one of those rocks. The most common way people get stung is by the scorpion hiding out in your shoe, then you putting the shoe on and zing! Gotcha. So check your shoes in the morning or bring them inside your tent with you when you sleep. Keep your tent sealed unless you are going in or out so you can rest easy, knowing you are alone in your tent. My brother and friends one night discovered a tarantula who had come in the tent for the night and it walked over the face of one of the kids he was camping during the night, waking him up in a panic, who woke up all the kids into a panic, and brought the tent down on top of them and the tarantula, which made them all the more uncomfortable trying to find the zipper to get the door open. Ultimately, the tent was destroyed and all of them got the willies so bad they couldn't sleep outside for the rest of the night with no tent. Tarantulas are scary for sure, but they generally don't bite and they also aren't poisonous. Worry about the widows and scorps more than the little fuzzy ones. Err, big fuzzy ones.

Hopi rattlers are nasty creatures. When I told my medicine man about the encounter I had with one, before I could even start the story he replied with "oh, you were walking someplace you shouldn't have been?" They hide underneath sagebrush, underneath wood and underneath living things like plants it seems. They'll generally warn you if you're intruding, but you need to maintain a steady and somewhat slow pace so that you don't frighten one into striking or releasing venom. I like to use my tripod or a stick to poke in from of me if I feel like I am in rattlesnake territory, jumbling rocks and shaking dirt a little to see if I get a peacefully silent response or a soul trembling rattle from a pygmy rattler. Sometimes I get the same fear when I hear a loud grasshopper but if it's a rattler, you'll know the sound and hopefully you'll stop in your tracks. The best thing to do is usually to stop dead in your tracks, then, when you feel the moment is safe, reverse your foot in the same order you came in with them. This is to say if your last step was with your right foot, take one step back with your right foot then your left, then get the hell out of there. Don't try to turn around or anything like that and get about 15 feet away. Pygmy rattlers can kill you or make you sick for weeks. They suck but they're rarely seen and staying on established animal trails will most likely keep you from ever seeing one. If you do encounter one, you'll probably hear the rattle from just a few feet in front of you. By the time a rattler rattles at you, you have about 2/3rds of a step of leeway before you're within striking distance most of the time. So if you hear the rattle, you have to stop right away. Don't take another step forward. Stop as fast as you can and reverse motion. It's better to walk somewhat slowly most of the time, especially if you're going through any kind of brush.

Ticks: It's a good idea to check yourself for ticks after trapsing through any amount of brush. They're nasty. If you get one and get it off before you sleep you'll probably not have to worry but if you let one burrow into you, it's not fun. The way I've gotten rid of burrowed ticks is with a match. To do this, light the match then immediately blow out the flame. Press the end of the match on your skin above where the tick's head is. The head will be the first part to get into you, so you have to burn your skin, not just the tick's ass. It will hurt like a burn hurts but only for a few seconds. You need to burn the head of the tick so it dies before it can burrow any deeper. If you burn his ass, he will dig as fast as he can into you so you can't mess around, you just have to take a deep breath and burn yourself. After you stop screaming and the burn cools, you can remove the tick with tweazers or whatever you can because he's dead at this point. Sometimes it takes 2 matches. People don't like the burn and can't take it so they havea hard time holding it on themselves. Do it anyway or do it twice of you can simply take my advice: Check yourself for ticks periodically.

Why Indians Wear Moccasins

Since I usually travel alone, in remote places, often at nighttime when the scorpions are out, I have devised protection from all of these desert creatures which has proven the test of time. Moccasins. I figure the indians used them and made them knee high for a reason and they probably worked well for them so I decided I needed a pair. Plus they are good for examining ruins with because they leave no trace and besides, they're cool and I always wanted a pair. I looked online and at western wear stores, etc. and I couldn't find a real pair of moccasins like indians wore. I wanted real moccasins made for real indians and for really walking in and protecting me from the desert and discovered that the only way to get a pair of those was to make them myself. So I bought the leather to make them and made them very thick and protective, able to resist about anything. I can step on cactus better than I can in my tennis shoes, that is to say, they actually protect from accidental steppings on of cactus better than my tennis shoes do, or I get fewer pricklies when I do that if I have my moccasins on. To make them tough like this I had to use two layers of rawhide in the soles, topped with two more layers of buffalo hide. For the leg parts I used buffalo skin and lined completely the moccasins with indian brain-tanned then smoked elk skin for comfort and for keeping any tanning chemicals off my skin. I feel pretty confident that they are either keeping scorpions or widows off of me and if I encounter a snake and get struck, I will feel that much better about it and probably the snake would inject its venom (if any) into my leathers rather than my own skin. I might also make a pair of leggings, which would be much easier than making the moccasins was which would work with regular tennis shoes. This is because I don't want to wear out my moccasins. When indians wore their moccasins out, they patched them so that the soles would eventually come to fit the foot perfectly well and for the wearer's foot pattern, but I want to slow the progress and there are also times it makes sense to wear rubber on your feet.

Sunshine and UV rays:

UV is underrated. It's not good and the slickrock and sand both in the desert will reflect a lot of light. So will a river. Greasing yourself up with titanium dioxide ladened goo and rubbing all that heavy metal into your skin might be worse though. I don't recommend sunscreen except as a last resort and in that case I recommend scrubbing it off as soon as the sun goes down. I wear long pants and a long-sleeve white (so I can stay cool) shirt. I also wear a hat with a huge brim on it which keeps the sun off my face, ears, and neck from any direction. When I go down rivers I wear a pair of white gloves that I modified for rowing better in. To make a pair just use some white gloves and cut the palms out so you can grip better.

Mosquitos and bugs:

If you're not immune to mosquitos, they can be a real problem in the desert. Especially near standing water where they lay their eggs. Staying and camping far away from water will help greatly and if you ever find yourself unable to bear them and without deet, you can almost always go to higher ground and you will escape them. I use a minimal amount of deet that I put on the outside of my clothing and on my hat and lightly on my hair to keep mosquitoes away when they are unbearable. It will help to keep ticks away too. . I have often found ticks on the shoulders of my shirt. It's a good idea to check yourself every once in a while. Wearing a hat, long pants, and long shirt will help keep both mosquitos and ticks off your skin. The deet will keep mosquitos, flies, and ticks away but it's nasty stuff that melts plastic. I don't recommend getting it on your skin. If you must wear shorts or for any exposed skin, Avon's Skin So Soft works well. Flies will still land on you but they iwll not bite and make you itch for days like they will without this stuff. If you get out in the deset enough, you start to realize that putting the goo and stuff on is less favorable to wearing full clothing for protection from sun and bugs.

There are too many dangers to list here and there is always the unexpected waiting to occur. This is true of any environment. The best recommendation I can give is to keep some things in mind at all times. Remember that you might be in unfamiliar territory and things can happen fast and problems can multiply faster than you might expect them to. Keep an eye out for potential dangers. Rocks that slide, rivers that rage and wash roads away. Roads with puddles that when you roll over them turn into sink holes and leave you stranded for days. As with any hiking you have falling rock but in the desert you have extra danger when it comes to falling rock. Don't camp or get yourself caught in a flash flood. IF you get yourself into a situation you know you're not getting out of for a while, make sure you have water or know where to get it before you run out. If you get yourself into a situation and have to hike out, do it at night so you can make it more than three miles before you die. Be prepared with maps and know where you are going. Bring fuel and more than you need. Bring more food and more water than you need. Bring a water filter, emergency water purification and be prepared to boil then settle lots and lots of water if necessary. Water is key in the desert. I like to do my exploring and photographing, etc. in the morning and evening hours or at night time. During the days is when I get my water boiled, cook and eat then cook and eat again before getting out for the evening cooling off. Shade to shade in the hot daytime heat and drinking water constantly. Eat salty foods because you'll sweat enough that the salt goes right through you and builds up on your skin to the point you can scrape it off and see it at times. Avoid this kind of sweating at all times possible. It hurts and makes one's journey less pleasant.