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Paul Devereux - The Anasazi culture
Identifier
006600
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
Anasazi kiva sites with paths are to be found in the San Juan basin, Colorado, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico and South West USA. On example site is Chaco canyon. The Anasazi culture or the ‘Ancient ones’ created paths both within the canyon and for tens of miles around the canyon in a system of roads all straight as arrows.
Archaelogists have also found a system of ‘signal shrines’ scattered through the landscape around Chaco canyon. For instance about 12 miles north of Chaco canyon, the North road encounters a group of pinnacles. It goes directly towards what archaeologists have dubbed El Faro – the Lighthouse – because on its summit they found a hearth on which many fires had been lit. Segments of the road are to be found on either side of the pinnacles.
There are a number of structures on mesa tops around the great houses all linked by paths, none of which are the living spaces of communities. They are simply ‘places’ - sacred sites
A description of the experience
Paul Devereux – Sacred Sites
The great houses seem to have been linked to this network, hundreds of miles of which have now been uncovered by aerial and ground study .. The roads are wide, usually a constant 9 metres with tributary or spur roads half that width. They were bordered with earthen ‘berms’, rows of stones or occasionally drystone walling and their surfaces were compacted subsoil or sometimes cut to bedrock.
It is a mystery why a people without the wheel or horse should want such broad exact roads, yet aerial and infra-red remote sensing has also found that some lengths of road had parallel sections running alongside them … now invisible to the naked eye, and on the ‘North Road’, double groupings of parallel roads.
A Navajo legend claims that the roads are really tunnels, which the ancient ones could pass along safely.