By Sidney Secular
July 13, 2022
THE LOST KINGDOMS OF THE ANASAZI AND HOHOKAM
Up until recently, the origination and racial derivation of the culturally advanced civilization of the Anasazi and Hohokam peoples who lived in the American Southwest around 1,000 years ago were basically obscure but they were assumed to be just “Native American” tribes who were ancestors to the Hopi, Navaho and other pueblo Indian peoples who today reside in that area. The two peoples in question inhabited a large swath of the desert Southwest but their settlements were more or less were centered in the Four Corners region where Utah, New Mexico, Arizona and Colorado meet.
That these peoples were “Native Americans” in the accepted meaning of that term could not be further from the truth! Indeed, the folklore “history” of the resident “Indians/Native Americans” readily admit to that fact, acknowledging that the Anasazi and Hohokam were ancient enemies of their own people at a time when those civilizations were ending. As a matter of fact, the Native American populations were instrumental in destroying both cultures in a sort of precursor of the same fate of those “Indians” at the hands of the white man in the American west of the 1870s! What goes around, comes around, they say.
From what is known, the Anasazi and Hohokam peoples arrived seemingly out of nowhere, dominating their areas of settlement from just before 1,000 AD until approximately 1,250 AD. Racially, both peoples were white as indicated by the fact that a majority of both “tribes” were red-headed! This physical fact alone puts to rest any claim that they were “Native Americans!” Furthermore, both groups were far more advanced than their “native” neighbors, a fact that continues to feed the myth that Native Americans were at one time far more advanced since by arbitrary decree and definition all Pre-Columbian cultures in the Americas are deemed to be Native American – that is, Indian, a Mongoloid race of people.
Conventional archeologists just can’t seem to let go of their out-of-date paradigm that non-Native American advanced civilizations in North America could not have existed before Columbus arrived in the New World. They willingly acknowledge “Native American” civilizations such as the Aztec, Inca, Maya and Nazca,* all of whom are considered far advanced. But even in that acknowledgement there is more recent evidence of a much deeper understanding of astronomy and the cosmos – all of which was gained without the telescope and modern instrumentation. (*The Nazca Lines are a collection of giant geoglyphs—designs or motifs etched into the ground—located in the Peruvian coastal plain about 250 miles south of Lima, Peru. Created by the ancient Nazca Indians in South America and depicting various plants, animals, and geometric shapes, the 2,000-year-old Nazca Lines can only be fully appreciated when viewed from the air [!] given their massive size. Despite being studied for over 80 years, these geoglyphs are still a mystery to researchers.
Some authors in the field such as Erich Von Däniken, believe that this “knowledge” was brought to Earth by “extra-terrestrials” in that historic period and that these civilizations were, in turn, consumed in the attempt to understand where they fit into the overall scheme of creation and to live in accordance with universal principles. Living in accordance with the natural order and conducting religious ceremonies to curry the favor of those whom they considered “the gods” was more important to these supposedly culturally “primitive” people than is the case with our present godless materialistic modern society! The Anasazi and Hohokam were fanatically (by our standards) consumed with such spiritually oriented practices and employed highly developed technologies to implement their visions in a practical manner that included advanced understandings of the use of herbs, natural cures, earth energies, trance-inducing plants, shamanism and esoteric practices usually associated with stone age peoples (like the Indians) but in addition were extremely competent agriculturalists with a knowledge of how to grow plentiful crops, introduce new crops where they had never grown in a particular area before, and conduct bio-engineering to create new varieties of food plants including the strain of blue corn we still consume today.
These people were not hunter-gatherers as were the great majority of those “Native Americans” who either moved from place to place following their food source or farmed on a far more primitive level. Both the Anasazi and Hohokam were able to make barren landscapes productive and had developed an urban style of structured settlements far more advanced than that of the Pueblo Indians who replaced them. They also developed extremely sophisticated canal and irrigation systems to fully utilize the precious and often sparse availability of water in their areas of settlement.
The Anasazi set up their main base of operations in the Chaco Canyon in Arizona. They created edifices of superb masonry known as “great houses,” lofty affairs sometimes five stories high with extensive horizontal additions over time that could add up to hundreds of rooms, all according to formalized floor plans. Finely plastered, high-ceiling rooms were organized into suites. These structures spread across the canyon floor in a leveled area two miles wide by nine miles long. For every twenty-nine rooms or so, a ceremonial pit known as a kiva was built. These were geometrically elegant features of plastered dry stone sunk up to fifteen feet into the ground. A bench was fashioned around the inside perimeter of the circular wall. Religious ceremonies and enactments were the primary focus of Anasazi life. A common theme of the enactments was the re-emergence of humanity after the Great Flood, an almost universal pre-occupation of ancient civilizations, which is also, of course, a major theme of our Bible. Anasazi kivas are preserved amongst the remnants of the Anasazi cliff dwellings within Bandelier National Monument in New Mexico. About 16% of the kivas investigated were integrated with underground temples called sipapus. The overall number of these temples is unknown.
At Yellowjacket Canyon, 400 kivas have been excavated, the largest of which is 81 feet in diameter. The Great Houses had walls of dressed sandstone blocks coated with a matrix of clay and mortar, then covered with layers of dried mud within which were inserted surfacing stones in distinctive patterns. The entire Great House complex was tastefully landscaped suggesting that the houses might not have been residences at all but just ceremonial centers on holy ground visited only on religious occasions! This interpretation is supported somewhat by what appear to be residential areas surrounding the Great Houses. The Chaco Canyon complex expanded over time to include 70 or more outlying towns and trading posts covering 25,000 square miles of the San Juan basin. The grandest of all the Great Houses is called Pueblo Bonito, or “Beautiful Village.” It has 5 stories covering 2 acres – 3 times the area of the White House in Washington, DC. and was about the size of the Roman coliseum, containing 800 spacious rooms. The walls were 3 feet thick to support the overall ceiling that weighed 90 tons!
There were no significant trash middens (piles) found in the area, something supporting the idea that the site was ceremonial rather than a housing structure. This belief is also supported by the presence of many kivas within the complex. These Great Houses are curiously D-shaped, apparently denoting part of a sacred architectural canon. Altogether, building all these “great houses” required 900 million stones and a quarter-million conifer trees – and their felling and transportation would not have been an easy affair. After having exhausted all the local stands by the mid-eleventh century, the ponderosa pine, spruce and fir required for construction would have had to come from mountain ranges up to 70 miles away. How this was accomplished was a great mystery made even greater by the fact that none of the lumber used bore a single mar or scratch mark on them! At the least, an extensive road system would have been required and speaking of road systems, Anasazi settlements were connected by six skillfully engineered systems covering 95,000 square miles. The lone surviving example, the Great North Road stretches from the San Juan River to Pueblo Alto where the massive turquoise processing and chert tool production sites were located. In one Great House alone, a pair of richly dressed adult human skeletons lay on a bed of 56,000 pieces of turquoise and other precious grave goods. In one kiva, archeologists removed a turquoise necklace that was 17 feet long!
Anasazi roads had a bed of caliche (hardpan), a natural cement that is still used today in the manufacture of Portland cement. Anasazi roads averaged 30 feet wide and were clearly defined at the edges by earthen beams or rock walls. Because of the type of ground over which they ran, the roads had no shoulders that might lead to a load of valuable material being overturned and thus damaged. Amazingly, the roads ran in unerringly straight lines oblivious to any obstacles in the way. Very large boulders that could not be removed were provided with steps or other means used to get over them while steep cliffs were simply bored through to avoid deviations or detours. While many today ponder how the ancient Egyptians built the pyramids, it would seem that a similar miracle took place in the American West by another “primitive” people.
Being a profoundly religious people, 70 mile-long spiritual pilgrimages were undertaken by large numbers of Anasazi through the worst of the New Mexican deserts. Neither were these haphazard but the pilgrims were provided with support by groups that included food suppliers, medical personnel, and guards. Participants engaged in prayer and meditation in these ancient worship practices in order to create a transcendental experience. Timing for these events was determined by celestial cycles and/or events that had a particular association with the pilgrimage. The Anasazi operated a form of pre-Internet information superhighway. Signal posts were set up at regular intervals along the entire network of roads and during daylight hours, data was passed from one relay station to the next with the use of polished obsidian mirrors. Obviously, this worked very well in the desert climate of the place! At night, bonfires transmitted information. As noted, overcast skies and rain were infrequent and thus not a hindrance to the transmissions.
The full complexity of the Anasazi road system was not apparent until the year 2000 when the known data of the system was fed into high powered computers for analysis. Every land feature – roads, kivas, great houses, rivers, and even prominent geological structures were all deliberately aligned in a sort of sacred landscape. The alignments themselves reflected astronomical alignments with respect to the positions of the sun and moon at the solstices and equinoxes and other astronomical configurations and cycles. This type of activity in trying to align what goes on in the heavens to what is aligned on the earth seems to be a feature of all highly developed ancient civilizations such as Egypt and Mesopotamia, as well as the advanced Mesoamerican civilizations mentioned at the beginning of this article. Julius Evola, in his metaphysical writings, described these correspondences with the formula: “As above, so below.” Ceremonies observing these astronomical alignments and regularities were aimed at establishing a type of peaceful and proper correspondence between the human and natural worlds that would find favor with the gods.
Several engineering feats illustrate the Anasazi’s prodigious mechanical capabilities and the ability to carry out very large-scale operations. A spectacularly huge dam was found in New Mexico’s Animas Valley in 1892 measuring 5.5 miles across with provisions for the creation of a large reservoir. The structure was created from a mind-boggling 8 to 10 million cubic yards of material. As a means of comparison, Boulder Dam is only 1,244 feet across at the top meaning that it would take more than four dams the size of Boulder Dam to match the Animas Valley Dam. Another large scale water management project was the Weritos Dam near Pueblo Alto that created a reservoir to control storm water runoff. That project involved extraction of hundreds of thousands if not millions of tons of quartzite, a hard metamorphic rock beginning as pure quartz sandstone and converted into quartzite through heating and pressure usually related to tectonic compression. A huge complex of Anasazi quarries has been found about 125 miles north of Cheyenne, Wyoming. These vast projects were accomplished with strict adherence to existing guidelines that prevented the marring or polluting the local sites.
As well, Anasazi pottery methodology was in a class by itself compared to the more primitive techniques employed by the local Indians. All of this is beyond amazing since there is no evidence the Anasazi had a written language with the possible exception of the petroglyphs found on rocky surfaces near the cliff dwellings that they occupied during the latter part of their stay in the Southwest. From the civilization’s florescence around 1000 AD until its disappearance 140 years later, there is no indication that they had any recognized defensive measures in place. There were no warriors or walls or fortifications. Neither were there any slaves, prisons or poverty. Evidence of statecraft – that is, governing structure(s) or an existing bureaucracy is largely absent. It appears that when word spread among neighboring tribes that the Anasazi were turning a desert scrub wasteland into a paradise and needed laborers for their immense engineering projects, word spread and the other tribal people of the southwest migrated to Chaco Canyon to fill this need. Unfortunately, allowing these foreigners and non-whites to become integrated into their society was the Anasazi’s downfall. All great white civilizations have perished eventually when that occurred as we see in the West today. It is what doomed ancient Egypt, the Romans, the ancient Persians, the Anasazi and many others.
The Southwest’s climate turned more arid about 1150 AD and the drought was too severe to alleviate especially with the large numbers of people who had to be succored. When one adds the extended period of increased volcanism that consumed the region beginning at that time, the more primitive Indian cultures who had conceived of the Anasazi as gods then saw them as evil spirits who were destroying everything that they in fact had created. The consequences of the falling away of their past worshippers were terminal and the Anasazis paid for their elevated culture, lack of military preparedness and humane naivete with their extermination and the destruction of nearly all they had created so that today there is very little evidence that an advanced civilization ever occupied the region. More details on that eventuality anon.
There was another distinct but complimentary white people who settled a large area south of Chaco Canyon. These people had arrived simultaneously with the Anasazi and were named the Hohokam. Interestingly enough, the Hohokam had been allies of the Anasazi for many generations before they migrated together from South America. What distinguished the two peoples from one another was their fundamentally different approaches to agriculture. The Anasazi were dry land farmers who relied on sufficient rainfall and upon their skills in building reservoirs for the distribution of water to crops. For a period of time matters worked out until, as we have seen, severe drought conditions led to their undoing. Meanwhile, the Hohokam who had settled in extremely dry southern Arizona were sophisticated hydraulic engineers who were able to utilize local river systems to create an amazing irrigation system which curled around to create a 1,000 mile long system of canals comparable in sophistication to anything extant today. To illustrate the size of these systems, had they been laid end to end they would have reached the Canadian border. With this system the Hohokam were able to create a twice annual growing season with a profusion and variety of crops where nothing comparable had grown before or since. Today, all these canals have been obliterated by urban development, modern farming, and the destruction wrought by the Indians. However, two of their canals have been preserved at the Pueblo Grande Museum and Agricultural Park in Phoenix, Arizona. Pueblo Grande (“Big Town”) was the Hohokam’s largest city. Today’s so-called experts, assuming the Hohokam were just another tribe of “Native Americans” assume that the Hohokam had no draft animals and that they would have had to dig through the hard sun-baked soil using hoes, axes, and digging sticks. If that were the case, it would have taken generations to construct their irrigation system. The Hohokam also developed an extensive salt mining system to preserve the superabundant quantities of produce they grew. The wealth produced by trading their prolific quantities of produce and salt allowed for extensive trading with the inhabitants of the Mississippi Valley and the Valley of Mexico (Mexico City area).
The Hohokam decorated their pottery with distinctive variations of the symbol of the swastika, a symbol used by many ancient civilizations to represent sun worship. Hohokam residential areas were comprised of clusters of homes opening on a common, open-air courtyard. Homes were fabricated to standardized measurements. They usually housed spacious workshops for arts and crafts activities, jewelry making, and weaving. Over ten local minerals including turquoise, amethyst and jade were used in these crafts and as a result, the Hohokam undertook extensive turquoise mining operations. They supplied the product in massive quantities to their Anasazi allies and exported it in large quantities to the Indians and to the rest of Latin America from Mexico to Chile. In other significant accomplishments, the Hohokam invented acid etching hundreds of years before it was independently developed in Renaissance Europe, that enabled the creation of remarkable works of art. They were also advanced metal smiths producing silver, copper and bronze bells.
The golden age of “white prehistory” (“white” American history supposedly began with Columbus) in the American Southwest lasted only 140 years. The glittering civilizations of the Anasazi and Hohokam attracted upwards of 250,000 Indians who invaded and inundated the developed area much as the “barbarians” invaded the Roman Empire from its edges. The Southwestern civilizations were very fragile since they were founded upon sophisticated technology and dried up when there wasn’t enough water to sustain the system due to severe and extended “climate change” – and, yes, this was the result of actual “climate change!” As their civilizations failed, the ignorant mass of Indians turned against them with a savagery beyond belief and destroyed those who had been their benefactors as well as nearly all the great creations of those civilizations.
Perhaps these great white cultures did not realize that their more primitive neighbors saw them as “divine” and so, when they failed, they suffered not just from the ordinary problem of “inter-tribal” hostility, but the consequences of blasphemy! For their former worshippers blamed the natural events on the very people they knew to be capable of creating “miracles.” Thus, the very people who had brought them wonders were now believed to be evil spirits that had to be destroyed in order to save what little could be saved. Violence raged through Chaco Canyon incinerating the Great Houses and many of their “elitist” occupants. The entire fabric of civilized life was torn apart. The remaining Anasazis and Hohokam understood that their formally successful experiments in advanced civilization on the Colorado Plateau had come to an end and organized evacuation was the only option. A trek of 400 miles south to the thriving commercial center of Paquimé in Mexico was considered, but they decided to employ a less risky strategy – retreat to higher elevations such as Mesa Verde and Canyon de Chelly where they could live free from fear of attack in unassailable cliff dwellings while protecting the farmers working the fields below. Defensively, stone towers of refuge constructed in the fields would afford immediate protection to those same farmers. For though none believed that the massive drought would last forever, yet the real question is why these advanced peoples believed that the Indian menace would cease or, in the alternative, could be overcome. However, not having any military tradition or training is a good indication these were peaceful people who suffered from a lack of understanding of the hostility of others as do many of today’s clueless liberals.
Nonetheless, they were not totally unthinking for besides the cliff dwellings, there were several other developments in their mountain strongholds that can be seen as the equivalent of today’s gated communities. But the strength of these strategies was a mirage as it took less than 40 years for the Indians to overcome them, one by one. The lack of any military background certainly facilitated their destruction. The Anasazi had one castle-like defensive fortification which is preserved today at Hovenweep National Monument in Utah. It is pointless to go into the gory details of how the “Native Americans” dealt their former benefactors! Simply put, these peaceful, intelligent, cultured people were killed, mutilated, and burned and all traces of their civilized cultures obliterated to the greatest extent possible. On the other hand, it does provide an interesting comparison to the howls of rage against the white man and his interaction with the Plains Indians in the 1870s when those Indians were seen purely as victims of the evil and greedy whites. It’s not that the claim was altogether wrong, but the matter was not nearly so one-sided. For by 1970, some 500 cannibalized skeletal remains had been assembled from forty Anasazi locations. And while some of these advanced people managed to escape to Mexico, at least 40,000 were savagely killed, the networks of roads they built destroyed and covered over and the temples built for their religious practices turned into banquet halls for cannibal feasts. Almost all traces of the engineering marvels built by the Anasazi and Hohokam have been buried by the sands in their former kingdoms.
The Anasazi and Hohokam were not native to the American Southwest. They had already developed their engineering and artistic skills when they were known as the Huari and the Moche peoples, prosperous pre-Inca civilizations in Peru. The time in which these people were forced to leave South America by their enemies in that place was coincidental with the sudden rise of the Anasazi and Hohokam peoples in the Southwest thus leading us to connect the groups. The Huari, Moche, Anasazi and Hohokam shared enough cultural traits to reveal their common roots.
Today, the Southwest continues to suffer from an extended drought and shrinking water reserves while nothing is being done about it. It can be properly asked is this a prelude to a scenario where the illegals and never-do-wells take over California despite the high tech Silicon Valley culture that rules it today? If that becomes the case, the parallels with the fate of the Anasazi and Hohokam are there for us to contemplate.
© 2022 Sidney Secular – All Rights Reserved
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