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A Chacoan Georitual Visitor Center on I-40

Dennis Doxtater

School of Architecture

University of Arizona

Current research indicates the possibility that some ancient ceremonial sites were located in relation to large-scale geometric patterns involving significant natural features. These “georitual” frameworks appear to have organized the connection of dominant spiritual power of the landscape to subordinate architecturally defined ceremonial sites. While much research remains to fully establish such phenomena, the present interest lies in the eventual problem of interpreting such large-scale, landscape based religion in visitor’s centers for ancient or historical cultures. Toward these ends, the author devised a hypothetical student design program to interpret the culture of Pueblo Ancestors on the Southern Colorado Plateau. In addition to images of one design solution, the present paper also provides general background along with three examples of existing historical or archaeological sites, in different cultures, where larger landscape contexts are only minimally interpreted.

Before describing and analyzing this hypothetical National Park Service project, as designed by my studio class this past semester, let me first provide some background to the work. In our efforts to not only understand the way interpretative processes work, but also the equally important larger design intentions behind them, let me make a beginning confession. As design oriented architects, we were taught to believe that physical settings could influence social life for the positive. In spite of interdisciplinary research on the subject during the past thirty years or so, the case remains to be fully proven. Even when architecture felt at home among more or less coherent circles of writers, musicians, artists and philosophers, it was not at all clear just how primary the role of physical form was, including both architecture and landscape. And because of the explosion of media today and its greater accessibility and independence from the “real world” the social understanding of physical form is even more problematic--this in spite of the popularity of social space discourse by Benjamin (1999), Cavell (2002), de Certeau (1984), Lefebvre (1991), and others.

So why am I attempting to persuade you, and the NPS, that a particular spatial layout of architecture and landscape along I-40 might have a positive social effect on large numbers of visitors? It has mostly to do with religion, or more specifically with how expressive effect is organized and how a better self-understanding (interpretation) of such would be instructive to people today. This largest perspective is not that different from Leonard Shlain’s distinction between a more egalitarian, less-sexist, less heroic religious process based on images, and one with the opposite characteristics based on religious texts and its interpretations by usually male elders (1998). This distinction can be found earlier in Joseph Campbell’s “earth mother” vs. “heroic” cultures (1964), and elsewhere. As an architect-anthropologist, my interpretation of this schism depends more on the evolution of religion from ritual landscape, not just “images”, to environmentally removed media such as the written text. As Roy Rappaport said, both in print and in his seminar at Michigan, ritual is different from other forms of expression, particularly speech or text, because of the greater ability to lie in the latter.

Understanding the differences between expressive processes of “ritual” and “rhetoric” as it were, are not only theoretically interesting in the study of religion and symbolic culture, but also critical to our interpretative approaches to “seeing the past”. In this respect the I-40 project is extremely presumptuous to say the least. It assumes something of a scholarly agreement of an effect as religions move from landscape to text, and then makes broad speculations about how this distinction might be interpreted in a novel NPS site. But again before we get to the actual projects, let me briefly outline some examples of research on landscape based religion in ancient societies, and then how such content is or is not interpreted in contemporary symbolic settings.

Ritual process and the architecture-landscape opposition

Scholars of text, art, film, even music might well argue that all the structural devices for organizing expression exist equally in these media as they do in the ritual layout of temples and sacred landscapes, for example. Certainly one finds symbolic opposition and even threshold in both, as for example in the common usage of Turner’s “liminality”. But what about the ability of ritual settings to orient the participant to multiple, related points in a far more complex pattern of oppositions and axes? What about Eliade’s homologue where similar complex spatial patterns reappear at different locations and scales, all correctly oriented to the larger landscape (e.g. body, house, cosmos)? What about the duality of horizontal and vertical symbolic structures (e.g. where “North” is also “Up”)? Yet it is clear at least in Eliade (1959), the anthropologists Ortiz (1969) and Broda, et. al. (1987) , among others, that structural capabilities are common because they derive from the linguistic, either as folk stories or origin myths.

If an architectural background teaches you anything, it is an awareness of spatial diagrams of physical settings, many of which we believe will have strong design overtones of social meaning--a continuum from simple territoriality to complex symbolic and ritual frameworks. As a part time social scientist, I am also aware of the frequent lack of spatial diagramming that occurs in much discourse about social behavior or organization, even when purportedly addressing issues of social space. This in part stems from the implicit assumption that media such as text or speech can fully capture or even originate social meaning of space. To the contrary, it seems to me that a small social group of humans living together in a common physical setting will over time develop an expressive, religious structure emphasizing ritual participation. This theoretically will occur at a more primary level than expression in media, per se. On the other hand, when societies become larger and less focused on commonly lived in space, then the role of media becomes more primary, or “rhetorical”, and eventually displaces important aspects of ritual-based religion.

As an example of the former, my dissertation work on symbolic and religious space in the Old Norwegian Farm Culture describes a folktale called “East of the Sun, West of the Moon”, that structurally parallels the layout and movement of wedding ritual in the actual farm and community valley setting (Doxtater 1981:201). Yet it is clear that one could not lay out an actual wedding ritual from the folktale. The directions and movements are abstracted, formalized, and simplified to a degree that makes them impossible to coordinate with the topography of Norwegian valleys. These folk farm communities from the Middle Ages are probably smaller than larger ritual landscape organization, integrating regions perhaps to much more specific landscape. Yet even in the folk valleys, the physical setting appears to be the originator of symbolic ritual structure, not the tale itself.

This idea not only suggests the uniqueness of ritual expressive process in certain kinds of social organization, but that the control over these ritual processes can be associated with the symbolic relation between architecture and landscape. At more complex scales of social organization, architecture has the tendency to play an increasingly rhetorical role in social influence, diminishing its power as ritual setting. At less complex, more egalitarian scales, the ritual role of architecture will be integrated and subordinated into the larger symbolic and natural landscape. When the gods live in significant landscape places, the ritual role of architecture is more limited to threshold functions, or making contact with spirits from afar. When the gods live in temples, the larger landscape symbolism is largely reduced to the architectural or urban setting, radically shifting the expressive power of ritual in the larger landscape to a more representational effect of temple layout. At less complex scales, the rhetorical effects of territorial position, style, monumentality, and cost are extremely limited in architecture. In larger scales, these effects play a much more powerful social and political role. These architectural effects are perhaps most persuasive when accompanied with far-reaching messages of religious texts.

A more detailed development of the above ideas exists in the first chapters of my book on the unique, non-sacred, contemporary ritual processes--and architecture--of Swedish office organization over the past twenty years (Doxtater 1994). The book outlines three fundamental conditions of social space in Scandinavia. “First Order” refers to the all encompassing sacred ritual frameworks of valley or fjord landscape and architecture that existed in ancient and folk periods; “Second Order” defines the village form of social and expressive process as a reaction to external hegemonic control of formerly sacred landscapes; and “Third Order” represents the essentially modern condition where space has become almost completely territorial and architectural form plays a primarily rhetorical role. Currently I tend to use the term “georitual” to refer to conditions where sacred landscape frameworks subordinate architecture, then “local ritual” for village or village-like experience where day-to-day less-sacred practice between individual entities like family and cooperative groups still maintain a dominance of the latter over the former, and finally the “rhetorical” for the modern condition where competitive territoriality replaces ritual frameworks and architecture becomes much more free to express monumentality of scale, style, expense and the like (sacred cities form a transitional phase between the georitual and the wholly rhetorical).

New abilities to map geometric patterns of the larger landscape

One of the reasons we have theoretically and interpretatively tended to focus on architectural settings, thereby obscuring the fundamental difference between landscape based religion and rhetorical religion, is our previous inability to technically analyze and otherwise think about formalized large-scale landscape symbolism and ritual. Certainly there has been agreement that in the earlier, less hegemonic or hierarchically structured societies, significant natural landscape features were the most powerful sources of religious affect, e.g. as the homes of the gods. Furthermore it is also true that even the most seemingly rudimentary of cultures formalized (ritual) space at smaller scales of dwelling and immediate settlement area. See for example the layouts of the Ndembu Isoma ritual described by Turner (1969:1-39), or Bourdieu’s Berber House (1973:98-110), or the Warao village round house (Wilbert 1993:185-218), or the Norwegian dwelling and farm layout (Doxtater 1981:89-102), just to name but a very few.

The only thing that stood between the logical merging of large scale landscape symbolism and small scale formalized ritual layout was the immediate assumption that very traditional people didn’t have the technical means to symbolically and ritually structure their larger landscape as they did their dwellings and settlements. Otherwise it made very good sense that spiritually charged, formally laid out small scale settings, functioning to make contact with spirits, might well have been connected to or contextual with the larger scale most powerful sources of spiritual power. I became interested in this possibility about seven or eight years ago as a logical attempt to more fully define the earliest kinds of landscape symbolism in Scandinavia--an extension of sorts from “first order” layouts of valleys and fjords to “georitual” systems of possible integration between regions. It turns out that it was technologically well within the abilities of very traditional peoples to use pairs of tripod plumb lines to backsight by trial and error to align interim points with two visible distant features. This process can be used as well to straighten much longer lines between two distant points not visible from any one interior position. These simple trial and error processes are described more fully in a recent publication in Southwest archaeology (Doxtater 2002), and naturally rely upon software that describes ellipsoid “great circle” relationships between latitude and longitude points on the surface of the earth.

Once we get by the initial misperception that known natural landscapes were technically too difficult to formally, symbolically, and ritually lay out, then we are faced with two immediate and much more serious obstacles. The first is a need to ethnographically verify that early cultures actually used landscapes in this more formalized manner. As the reader may imagine, this kind of evidence is far less archaeologically available than the remains of built form or architecture. Yet we have two examples of just such patterns in the landscapes of American Indians. Ortiz’s religious means of being and becoming in the Tewa world is structured by a “framework” of two and possibly three axes running from three levels of concentric sacred features out into the landscape: four hills, four springs and four mountain tops (1969). It is true, however, that this intersection of four sacred landscape axes that creates the center and location of San Juan Pueblo is not accurate with respect the four actual sacred mountains of the periphery. Thus while we may briefly sympathize with Ortiz’s assumptions that the spatial layout followed the abstractions of their origin myth, a la Eliade, nevertheless it is an example of a formal integration of large scale sacred features of the landscape with those of dwelling and pueblo scale.

The second ethnographic example of large-scale landscape patterns can be seen in the Warao of the Orinoco delta, as detailed by Wilbert (1993). In this case there is no question of accuracy as this quite traditional culture clearly had the ability to lay out a 200km north south axis from two significant natural points separated by tropical flat topography of the delta. The deviation of the line from true-north is only about nine arc minutes. Together with its E-W axis, the larger Warao cosmos is symbolically replicated in the circular form of the collective village dwelling, with its vertical axis mundi pole at the center. While the association between the spiritual power of the larger landscape and its formal layout and the village dwelling is made powerfully clear in Wilbert’s account of this shamanistic religion, memories of any possible integrative effect of ritual landscape framework on social relations between village groups apparently no longer existed in the minds of his informants.

Given the difficulty of ethnographically recording possible georitual processes in these most traditional of societies, our best evidence may well lie in the locations of ceremonial sites documented archaeologically. But to establish that certain sites were located in relation to large-scale landscape frameworks requires overcoming the second obstacle, i.e. distinguishing designed patterns from random ones. At the time of this writing I am just completing the testing of some new, custom math-based (not GIS) software. This will allow the user to compare existing geometric patterns that involve large-scale natural features and known archaeological sites with patterns associated with randomly generated site locations. While it should be possible to compare an existing pattern with thousands of random points and their patterns, such will not constitute any absolute proof of design. It will hopefully provide a reasonable hypothesis, however, which together with other hypotheses and perhaps even ethnographic evidence will more fully inform this line of inquiry. Eventually this software will be made freely available. Not only will it be useful for archaeologists and symbolic anthropologists for their research, but for architects and landscape architects as well seeking to apply these ancient processes to contemporary settings including those that “see the past”.

Three examples of interpretative settings and lack of larger landscape context

The public interpretation of historical or archaeological settings discussed below diminishes or omits symbolic and ritual landscape contexts for reasons introduced above. Certainly the fundamental charge of protecting historical buildings or ancient ruins may in itself limit the extent of interpretation or reenactment of complex, inherently participatory processes such as ritual--even if such were well understood ethnographically and technically. Our partial solution to at least the protection issue this past semester was to choose an interpretative site with no actual historical or pre-historical use. While admittedly having some characteristics in common with theme parks and their like, we thought of the project as having a greater emotional and even religious effect, one not unlike that described in Wasserman’s overview of landscape and urban memorial settings (1998).

Yet given an awareness of the complex symbolic layouts of traditional ritual settings, and their apparent power to make contact with the spirits, it seems that even an evocative, cathartic experience like the Viet Nam Memorial works because of rhetorical rather than ritual processes. Many of the metaphors described by Griswold (1986), e.g. seeing one’s mirror image juxtaposed over the names of the dead, are certainly effective but remain essentially unorganized into any ritual sequence with opposed domains, clear thresholds of contact with spirits and the like. The larger-scale spatial meaning is really neither territorial nor ritualistic. The memorial’s lack of typical mall rhetoric--territorial position, architectural monumentality, style and expense--itself constitutes an anti-war message or rhetoric, in spite of the designer’s efforts to neutralize or eliminate such immediate content, especially prior to the actual experience of the wall.

Certainly metaphors may be more spatial or linear as in the case of museum time- lines or the Resistance Museum in Oslo where the visitor immediately descends underground (literally and symbolically) along an interpretative sequence, eventually emerging again as the country is liberated. A clearer ritual structure and actual social effect can be found in the layout of the original Disneyland. Thresholds from the outer, ordinary world are clearly marked and associated with liminal experiences of train, boat or merry-go-rounds. Content domains relating to the U.S. role in the post-war world are clearly articulated and climax with Bank America’s “Little World”. Parents become children, effecting a real ritual reversal of social power, aspects of which may be homologically linked to the role of the U.S. with other nations.

It also seems to me that the original Las Vegas also may be seen as an authentic ritual setting. The “strip” of distorted architectural facades, or its equivalent of the Colorado River running by the gambling town of Laughlin, separates normal American competitive life where people really don’t have an equal opportunity to get rich, from the ideal competition of the roulette wheel. Serious pilgrims don’t gamble against their friends, but rejoin them with food, sun bathing, or other entertainment after losing. Both Turner’s “structure” (gaming) and “anti-structure” (collective events) are expressed in these contrasting experiences. Presumably there is a real social effect from the experience, one better preparing the American for the reality of ordinary daily life.

But to what degree can or should historical or archaeological sites, or replications of such, develop a more powerful social effect through ritual or ritual-like experience, and how could one invoke the added power of ancient sacred landscapes? As a first example, to what degree are these potentialities brought to bear on the experience of vernacular or folk museums in Scandinavia?

Scandinavia

At the turn of the last century, most major Scandinavian cities of any size collected buildings and other artifacts from the disappearing folk culture on the rural landscape. Scansen, for example in central Stockholm, can be taken at face value as a rhetorical expression of the difference between a folk past then organized by either “sacred landscape” or “local ritual” and the fundamentally different ways of operating in a modern, rhetorical culture where competition and territoriality dominate social experience. This contrast is expressed by the visual juxtaposition of small wooden farm buildings with the multi-story, stylistic, and densely urban buildings of Stockholm’s central city, or in Norway with the short ferry ride from Oslo’s central harbor to the peninsula museum of Bygdøy. The example in figure 1 shows Kulturen, the folk museum in the heart of Lund, Sweden.

The layouts of these working museums are only organized loosely according to counties from which they came. While some of these geographical areas may in fact have been functioning smaller scale georitual landscapes of valleys or fjords--a coincidence of more modern organization with topography--this ritual possibility is totally lost on the visitor. The ancient East-West orientation of farm dwellings in Scandinavia, even up until the Reformation, and their eventual 90 degree reorientation to finally become coincident with church symbolism (Doxtater 1990), was not recognized either at the time of moving the buildings from their original sites, or even today. Thus, once sacred thresholds articulating the contact between humans and spirits go every which way in the museums. Nor does the visitor at all sense the site contextual meanings of the four principal farm buildings and their symbolically defined oppositions between humans and animals, male and female. These were part of the spatial frameworks mentioned earlier in the parallels between folk wedding ritual sequence and the folk tale East of the Sun, West of the Moon. Also lacking is any interpretation of the ritual importance of the ancestor’s mound that tended to be located to the symbolic north of the main farm cluster of buildings. From folk ethnography we know that if one didn’t give the farm spirit his ale on the “center” day of the week, Thursday (Thor’s day), one was likely to see a pair of huge bloodshot eyes peering between raised logs of the principal dwelling (Doxtater 1981:120).

(Figure 1: please see downloadable version)

At the smaller georitual scale of valley or fjord community of folk times, enough is known of the actual spatial and ritual experience to at least attempt an interpretation. But such is inhibited by larger, contemporary views of Scandinavians. They are not so interested in less pragmatic, less ecologically based, more purely symbolic and religious meanings of their earlier settings and culture. The idea that social process and equality could come from elaborate symbolic frameworks that organized contact with spirits, or religious practice generally, is anathema to present day practitioners who conventionally solve their problems with lots and lots of meetings (some of which are “local ritual” as in Swedish offices). Nevertheless, while some group of interpretation professionals, including politicians, are responsible for omitting such content from the still active folk museums, those on the artistic side of things seem somewhat less compelled to do so. The best example here is Gunnar Asplund’s Woodland Cemetery in the greater Stockholm area, where meanings of death and transition must be symbolically expressed in spite of the social pragmatism and diminished effect of state religion in Sweden at

(Figure 2: Please see downloadable version)

least. Woodland Cemetery, figure 2, with its grove of trees atop an obvious mound and numerous visual axes extending or connecting this ritual-like focus out into the seemingly distant landscape recalls to the viewer not only the major calendrical rites of folk valleys and fjords in Scandinavia, but of much more ancient georitual landscapes and societies. While much of my initial georitual work in Scandinavia (prior to developing the computer ability to test against random patterns) remains to be reanalyzed and published, one archaeological example here will illustrate what Asplund somehow understood in his design of a death and spiritual transition experience at Woodland.

In my search for an actual site or sites of highest spiritual power in the north of Scandinavia, as clearly understood from secondary texts, there appeared two clear candidates. The first is a still sacred Sammi (Lapp) conical island in the middle of a lake in north central Norway. It is called “God-Mountain-Island” (Gudfjellöya). The second natural feature is the moderately high landmark used by seafarers, and also conical

(Figure 3: Please see downloadable version)

mountain called Heimdalshaugen, literally the burial mound of Heimdal. In Norse mythology, Heimdal is the “frame god” sitting above in the cosmos, looking down at the positions of the other gods. In the encyclopedia of Norwegian traditional culture, the description of the mythic and folkloric associations of this mountain is more extensive than that for any other natural feature. During the late Viking period, a set of three huge mounds, commonly compared to those of Uppsala, Sweden, were built on the present day Bertnem farm on the upper reaches of the Namsen River and fjord to the southwest of Gudfjellöya and Heimdalshaugen. An unusual longhouse with ceremonial indications built by Vikings from distant places to the south sat next to the mounds. When one calculates an extended line from the two natural features (peaks), the line actually hits the center mound of the Bertnem trio, as shown in figure 3.

If this georitual alignment can be soon restated as a statistical hypothesis, and not just a remarkable coincidence, then it would clearly indicate a religious relationship between the natural features and this ceremonial site, accessible as it was to sea-going Viking participants. This kind of georitual experience seems very analogous to Asplund’s design intent at Woodland Cemetery. I am not suggesting that the funeral or meditative experience at Woodland is even ritualistic, unlike the probable Bertnem rites in Viking times. Woodland is best defined as evocative, and therefore still rhetorical. Certainly some more structured sequence of symbolic and social experiences, i.e. ritual, may have developed at Woodland over time, but most likely was not part of any original design intention (the setting has not been analyzed to my knowledge).

Other contemporary Scandinavian settings can be found with recollections of a georitual past, and even with some formally structured ritual process. See, for example, the culminating Swedish office example, the SAS building in Stockholm (Doxtater 1994). The entire site and building is organized around a North-South “street” that terminates to the North with the fjord. This most northerly domain has the most cultural (and spiritual in a contemporary sense) associations in its use for daily meals with work groups, musical performances and as the climax to the Midwinter Santa Lucia procession. I recall giving a small presentation about this possible symbolic meaning to a group of architectural faculty at the University of Lund; Hans Asplund, Gunnar’s son was my sponsor for the year and was in attendance. To my surprise they were quite comfortable with these kinds of content in Scandinavian settings, this in spite of the absence of much real discourse on similar subjects in the literature.

Crete

Most people visiting the archaeological site of Knossos on Crete probably have first made the climb up the Acropolis in Athens. Most people will have also seen the Parthenon represented in some non-environmental medium or other and will have actually experienced first hand countless classical reproductions as governmental buildings, banks, fraternities or sororities, museums, etc. Thus in many respects there is not that much new in the Acropolis experience. One sees large classical buildings with strong territorial location, monumental scale and expense that obviously impress even those with little or no depth of historical understanding. Even when one does get into an academic view of Greek temples, we find this same fundamentally rhetorical perspective in de Polignac’s (1994) definition of the territorial basis for many sanctuary sites and politico-religious function.

Or even consider work like Vincent Scully’s that some time ago drew attention to the relation of temple orientation and location to unusual, often horn-like mountain features in the visible surrounding landscape, including solar risings that timed birth days of the gods (1962). This pattern remains fundamentally “archeocentric”. Like other rhetorical aspects of the architectural sanctuary site, these too originate more with simpler, less ritually structured design elements intended to amplify the power of those hiring the designers. Gods reside in the temples and landscape features still remain subordinate in spiritual effect. Plato’s ideal zodiacal layout of Greek landscape radiates out from some predetermined center position. As a first time visitor to the acropolis I wanted to be up there at sunset to at least better appreciate this extension from architectural site to the landscape. Unfortunately the site closed a couple of hours before sunset thereby eliminating any visitor’s sense of even this lesser landscape aspect of the site’s religiosity in classical times.

The so-called palace of Knossos is to me an inherently different kind of ancient setting, yet this difference is undoubtedly lost on the vast majority of visitors. First of all, both the location of the site and the presentation of the building to the approaching visitor is curiously non-rhetorical. Knossos sits seemingly arbitrarily perched on the side of one of a multitude of less accommodating hill slopes that characterize the lowlands of Crete. Secondly, the main approach from the west seems not at all intent on presenting either the Minoan participant or the contemporary visitor with any overly impressive monumentality of territorial location or building scale. The setting focuses instead on the interior courtyard, a landscape microcosm immediately suggestive more of ritual, and possible landscape homologue, than the rhetoric of classical Greek sites. Again, there are those who discuss a fundamentally different kind of religion among the Minoans, a variation of Campbell’s earth mother and its Bronze Age emphasis of landscape (Goodison & Morris 1998:113-132). Yet even if the visitor has read some of this background to the site, there is still little in the experience that connects the palace to the larger landscape and its gods, save for the view of Mt Juktas from the central courtyard.

It is archaeologically understood that people at Knossos used the Peak Sanctuary on Juktas religiously. One might therefore expect a greater effort to interpret this potentially reverse relationship where a sacred natural feature might have been seen as dominant over the architectural or temple site, seemingly lacking clear representations of gods in residence. After all, peak sanctuaries had been used even more extensively

(Figure 4: please see downloadable version)

before the palace period; only some, like Juktas remained in use during (Peatfield 1990). But even if one chose to develop the Knossos-Juktas (ritual) relationship, it seems that at the largest scale of the entire island of Crete, and even beyond, this still would amount to a somewhat territorial, non-ritually integrated view of separate palaces and their nearby sacred landscape features. Juktas is only a little over six kilometers south of Knossos.

But let us consider briefly a bit of new georitual research by the author on the entire Minoan landscape. It examines the possibility that the major palaces, at least, existed in a larger symbolic and presumably ritual context that may have diminished individual territorial hegemony and even promoted some sort of socio-political integration. Having done georitual analysis both in Scandinavia and the Native American Southwest, my interest during the last sabbatical was to try to bring aspects of this work closer to a more conventional understanding of architectural and landscape history in design fields. It seemed reasonable that if the classical Greeks were fully practicing essentially modern, rhetorical forms of religion and architecture (though still not broadly text based), one could go back farther in the evolution of social space, as it were, and perhaps find more landscape based, ritual ways of organizing religion and society, even at quite large scales. Early peak sanctuaries, again, seemed to be good indications of such at times less focused on architectural temples or palaces.

A current paper being reviewed for publication (Doxtater 2005) describes sets of patterns between the four major Minoan palaces and significant natural features that indicate an overall ritual integration and ultimately religious subordination of architectural site to natural landscape. The paper includes several efforts to statistically test these patterns against those generated by random points. Let me here briefly describe

(figure 5: please see downloadable version)

one aspect of these patterns, the orientations of the palaces, that illustrates content missing in our usual rhetorical interpretation of archaeological sites. The computer based analysis of geometric relationships among nine of the most prominent natural features on Crete discovers a highly accurate, formal pattern (figure 5) of two parallel east-west axes and a vertical bisect that connects their mid-points to a central north-south axis originating at the highest mountain peak in the south (Kofinas with two peak sanctuaries). This axis runs through the peak of Juktas and out to the island of Thera or Santorini (within two kilometers of the caldera, source of major eruptions during the palace period). This is an entirely coincidental, natural geometric pattern that hypothetically might have been known far back into early Minoan times and before. It contains dualistic east-west elements and an emphasis on a north-south axis mundi that is not at all dissimilar to georitual frameworks in Scandinavia or among the Pueblo cultures of the U.S. Southwest.

As an example of its accuracy, consider the West axis between the island’s two highest mountains Pachnes and Mt. Ida and the most well documented Minoan ritual cave, Psychro ( Tryee 1974). An exact line from the data column on Pachnes to my GPS reading at the mouth of Psychro Cave will miss the data column on Mt. Ida by about 21 meters; the overall distance of the line is 129.2 km. The deviation here is about 0.018°, or very close to the nominal figure given by optical science for maximal visual acuity with the naked eye, 0.017°. On the East line, Dikti is the mythological partner to Mt Ida, and Mt. Thriptis is the highest peak out on the eastern tip of Crete. The western point of the East line, Mawri, is the saddle of the horned mountain visible from Phaistos. The actual ritual focus here might well have been Kamares Cave, visible as well from Phaistos just below the horns on the south face of Mawri. The latitude/longitude point for Mawri is derived from the intersection of the Ida-Kofinas line with the extension of Thriptis-Dikti.

Our present example asks only whether the orientations of the three major palaces, Knossos, Phaistos, and Mallia relate to this possibly early georitual pattern. The orientation of the fourth palace, Zakros, can only be understood in relation to other aspects of the early pattern and the locations of the three major palaces (all part of the paper currently under review). The primary study of the orientations of these four palaces by Shaw (1974) could find no logic to the variations of their generally north-south axes: Phaistos (2° 35’ 38”east of north), Knossos (11° 37’ 08” east of north), and Mallia (17° 1’ 48” east of north). But when one considers the possibly early georitual pattern, we find a clear, accurate, and logical association between architectural orientation and significant, contextual natural features, figure 6.

(Figure 6: please see downloadable version)

Each of the “East” and “West” palaces orient accurately to the closest points of the early natural pattern, the respective origination caves of the West and East axes. Knossos, for its acknowledged vertical or mediation role orients accurately to the origination point of the axis mundi, Kofinas. Symbolically these patterns are very consistent and very typical of formalized ritual layouts at smaller architectural or settlement scales. Given the probable ability of Minoans to understand and eventually lay out similar patterns at larger, georitual scales, it should not be at all surprising that such might have existed as a significant part of the “earth-mother” religion on Crete. But it would be nice to be able to provide more of a statistical hypothesis that the palace orientations to the naturally coincidental pattern were in fact designed and not also a random happenstance. While the author’s Crete paper does include several such tests for the more complex patterns of palace location, again in relation to the early natural pattern, we can here only consider the odds of the three palace orientations being random.

Consider the more normative view, that the three palaces were not located or oriented with any consideration of a georitual landscape, but simply positioned to territorially (rhetorically) control somewhat equally located western, central and eastern areas. Given this distribution, each palace would only have a chance to randomly orient accurately to two of the early pattern sites each, also assuming some sort of religious orientation as generally north-south, i.e. Phaistos (Mawri or Mt. Ida), Knossos (Juktas or Kofinas), and Mallia (Psychro or Dikti). If we then take Mallia’s 17° (rounded off) deviation from true north-south as the maximum possible variation, the total possible variation for each palace would be 2 x 17° or 34° (variation either west or east of north). If one then averages the deviations of the palace orientations from Mawri, Kofinas, and Psychro (0° 0’ 25”, 0° 4’ 25” and 0° 11’ 28” respectively) one gets an average deviation of 0° 5’ 35” or 0.093°.

Envision spinning a wheel in any location within the general territories of the three palaces. How often will it accurately point to one of the two natural features in its general north-south area (if the spin were somehow limited to the 34° range). Each feature measures 2 x 0.093° (0.186°) since the pointer on the wheel can fall on either side and be within the range of deviation. And since we have two such points where alignments within this degree of accuracy would occur, the total area of the 34° range that will win the prize is 2 x 0.186° = 0.372°. To find what the chances of hitting this area one simply divides 34° by 0.372°. It follows that one spin of the wheel for one palace’s orientation will give the player about a 1 in 91.4 chance of winning. To find the odds of winning with all three palaces at once, we simply multiply 91.4 x 91.4 x 91.4 as is the rule in determining standard lottery odds. So as a rough measure of possible randomness and intentional design in the case of the palaces, the odds against the orientations of Phaistos, Knossos, and Mallia being all accurately and randomly oriented to one of the natural features of the possibly early georitual pattern on Crete are approximately 763,552 to 1. This, I suggest, is a reasonable hypothesis that the orientations were designed with the georitual pattern in mind. It can also be noted that this calculation does not account for the apparent symmetry or logical formality of which natural point was chosen for palace orientation, particularly with Phaistos and Mallia. If one of the East-West axes had been left out, i.e. no point had been chosen, or both points had been on the same line, then the scheme would dramatically lose its sense of duality.

How the orientation patterns as well as those actually locating the palace, all with respect to the early natural layout, might someday be interpreted to visitors is introduced by the final ethnographic example and design exercise.

The Pueblo Southwest

Most readers will have seen some sort of image in some medium or another of Native American Pueblo culture that includes the historical Pueblo groups of Hopi, Zuñi and Tewa or their Chaco, Kenyata or Mesa Verde ancestors. The Navajos also occupied this Southern Colorado Plateau area around the 15th century and hold some of the same natural features to be sacred. The image that most people carry with them prior to visiting an actual historical or archaeological site is of a multi-storied, clustered pueblo village, though sometimes mistakenly associated with contemporary Navajos. People have also seen images of or have heard the term “kiva”, the characteristic, and partially subterranean, usually round room used for important rituals, among other activities. Far fewer people may have seen several recent films that promote an archaeoastronomical perspective to the orientation of architectural or landscape features and the location of pueblo structures and great kivas with respect to the movement of sun, moon and the stars (c.f. Robert Redford’s Mystery of Chaco Canyon).

The showing of such films in interpretative sites, often adjacent to archaeological ruins, certainly is an example of extending the visitor experience and understanding to larger landscape scales of indigenous space. These archaeoastronomical efforts naturally have much in common with the present interest in georitual contexts. It is important, however, to note that a typical alignment of archaeological feature to an astronomical phenomenon may or may not involve landscape features. A window in a building can cast a ray of light on a designed feature within the building, or at the greatest involvement of landscape, a feature on the horizon may be used as an element of alignment with some built or other natural feature as focus. In this latter case, the context of the natural landscape is limited to the immediate, visual landscape around the focus, not unlike Scully’s relationships between Greek temples and their immediate setting. The present emphasis on much larger, georitual patterns in the far landscape, seeks not to diminish the considerable strides archaeoastronomy has taken in recent years. To the contrary, georitual may turn out to be quite complementary to astronomical alignment. The primary ritual locations for making contact with spirits may be determined by patterns with the larger landscape, while ceremonial timing would likely be determined by astronomical patterns. This relationship between georitual and astronomy will occur in the design example below, but is not yet academically mainstream or interpreted in visitor settings.

Certainly one of the most memorable interpretative experiences in the Southwest is the trip over forty or more miles of dirt roads to the 10th-13th century Pueblo Ancestor site called Chaco Canyon in Northwest New Mexico. Visiting the NPS site is at least an all day trip from any more populated area, and some visitors camp at the grounds provided. Once one enters by car the modest canyon with little noticeable descent--the canyon walls rise only a couple of hundred feet or so--the visitor hits a modern paved asphalt road leading to the visitor center parking lot. Here one stretches their legs, visits the restrooms, and then heads into the small modern building (Pueblo style) that houses an information counter, bookshop, exhibits and film theater. Several maps orient the visitor to the locations of the eleven pueblo structures, one solitary great kiva and other features spread along the six or eight miles of the NW-SW orienting linear canyon. One of these pueblos lies within a short walk from the visitor center, while the others are reached by car along the paved park road.

While most visitors making the effort to get there will naturally have a greater than average interest in Puebloan culture, their understanding and awareness of Chaco Canyon’s relation to the greater Chacoan “world” of the 1250’s, the landscape of most of the southern plateau, may still be minimal. True, the extent of Chacoan “outlier” communities and the pieces of arrow-straight roads that extend for miles out from Chacoan structures both in the canyon and out around the plateau are mapped in the interpretative center. The visitor may also discern the now mainstream view that the primary purpose of Chaco was as a religious pilgrimage focus for Pueblo people of the region. The big structures, in spite of their hundreds of rooms were not used residentially but primarily ceremonially. Yet only when the visitor hikes up to either of the two structures on the central north and south rims does he or she begin to sense the distance involved in the Chacoan organization. But only distant undefined mountains, primarily to the south, not outlier communities, can be seen from these vantage points. In spite of the fact that the ancient Great North road (sometimes as multiple lanes) connected to the north rim structure of Pueblo Alto, this is very difficult for the untrained visitor to discern.

Beyond these ephemeral road segments, however, exists probable evidence for a much more extensive and logically patterned georitual context for the location of Chaco Canyon structures. While some of these patterns have been published in recent mainstream archaeology, they are far from being the subject of interpretative strategies in visitor centers. In Chaco Canyon at present, the visitor’s primary experience is to drive up to a still large and impressive building ruin, park the car and then further expand the scalar sense by walking up and into the structure. Brief interpretative pamphlets are available at each ruin, but these remain clearly secondary to the less consciously focused experience of the site. This experience in many respects mimics our conventional appreciation of rhetorical buildings, whether from historical or contemporary periods.

It may be true that the sizes and implicit monumentality of some of the largest of great houses did begin to rhetorically express a competitive relationship between these

(Figure 7: please see downloadable version)

religious structures, built as they probably were by different tribal groups from the greater Chacoan region. But there was neither a clear territoriality nor stylistic facade to bolster the rhetorical message. The central or focal point of the canyon is not one largest of buildings, as would be the territorial case, but a balanced oppositional structure so typical of more integrated societies. At the center lies the singular and largest of great kivas called Casa Rinconada, quite possibly perceived by the Pueblo Ancestors as being dominant over the much more architectural and self-interested great house structures on the other side of the Chaco wash or river. As presently experienced by Chaco visitors, Casa Rinconada, with its almost lack of profile or facade, appears rhetorically unimpressive on its own, and strangely incongruent in its relationship to the great houses.

But what did georitually organize the locations of these structures and at the same time constrain much of their architectural rhetoric? Having some time ago published papers on the Hopi ritual landscape (Doxtater 1978) and how these ideas, including the work of Ortiz with the Tewa layout mentioned above, might begin to answer fundamental questions about Chaco (Doxtater 1991), I more recently began to use some unique but straightforward computer applications to look for geometric patterns between distant mountains and the structures of Chaco Canyon. This work, while nonetheless similar in spatial scale, can be distinguished from Lekson’s recent ideas of a Chaco Meridian (1999). Rather than attempting to define how actively used ceremonial sites were being connected to most sacred natural features (georitual), he maintains an elite group initiated the Chaco center, then extend a (north-south) meridian to a second center at Aztec and then a third down to Paquime or Casas Grandes in today’s Northern Mexico. Lekson’s concept, while admitting some religiosity to a north-south axis mundi, is more rhetorical or territorial in essence, originating from an elite selected location and radiating out to distant built sites. His ideas parallel those of Plato with the Greek zodiac or the Incan ceques radiating out from Cuzco.

(Figure 8: please see downloadable version)

My reason for the location of Chaco structures plays much more heavily on the religious meaning of a north-south axis mundi, not unlike the example mentioned in the Warao. This work is more fully documented in two recent publications (Doxtater 2002, 2003). The Chaco Canyon focus lies directly south of the highest mountain within or on the periphery of the Southern Colorado Plateau, Mt. Wilson, one of the “fourteeners” (mountains of highest elevation) in Colorado. As seen in figure 8, this exact meridian runs from Mt. Wilson coincidentally through the possibly known, most recent prehistoric volcanic vent called McCarty’s flow, and down to the peak called Cerro Moctezuma, directly west of Paquime or Casas Grandes. What made Mt. Wilson most religiously powerful, in my estimation, however, was its location exactly due east of Abajo Peak. As also seen in the diagram, this may well have been the symbolic “north” of an earlier, very large-scale georitual pattern focused at Canyon De Chelly. The sun’s equinox rise directly over Mt. Wilson, as seen from Abajo, could have inspired the religious aspects of the subsequent Chaco focus, due south of Mount Wilson and approximately due east of Canyon De Chelly.

While Lekson’s northern center of Aztec does lie accurately on the great meridian from Mt. Wilson, the meridian actually passes not through the central focus of Chaco Canyon in the Casa Rinconada area, but through the great kivas of the unusually large Basketmaker (pre-pueblo) village on the NW rim of the canyon, Shabikeshchee, and the great house of Penasco Blanco, one of the first four such structures in the canyon in the 900’s. To this reality must be added that of two more “cross” axes and their intersection point. At the hypothetically earlier Canyon De Chelly focus, the vertical and two cross axes to distant largest of mountain points naturally intersect within about 300 meters of a common point, as did a perpendicular to the north-south axis that ran to the intersection of the two Colorado Rivers in the Grand Canyon, a pilgrimage site even today among Pueblo people. The four distant mountain features chosen for the new Chaco focus, seen again in figure 8, intersect at a much greater distance from the exact meridian, about 6.6 km. This point lies just west of the great house of Hungo Pavi, over a kilometer east of the chosen focus around Casa Rinconada.

(Figure 9: please see downloadable version)

It behooved the Chacoan priest-surveyors to reconcile this natural geometry into a ritual point where all the spiritual power from the six distant mountains could be channeled into one ceremonial structure, in this case Casa Rinconada. Present space doesn’t allow any detailed description of this somewhat complex geometric strategy, published elsewhere. In brief, they chose a modest but symmetrical butte, Haystack Mountain, lying roughly between the two SW (Hosta Butte) and SE (Mount Taylor) mountains of the cross axes. The 270km line from Haystack to Mt. Wilson actually hits the great kiva of Casa Rinconada. A second, representational vertical axis mundi from Haystack to Pierre, the “acropolis” site at the termination of the great north road about 20k from Chaco, connected as it were the new vertical axis with the intersection of the cross axes. Pierre lies on a line from Mt. Wilson to the intersection point. Then the line from Pierre to Casa Rinconada, figure 9, appears to have been perceived as the primary path of spirit entry into the great kiva at the center of the canyon. This line organizes the locations of the three large great houses at the center.

Essentially the two published pieces attempt to document a georitual reason for the location and even symbolic meaning of major Chacoan structures in the canyon and as related to a third axis mundi associated with the spectacular Ship Rock feature and the Chacoan sites of Lowry (north) and the Village of the Great Kivas (south). This “middle of middles” seems to have been some sort of mediator between the more ancient focus at Canyon De Chelly and the shorter lived, seemingly integrated focus at Chaco Canyon. While this brief description does no justice to a much more complicated and still controversial argument, it will serve as an introduction to the kind of georitual content my students attempted to convey in their studio project last semester.

A Chacoan Georitual Visitor Center on I-40

My idea of locating a Chacoan or really Pueblo Ancestor visitor center along busy I-40 comes only partially from the prospects of influencing much larger numbers of people, compared to the number that make the actual trip to Chaco Canyon and other significant sites on the plateau. The hypothetical project is also fueled by the mentioned argument that these ancient peoples were in no small degree organized religiously by symbolic and ritual conceptions of North-South or vertical axis mundis. Given this design assumption, one can then map the convergence of practical adjacency to larger numbers of potential visitors with these ancient religious lines on the landscape. Both the more ancient De Chellian vertical axis between Abajo Peak and Baldy Peak and the Chaco meridian from Mt Wilson cross I-40 (see again figure 8). Furthermore, the southern feature of Haystack Mountain, that re-creates a second axis with Mt. Wilson and the actual Chaco center, lies just a few hundred very visible meters just north of the interstate. Cross-axes lines to Mt Taylor, also visible along a considerable stretch of the highway, and Hosta Butte create additional siting opportunities.

The idea of locating a large, expensive visitor center away from an actual archaeological, and usually architecturally dominant site, was initially not very interesting to the National Park Service. They did however graciously fund a good part of the class field trip to this stretch of I-40 and of course to Chaco Canyon itself. While the class of seven fifth-year architecture students (of a 5-year professional program) and three graduate landscape architecture students had chosen this studio option last semester, they too were initially reserved about the abstractness, and other interpretative potential of georitual patterns. None of the students had any previous background either in Southwest archaeology generally or from my seminar on georitual and other forms of social space. Thus we had to start from scratch, using Lekson’s volume as an excellent overview, my articles of course, other anthropological literature and guest visits from archeologists. In addition to the Chaco Canyon interpretative center we also visited four other centers or museums in the Phoenix-Tucson area.

With some ethnographic background and a minimal introduction to using my custom Geopatterns software, each student began a couple of weeks before the field trip to search for his or her ideal site. One immediate difficulty, particularly during and after the field trip, was the tendency to be influenced by the immediate phenomenological beauty of the possible sites, sometimes totally minimizing their relationships to the sacred ancient georitual lines. These tendencies persisted with some students even after visiting the phenomenologically minimal Chaco Canyon. While more intrinsic natural visual aesthetics--and those of architectural tectonics for that matter--can be contrasted to the extrinsic meanings of rhetorical form, both are popular and dominant aspects of design today. They both differ fundamentally from symbolic frameworks of ritual action, at whatever scale.

It turned out that in some respects two of the most successful projects chose the least visually aesthetic site. This is a relatively flat area next to I-40 as it intersects with the Canyon De Chelly vertical axis from Abajo Peak (due west of Mt Wilson) to Baldy Peak (the present day sacred mountain of the White Mountain Apaches). One of the reasons why these two projects were successful was because their lack of constraining, beautiful topography allowed for a greater representation of the large-scale character of plateau religion for the Pueblo cultures. While studio time in one semester does not allow for any kind of total project completeness, particularly for such a large and complex visitor setting, the schemes do clearly communicate, I believe, certain ideas and the ultimate potential for this kind of a project.

The following is one of the two projects for this De Chelly location, largely as presented for review by Ray Clamons with very minimal comments by myself (text for figures). This location is also interesting because of the lack of any town or industrial facilities visible from I-40. The landscape is planar with distant mountains to the south appearing very small on the horizon. Baldy Peak is just barely visible if one knows where to look. Northern views are impeded by the gentle rise in topography in that direction. The area lies at around 5,000 plus feet in elevation with minimal shrub-like juniper sparsely dotting the largely clay surface. The freeway exit is named “Navajo” and has only a new gas station and convenience store shaped rhetorically like a Navajo Hogan. The exit primarily provides access to the many small Navajo ranches spaced every kilometer or so across the seemingly infertile landscape. For practical reasons of time during the brief semester we could not include any participation of Native Americans either in terms of site location or design of the actual experience. We are well aware, however, of the ultimate necessity of full participation as exemplified in the recent NMAI process. One of the author’s paternal ancestors (Doxtater), six generations removed, was a historically well-known Oneida Indian and Capitan in the Colonial Army in our war of independence.

Please see the following file for student projects: Doxtater Project.doc

Ray’s project, in my opinion, succeeded along a number dimensions. First of all, like most projects of the studio, we see a healthy constraint of the more typical rhetorical aspects of museum interpretative architecture. Those portions of the site that actually must enclose and protect objects and people are subordinated to the overall sense of landscape, both immediate and extended. While it is not completely clear in Ray’s project where all the more typical interpretation of objects occurs--not only the Chaco area but also the two others would have exhibit areas--these could be easily integrated into the larger experiences without dominating them.

We were at times quite conscious about distinguishing the more poetic even ritual-like experiences from the more scientifically factual, intellectual understanding of the past. Certainly it can be argued that the telling of stories, imagery in film and other graphics, narratives of journey through the landscape, ritual-like movements, observations of astronomical events and the like are more theatrical than scientific. Yet it can also probably be said that these experiences, because they exist at a different cognitive and emotional level, do not really distort any truth. These general kinds of experiences, even including georitual conceptions of axis mundis, exist in Pueblo cultures. Such experiences in the hypothetical setting tell no lies, but convey a broader and appropriate sense of the kind of religion and beliefs that Pueblo people had and to certain degrees still have.

The overall hypothetical effect of the more poetic experiences in the present case remains, however, much more rhetorical than ritualistic. Ritual is represented more than practiced. First, the smaller scale reproduction of the large-scale georitual pattern is not really a ritual homologue, but a representation of the plateau pattern per se. It is a kind of time line, representing how the georitual pattern may have evolved. Such a pattern would never have been experienced by any particular individual or group, as would happen in the visitor’s experience. In terms of the overall sequence, the scheme appears to reveal a certain preference for the earlier focus, Canyon De Chelly, over Chaco. This axis and its interpretative portion organize the scheme as its primary axis mundi. Is this an undue rhetorical attempt to influence the visitor’s ideas about early Pueblo religion particularly in the contrast between the natural Canyon De Chelly and the architectural Chaco? Perhaps not, since to a certain extent the symbolic use of Canyon De Chelly focus and outlying points by plateau people after Chaco, both Navajo and Historic Pueblo, suggests a return to the early georitual pattern and religion. Thus the emphasis of the De Chelly axis in Ray’s scheme may well be justified.

Finally, there exists another bit of symbolism, perhaps even ritual, in the vertical juxtaposition of entry and exit experience. When entering from the underground point of emergence (Grand Canyon), the visitor is persuaded to become an ancient Pueblo Ancestor. The representational mythic journey takes this new soul subtly by the actual most ancient vertical axis to an identity as Chacoan. Returning to the now more completely expressed De Chelly axis, the visitor becomes either Navajo or Historical Pueblo (Hopi, Tewa, Zuni) as it were. Then when the visitor enters the craft/dance plaza area, this identity becomes modern. With the presence of food and social dancing, both by actual Native Americans, the participating visitor enters a quasi communitas experience, in Turner’s terms, in comparison to the structuring, specific identities of the previous Chaco and De Chelly sites. This destructuring fusion with real, modern Indians could presumably have an actual social effect in the visitor’s consideration of Native Americans in ordinary life circumstances.

The location of the craft/dance plaza directly over the ancient emergence experience below might well have unique significance particularly for Native American visitors. To them, the various craft sellers from different tribes could express the reality of intertribal competition. This competition is then opposed, balanced, by the dance plaza itself functioning for the Indian more as pan-tribal Pow Wow than any site actually sacred to a particular tribe. Its location over the emergence space speaks of more generalized pan-tribal religion in the past. The question remains as to whether the ancient line that runs through the center of the site might be used, by whatever kind of visitor, as a sacred means of making contact with spirits. This issue, along with many others, might be given further thought in some more extensive, fully participatory, real design process.

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