Where the Moon Stood Still, and the Ancients Watched
The moon rises between the spires of Chimney Rock in southern Colorado.
THE great Chaco civilization, trading partner of the Maya, established a far-reaching sphere of influence in the North American desert a millennium ago. Among the most remote and mysterious of their outposts was Chimney Rock, in what is now the very southwest corner of Colorado, 90 miles from Chaco Canyon in New Mexico, the center of the culture.
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Visitors can watch the lunar standstill from a fire watchtower.
The Great House was built a thousand years ago.
Why did the Chaco people — the Anasazi, or “ancestral Puebloans,” as their descendants prefer — build an enormous ceremonial Great House at Chimney Rock, so far from home, 1,000 feet above the nearest water supply and at the base of immense sandstone spires?
It was not until two decades ago that archaeologists arrived at an explanation that most now accept: the Chaco people built the Great House as a lunar observatory precisely aligned to a celestial event that occurs just once in a generation.
That rare event, a “major lunar standstill,” is happening now, and continues through 2007. To witness this extraordinary moonrise, some two dozen visitors, including me, arrived to climb the Chimney Rock mesa in the middle of an August night.
Every 18.6 years, the moon does something strange: it radically expands the voyage it makes each month across the sky and, at the northern and southernmost edges of that journey, appears to rise in the same spot for two or three nights in a row.
What archaeologists discovered at the last occurrence of this event — in the mid-1980’s — was that if you stood atop the Chacoan Great House at Chimney Rock (or as we did, on the modern fire watchtower that stands in front of the Great House and replicates its alignment), you saw the northernmost moonrise directly between the sandstone spires. Move anywhere else on the mesa, and the shift in perspective slipped the moon from its frame.
The current recurrence of the cycle began in December 2004. With permission from the local Pueblo tribes, for whom Chimney Rock remains sacred, the United States Forest Service began in 2005 to allow visitors up the mesa seven nights a year (once a month, from July through January) to watch the moonrise. Similar moonrises occur at Stonehenge and at Callanish in Scotland, the two other sites in the world where archaeo-astronomers have found substantial evidence that preliterate peoples used immense stone structures to mark the place in the sky where the moon stands still.
On the night I attended, it was nearly 1 a.m. when we began the quarter-mile climb. First, there had been midnight muffins and T-shirt sales at the tiny visitor center, chirpy greetings from local volunteers and the reading of a list of prohibitions, each born (our guide later told me) of earlier difficulties with “new age” celebrants, who are drawn to the event by the mystical associations with megaliths and aboriginal peoples, and by the moon’s traditional importance in animism, astrology and the “lunacy” of poets and visionaries.
“The Puebloan community believes that the spirits of their ancestors still inhabit this place, and ask that there be no religious ceremonies by non-native visitors,” a volunteer read. “Please refrain from chanting, singing, burning incense, audible prayers, whooping, hollering, rattles or drums.” Because noise would disturb the falcons nesting on the rocks, she added, we were to make our final ascent in silence.
The sky was nearly cloudless when we set out. It was packed with celestial bodies, the smears of the Milky Way and long scribbles of falling stars, the last remnants of the Perseus meteor shower. A few conversations floated on the air, hinting at the reasons people had come. Two men swapped tales of their travels to see the northern lights and the Southern Cross; a gray-haired woman whispered intensely to her companion about her healings with a Mayan shaman. Nearby, a young couple kept silent, nuzzling beneath the pines.
As we approached the spires, the ridge narrowed to a knife edge and the pinyon-juniper forest dropped sharply away. Cresting the mesa (itself 7,600 feet high), we switched off our flashlights to immerse ourselves in the deep black of the mountain night.
Our Forest Service guide, Ron Sutcliffe, began to explain that “the moon is a more complex creature than any planet or star in the sky,” because of its eccentric orbit and gravitational interactions with the Earth. An engineer and surveyor by profession, Mr. Sutcliffe is also a “naked-eye astronomer” who has been watching the moon for more than a decade. He moved here, he said, because this mesa is one of the world’s great natural observatories.
Though we were in the Rocky Mountains, with the Weminuche Wilderness to the north and South San Juan Wilderness to the east, Mr. Sutcliffe showed us how this plateau forms a natural planetarium, with a uniform horizon broken only by the cut of the river now called the Piedra (it was named El Rio de la Piedra Parada, the river of the standing rock, by Spanish missionaries in 1776) and by the spires, which precisely demarcate the paths of the stars, sun and moon. One by one he showed us the constellations, working his way around the zodiac. When Taurus rises, he told us, we would know the moon is near.
The lunar standstills occur during a different lunar phase each month, and at a different time of day. For the first half of each year, they are invisible because they happen during daylight hours (which is why there are no Forest Service events from February to June). The first visible moonrise between the spires occurs in July, when the moon is a slender crescent rising before dawn. By September it is a half-moon rising at midnight; in October and November it is a fattening gibbous; and by December it is a full moon rising at sunset.
In 2003, Mr. Sutcliffe figured out when each of the 114 “standstill” moonrises would occur between 2004 and 2007. Every May, the Chimney Rock Interpretive Association sells 24 tickets for seven of the moonrises that will be visible in the coming year (the other nights are generally reserved for Native Americans from the region); this year, all the tickets were sold in three days.
As he talked, Mr. Sutcliffe kept watch on the sky. As the bright star Aldebaran in the Taurus constellation edged above the horizon, he announced the moon’s imminent arrival: “Taurus, our herald, has risen.” He led us to the north edge of the mesa to wait in silence as a glow slowly washed the sky. After many long minutes, a tip of the silvery crescent appeared in the cleft between the spires and slowly inched into view, like a moth emerging from a dark chrysalis.
With three-quarters of the crescent revealed, the moon floated briefly between the spires. Confirming what I’d always thought to be folklore, coyotes began to yip and howl all around us from the desert below. They fell silent only when the moon disappeared behind the spire, an ember burning out, leaving an opalescent moonglow behind.
Strangely moving as it was to stand silently with strangers in the desert at night, all gazing fixedly on the sky, it was stranger still to think that a lunar pattern that recurs so rarely could have been perceived by a preliterate community whose average individual life span would have barely embraced two cycles. Yet archaeologists have amassed considerable evidence that the great structures at Chimney Rock were in fact built for the express purpose of gathering as many people as possible to witness the standstill in one of the few places on earth where geology provides the necessary frame.
THE most persuasive evidence comes from dendrochronology, tree ring dating, which places the two major episodes of construction at Chimney Rock 18 years apart and coincident with the northern lunar standstills of 1076 and 1094. The architecture provides additional clues: While the masonry of the Great House is indisputably Chacoan, the siting of the house is wildly strange.
The house is built of six million stones, 25,000 tons of earth and clay and 5,000 logs, and its construction required laborers to haul wood, food and water from the valley floor, two miles away and 1,000 feet down. And rather than center the house on the mesa, where one would expect, they shoved it right to its northern edge, creating the broadest possible platform from which to see the moon rising between the rocks.
Evidence of ancient knowledge of the lunar standstill has also been found elsewhere in the region, on Fajada Butte in Chaco Canyon and at the Cliff Palace at Mesa Verde, built in the century after Chaco and Chimney Rock were abandoned.
So what was it for? Most archaeologists argue that the massive, decades-long effort to build the Great Houses, and the marking over several generations of the rhythms of the moon, served to unify Chacoan society across broad reaches of desert and time. Others emphasize political authority: the ability to predict the movements of the moon would have bolstered the leadership’s legitimacy, particularly because the Chacoan florescence coincided with an extraordinary degree of celestial activity.
Between 1020 and 1100, 70 lunar eclipses could be seen from Chaco Canyon. The supernova of 1054, which created the Crab Nebula, was visible even in daylight for 23 days. Halley’s Comet passed in 1066. Total solar eclipses were visible in Chaco and Chimney Rock in 1076 and 1097.
Mr. Sutcliffe is impatient with the archaeological habit of imputing utilitarian purposes to the ancients’ infatuation with the moon; he believes people often pursue knowledge for its own sake. That faith was evident when we climbed down from the mesa and discovered he had his PowerPoint ready. It was almost 3 a.m., and growing colder, as he began to explain “the obliquity of the ecliptic” while the attention of his 24 observers faded, like constellations slipping from the sky.
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