AURA

Well, what can I say. You can’t go see it thanks to the jerks who take things like this or just deface them. The crazy thing is nothing ever happened until the Park Service tried to protect it by making Chaco a park to keep the miners out. Nobody really knew about it till then. I told Sine everything I know about it and he wrote it all down into the note you will soon discover is a lot longer than what you’re hearing from me now. He included some info in the text version of this note if you’re interested. Just keep reading. But I think I’ll just let it go for now, and tell you more about what you can actually experience at a similar petroglyph in Petrified Forest.

SINE’s NOTES

Wikipedia: Fajada Butte retrieved and edited 2/22/2019:

Fajada Butte is [an isolated hill with steep sides and a flat top] in Chaco Culture National Historical Park, in northwest New Mexico. “It rises 135 meters above the canyon floor. Although there is no water source on the butte, there are ruins of small cliff dwellings in the higher regions of the butte. Analysis of fragments of pottery found on Fajada show that these structures were used between the 10th to 13th centuries.[3] The remains of a 95-meter-high, 230-meter-long ramp are evident on the southwestern face of the butte (Ford 1993, p. 478). The magnitude of this building project, without an apparent utilitarian purpose, indicates that Fajada Butte may have had considerable ceremonial importance for the Chacoan people.

In 1977 the artist Anna Sofaer visited Chaco Canyon as a volunteer recording rock art. There she recorded petroglyphs on Fajada Butte at what is now called the Sun Dagger site, now perhaps the most famous site in Chaco Canyon, located at a southeastern facing cliff near the top of Fajada Butte. She noted three large stone slabs leaning against the cliff which channel light and shadow markings onto two spiral petroglyphs on the cliff wall. On her second visit she saw a "dagger of light" bisecting one of the spirals.[4] At about 11:15 am. on the summer solstice a dagger-shaped light form pierces the larger of the two spirals (Sofaer, Zinser and Sinclair 1979, p. 285). Similar sun daggers mark the winter solstice and equinoxes {Sofaer, Zinser and Sinclair 1979, p. 286} At one extreme in the moon's eighteen- to nineteen-year cycle (the lunar minor standstill), a shadow bisects the larger spiral just as the moon rises; and at its other extreme, nine-and-a-half years later (the lunar major standstill), the shadow of the rising moon falls on the left edge of the larger spiral.(Sofaer, Sinclair and Doggett 1982, p. 43) In each case these shadows align with pecked grooves (Sofaer and Sinclair 1987, pp. 48 – 59). Due to the slabs settling, the "dagger of light" does not cross through the center of the spiral anymore during the summer solstice.[5]

Diagram showing the location of the sun daggers on the petroglyph on various days

At two other sites on Fajada Butte, located a short distance below the Sun Dagger site, five petroglyphs are also marked by visually compelling patterns of shadow and light that indicate solar noon distinctively at the solstices and equinoxes (Sofaer and Sinclair 1987, p. 59). It has been noted, however, that these five noontime events are essentially the number one would expect by chance (McCluskey 1988, p. S69).

In the 1980s the National Park Service closed off access to the butte due to the delicate nature of the site and the damage and erosion caused by tourism.

Studies by Sofaer's Solstice Project suggest that the major buildings of the ancient Chacoan culture of New Mexico also contain solar and lunar cosmology in three separate articulations: their orientations, internal geometry, and geographic interrelationships were developed in relationship to the cycles of the sun and moon (Sofaer 2007, p. 225).

Debate:

There are several issues surrounding this site. One is when the two spirals were pecked into the walls, some scholars suggesting it "postdates the height of the Chaco tradition. Another is its importance. Although other solar observatories constructed by the Pueblo people predict solar events by the movement of the light over a period of time, this one does not. It has also been suggested that it was not built but that those who made the inscriptions were using a convenient existing fall of rock (Kantner 2004, p.99).

"Critics generally agree that the light and shadow phenomena at the site were intended to mark the arrival of the sun at the solstices and equinoxes (Carlson 1987, pp. 86-7; Zeilik 1985, p. S84). There is less agreement on the lunar phenomena; Zeilik found no ethnographic evidence for a concern with the lunar standstill cycle in the historic pueblos (Zeilik 1985, pp. S80-4). He also noted that contemporary pueblo horizon observations achieve greater precision than that possible using the sun-dagger site, leading him to conclude that the Sun Dagger site may have been a sun shrine, but would not have functioned well to regulate the solar calendar (Zeilik 1985, pp. S71, S77–S80)."

Perhaps it's fortunate the Chaco Canyon site is off limits:

Don Dedera, "Arizona's Other National Park," Arizona Highways, 2/1983, p. 25:

notes that much rock art has been removed for the pleasure of the thieves or for the money it can bring them. Which is ironic as awareness of it resulted from an effort by a 1970s National Park Service project to document what remained to that time.

Mary Ann Reese, "The Anasazi Puzzle," Sunset, 5/1981, p. 102:

enumerated the threats the Park service effort meant to thwart:

strip-minable coal deposits just north of Chaco Canyon

uranium (a sixth of the world's known supply in veins just south of the canyon)

oil and gas deposits

and cited conferring park status on Chaco in 1997 as essentially an attempt to thwart such threats. Increasing the Park’s boundaries by a third brought protection also to thirty-three Chacoan outliers in the area but did not include much of the ancient road system. The hope in preserving the area was to give us time to determine how the builders of Chaco managed to survive in such an unforgiving environment, echoing Aura’s observation that the ancients seemed to know the desert better than recent immigrants to it like us. Given predictions of global warming, desert dwellers may consider how they cope as a forerunner of what many currently balmier locales may have to implement.

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