Sacred Willow

Weather: Warm afternoons continue to dry the mud; when temperatures drop at night, the moisture hovers above and keeps morning temperatures in the middle to high 20's; last precipitation 2/17/12; 10:08 hours of daylight today.

What’s blooming: Black mustard coming into bloom along shoulders.

What’s still green: Juniper and other evergreens; stems on hybrid roses and young chamisa; leaves on grape hyacinth, alfilerillo, gypsum phacelia seedlings, snakeweed, anthemis, strap leaf aster; cheat grass.

What’s red: Cholla; branches on Russian olive, tamarix, sandbar willow, apples, apricots, spirea, wild roses and raspberry; leaves on coral bells, pinks, soapworts.

What’s blue or gray: Piñon; leaves on four-winged saltbush, snow-in-summer, stickleaf seedlings, beardtongues, golden hairy and purple asters.

What’s yellow-green/yellow-brown: Arborvitae; branches on weeping willow more intensely yellow.

What’s blooming inside: Aptenia, zonal geranium.

Animal sightings: Small birds.


Weekly update: The use of willow for sacred objects made to ensure a bountiful food supply goes back thousands of years, to the time when corn wasn’t yet an important part of the diet.

By then, the large mammals hunted with Clovis points around 9500 bc had come and gone with the peripheral environment of the last glaciers. The bison hunted with Folsom points around 8000 bc had moved on when the climate continued drying. The people who remained in the southwest adapted by following annual crops of seeds and berries and eating rabbits.

Then, about 2000 bc, the rains returned. Big horned sheep were in the area stretching from Grand Canyon west through the Mojave to what is now China Lake Naval Weapons Center at the base of the Sierra Nevada. A new technology, Gypsum points, developed and foragers perfected coiled basketry.

With the animals came hunting rituals whose artifacts were found at Newberry Cave southeast of Barstow on the Mojave river in the 1950's. They included quartz crystals with pigments and adhesives still attached, feathers wrapped in sinew, sheep dung wrapped in sinew and some petroglyphs.

Most important were small figures made by forming strands of willow into animal shapes then wrapping them with the same piece of willow. They found 11 in tact and fragments of another 1,000 that dated to 1500 bc.

Such figurines have been found in at least 15 sites in the lower Colorado basin and have occasionally been made with skunk bush or cottonwood. The earliest were found at Stanton’s Cave in the Grand Canyon from 2000 bc where they were associated with deer. They persisted in the Canyon Lands at the confluence of the Green and Colorado rivers where they evolved into social totems.


The petroglyph tradition persisted for another two thousand years in the nearby Coso Mountains. There drawings etched in volcanic rock show big horn sheep and animal-man figures. David Whitley argues the ones made a thousand years ago were done by Shoshoni shamans who traveled miles to seek contact with spirits of big horn who controlled rain. The details of the drawings came from their trances.

Alan Garfinkle suggests the ones made three thousand years ago, those contemporary with the willow figures, often show leaping or running sheep without hunters or depict long lines of animals emerging from crevices in the rocks. He believes they were done in communal spring rituals by people who believed animal spirits reemerged annually from the underworld. The glyphs were attempts to ensure a large population of edible animals.

Garfinkle notes many were more practically located near ambush sites, suggesting a more direct link to hunting magic. There are something like 35,000 glyphs scattered over 90 square miles.

Hunting techniques from 3000 years ago are difficult to understand when only stone points survive and petroglyphs show only the most symbolic interactions between man and animal. In more recent times, men in Wyoming first drove sheep into traps. There’s evidence they also used juniper bark nets to snare animals who could then be killed.

If such techniques were used earlier, wrapping an animal figure in the willow from which it would be formed would be more than a representation of a fixed moment. It’s creation would be a symbolic dramatization of the hunt itself.

Unlike the Coso petroglyphs which exist in open areas, the split twig figurines tend to be found in caves, many inaccessible today. Their location in a pluvial period may have been different, but there’s little indication Newberry was entered for any reason other than rituals. There’s little evidence of stratigraphy and no signs of occupation.

The use of willow may have been pragmatic: it was available, it was used for nets, it was pliable enough to form the figures. If the association of sheep with rain predates the cultural complex described by Whitley, the use of willow to capture the spirit of the sheep may have been meant more in a society more dependent on plants than animals for food.


Notes: All dates are general approximations.

Coulam, Nancy J. and Alan R. Schroedl. “Late Archaic Totemism in the Greater American Southwest,” American Antiquity 69:41-62:2004.

Crockett, Stephanie. “The Prehistoric Peoples of Jackson Hole,” in John Daugherty, A Place Called Jackson Hole, 1999.

Davis, C. Alan, RE Taylor, Gerald A. Smith. “New Radiocarbon Determinations from Newberry Cave,” Journal of California and Great Basin Anthropology 3:144-147:1981.

Garfinkel, Alan P. “Paradigm Shifts, Rock Art Theory, and the Coso Sheep Cult of Eastern California,” North American Archaeologist 27:203-244:2006.

Whitley, David S. A Guide to Rock Art Sites: Southern California and Southern Nevada, 1996.

Wulbrecht, Sally. “The Mountain Shoshones: Sheep Eaters,” Wind River Historical Center website.

Photographs:
1. Sandbar willow on ditch banks near Española, 13 January 2012.

2. Sandbar willow on banks of Santa Cruz river just before it merges with the Rio Grande, 29 December 2011.

3. Globe willow, 30 January 2012, just acquiring its winter color.

4. Weeping willow growing down the road, 27 January 2012, with winter yellow branches.

Modern Willow Baskets

Weather: Afternoon thawing continues, but morning temperatures have dropped again; last snow 12/22/11; 9:59 hours of daylight today.

What’s still green: Juniper and other evergreens; stems on roses and young chamisa; leaves on sea pink, coral beardtongue, gypsum phacelia seedlings, snakeweed, strap leaf aster; cheat grass; crust active.

What’s red: Cholla; branches on Russian olive, tamarix, sandbar willow, apples, apricots, spirea and raspberry; leaves on coral bells, pinks, small-leaved soapwort.

What’s blue or gray: Piñon; leaves on four-winged saltbush, snow-in-summer, stickleaf seedlings, golden hairy and purple asters.

What’s yellow-green/yellow-brown: Arborvitae, branches on weeping willow.

What’s blooming inside: Aptenia, asparagus fern, zonal geranium, Christmas cactus peaked.

Animal sightings: Small birds.


Weekly update: Genuine tradition isn’t frozen into a single set of rules. There are general patterns which anthropologists use to define cultural periods, but within those groupings there’s room for individual variation and innovation.

At Chevlon along the Little Colorado in the 1300's, basket makers covered some of their wares with thick coats of paint. In the early twentieth century, Mary Lois Kissell says the Papago and Pima were still decorating their baskets with red and blue mineral paints.

However, the craftsmen at Chevlon also dyed some materials to weave in patterns. When aniline dyes became available in the late nineteenth century, Hopi women were quick to experiment with them. Many returned to vegetable dyes, partly because collectors preferred them and partly because isolation made it difficult to purchase materials.

When Helga Teiwes was interviewing basket makers in the 1990's, she talked to Vera Pooyouma, then estimated to be 104 years old. She first learned chemical dyes, changed to vegetable ones, and had returned to chemicals because they were easier at her age. The slightly younger Eva Hoyungowa, born in 1912, learned to use vegetable dyes from her father’s sister. Dora Tawahongva, born in 1930, was using both commercial and vegetable dyes at the time, while many others used only chemicals. All lived in Oraibi, the most traditional village on the Third Mesa.

Among the plants Teiwes saw women use for red dye were Navajo Tea and Hopi Tea. The preference seemed to depend on which was more abundant, with the first used more often by coiled basket makers on the Second Mesa and the second by wicker workers in Oraibi. Otis Mason identified additional dyes made from prairie sunflower seeds for dark blue, introduced safflower for yellow, and kaolin clay for white. Myrtle Zuck Hough told him Hopi also used their cooking beans to produce a black dye.

Dye introduces a second skill into basket making and a separate material harvesting cycle. When making items for the tourist trade, where speed is more valued by the artisan than effect, color can be introduced by using different natural materials: against the natural white of dried yucca leaves, modern Papago, the Tohono O’odham, use fading but still green yucca, brownish red banana yucca roots, and black devil’s claw pods.


Similarly, local craftsmen use variations in willow to introduce color into their work. Steven Trujillo, who settled in San Juan, learned to interweave “light and darker colored reeds, the later being older and slightly discolored when he harvests them. When first done, the baskets are white and light tan, but with age, the darker reeds turn almost ebony, giving a frank contrast to the pure white reeds.”

Carol Naranjo, who learned from Joe Val Gutierrez of Santa Clara, keeps the bark on the willow she uses, but introduces designs with small strips of pealed, white branches. She makes sure all her pieces are as close to the same color as possible. Carlos Herrera of Cochiti uses willows of different ages, sometimes using the older, nearly purple ones in horizontal bands, sometimes randomly in the vertical posts.

Greater variations in design are produced in the ways they finish off their baskets. Instead of making a simple rim, contemporary willow workers, who use bands of four for their warp, fold them in great arches to tuck them back several uprights away. The overlapping bands create the illusion of an open weave.

Naranjo indicates there also are small differences in the way people gather their materials. She cuts her willow sometime between October and May when sap levels are low. The best color is found now, in January.

She lets the branches sit for a few days so more sap can drain, then uses the willow quickly, while it’s still flexible. She can finish a small basket in a day. A larger one can take two to three days and is stored under a towel in the bathtub between work sessions.

She says others weave their baskets immediately. However, she says when the wood dries, as it will, it shrinks and the weave can get a bit loose.

In the late nineteenth century, Mary Lois Kissell says the Papago cut the willow for their coiled baskets in the spring, when new growth was emerging, then removed the bark immediately. In the past they had used boiling water to loosen it first. When they made a basket, they then soaked their willow, a few splints at a time.


One thing that drives innovation within tradition is a desire to master something seen but unfamiliar. Allie Seletstewa taught herself how to bend the warp to start the sides of a deep wicker basket by “experimenting with wet sand, water, and steam.”

When Trujillo was first learning how to make baskets, he said he was “down by the river gettin’ willows. And then, a crazy thing go on. Suddenly it’s like I asleep and dreamin’. I was awake, I know that, but somehow I was asleep at the same time. And I heard this voice - real clear - says to me, “Keep goin’, son. Keep on goin’’.”

“So I go home and get right into makin’ them baskets. Pretty soon I got it real good. Them baskets turnin’ out alright now, and been makin’ lots of baskets every since.”

Notes: The current Latin name for Hopi tea is Thelesperma megapotamicum, Navajo tea is Thelesperma subnudum, prairie sunflower is Helianthus petiolaris, and safflower is Carthamus tinctorius. Banana yucca root is Yucca baccata. Devil’s claw is Proboscidea parviflora. Other plants identified in post below.

Fewkes, Jesse Walter. Two Summers' Work in Pueblo Ruins, 1904, on Chevlon.

Fleming, Tim. “The Basketmaker,” The New Mexican, 19 July 1984, on Trujillo.

Kissell, Mary Lois. Basketry of the Papago and Pima, 1916.

Mason, Otis Tufton. Indian Basketry, volume 2, 1905, on Chevlon and the Hopi.

Naranjo, Carol. Comments made 4 January 2012 at her Santa Clara home.

Teiwes, Helga. Hopi Basket Weaving, 1996.

Photographs:
Red willow wicker basket by Carol Naranjo; willow was collected near Our Lady of Guadalupe Abbey in Pecos.

Yucca and bear grass coiled basket by Rachel Pablu, Tohono O’odham.

Traditional Willow Baskets

Weather: Days alternate between thawing afternoons and freezing nights; the snow that melts turns to ice which turns slick under water; last snow 12/22/11; 9:52 hours of daylight today.

Snow still covers west and north facing beds, and eastern beds in the shadow of the fence. Those facing south or east are exposed to the drying sun and wind, as are open areas in the bunch grass. Ice is in the drip lines at night.

What’s still green: Juniper and other evergreens; rose stems; leaves on cheese mallow, sea pink, coral beardtongue, gypsum phacelia, snakeweed; cheat grass.

Big jump in prices for seeds in one catalog. Some prices much higher for bare root trees in another. No one left selling perennial plants at affordable prices by mail order.

What’s red: Cholla; branches on sandbar willow, apples, apricots, spirea and raspberry; leaves on coral bells, pinks, small-leaved soapwort.

What’s blue or gray: Piñon; leaves on four-winged saltbush, snow-in-summer, golden hairy and purple asters.

What’s yellow-green/yellow-brown: Arborvitae, branches on weeping willow.

What’s blooming inside: Aptenia, asparagus fern, zonal geranium, Christmas cactus.

Animal sightings: Small birds.

Weekly update: Weaving techniques exist separately from their form or plant material, and thus have adapted when changing requirements demanded new utensils. In parts of the west where fish were important, one set of shapes developed. Netting and cordage appeared elsewhere when people became dependent on rabbits.

The forms we associate with baskets evolved with a reliance on plants for food. The dietary transition occurred when glaciers had receded and the remaining lakes were drying. Large mammals had died or were migrating. The lacustrine environment supported trees like sandbar willow and sedges like tule.

The earliest burden baskets were made by weaving tule stems twisted into strands between fibers extracted from Indian hemp stalks. At Danger Cave in Utah in the 7000's bc, twined baskets were found with pickleweed chaff. The technology and form also appeared at Falcon Hill, Spirit Cave, and Hidden Cave in the same millenium in Nevada.

Within a thousand years, coiled baskets appeared that used willow as a weft, but eliminated the vertical posts that would have introduced spaces and rippled walls. The rows were held together by lashing them with strands of yucca.


A coiled basket has been found in Cowboy Cave in Utah from sometime in the early 6000's bc. Another made from sandbar willow was found in Hogup Cave, also in Utah, that dates to the late 5000's bc. Anthropologists think the technique developed a century or so earlier in Coahuila and moved north.

The use of yucca suggests a steadily drying environment. David Rhode and David Madsen found that while limber pine nuts existed in the strata from the 5000's bc in Danger Cave, the more arid piñon replaced them in the next higher layer, as they replaced them in the environment. They note that neither tree grew in the immediate vicinity of the cave, so the nuts found there had to have been gathered and transported.

With time people found ways to strengthen their baskets and compensate for variations in willow. They used two branches laid side by side or two with a split piece above. If a twig was too big, they dressed it down. If wood was too small, they padded with grass. They daubed the insides with mud to hold cooking water heated by hot stones. They caulked them inside and out with piñon gum to carry water.

When pottery was perfected after AD 500, it assumed many functions served by baskets. Then conditions dried even more, and places like Chaco Canyon were abandoned around 1200 for river plains.

Basket makers continued to work in the 500 room Chevlon on the Little Colorado in northeastern Arizona in the 1300's, but they substituted drought tolerant rubber rabbitbrush for willow. Walter Fewkes found the fragment of one wicker basket with small construction details identical to those used at Oraibi on the Hopi Third Mesa in the late nineteenth century.

Wicker work had been around for some time - Chevlon graves were lined with wicker matting. This apparently was simply an application of a familiar technique to a familiar, but different form.

The Spanish introduced new storage devices, like iron cooking pots, which altered usage patterns for both baskets and pottery, but they also introduced new foods with new handling requirements.

James Stevenson found an 8" high, globular wickerwork basket at Zuñi in the 1880's used to gather peaches. It was made from rubber rabbitbrush with a yucca rim. There were visible gaps between the rows and the walls were deeply corrugated by the stiffness of the composite. It was dismissed as crude, but fruit only needs a strong container, not a sealed or smooth walled one.

Many of the remaining basket functions disappeared when mass produced containers filtered west in the nineteenth century. Helga Teiwes says coiled basketry began to disappear among the Hopi around 1750, and willow was no longer used for the foundation after 1820. They once used skunkbush for their wickerwork, but now use dune broom for the warp and rabbitbrush for the weft.

By the 1880's, Stevenson’s wife Matilda noticed the Zuñi bought their baskets, preferably from the Apache, then from the Hopi. By 1916, Smithsonian researchers among the local Tewa speakers mentioned no local tradition, only used the past tense for the Hopi and Zuñi.

Basket making didn’t die out completely. Mary Lois Kissell heard the Papago continued to carry water baskets in the 1890's when they took their horses on long journeys. Steven Trujillo, who was born about 1899 and settled in San Juan, had an uncle who made baskets. Carol Naranjo, now in her 70's, remembers her grandmother had willow baskets hanging on the walls of her home in Old Laguna and always stored her freshly baked bread in a red willow basket.


Driven from the kitchen and store room, basket making, both coiled and wicker, survived for ceremonial uses. Basket dances existed in many pueblos. The Hopi used small plaques as symbolic emblems of kinship and community. Zuñi women avidly collected the finer pieces.

The trains that brought cheaper, more efficient containers also brought souvenir-seeking tourists. By 1915, the Papago were making coiled baskets for the curio trade. They no longer used willow for the coils; it was too valuable to waste on ephemera. Instead, they used bear grass. The Pima adopted cat tails. The Hopi were already using galleta grass.

They all still used sun bleached, dried yucca leaves. However, at White Dog Cave in Arizona, where early corn and primitive pottery were found from sometime between 480 and 175 bc, the finest baskets had eight coils to an inch with twelve yucca stitches per inch. Most were five coils to an inch and nine to eleven stitches. The coiled plaque I bought this week, made by Rachel Pablu, uses three coils to an inch with five stitches.

Tourists who drove between Santa Fé and Taos expected collectible pottery, not baskets, and so pottery making was revived for them. When Steven Trujillo wanted to learn basket making in the early 1950's in San Juan he could find no teachers. His uncle was dead; his aunts knew nothing.

Trujillo passed on his wicker ware skills to Joe Val Gutierrez of Santa Clara, who taught Naranjo, who has since taught others. While she’s sold her share, she’s also given her baskets to people in the pueblo. General weaving techniques may not have changed for thousands of years, but hers now serve a new function, providing continuity with those past generations.


Notes: The current Latin name for pickleweed is Allenrolfea occidentalis. Tule is Schoenoplectus acutus and Indian hemp is Apocynum cannabinum. Limber pine is Pinus flexilis while piñon is Pinus monophylla. Rubber rabbitbrush is a subspecies of Ericameria nauseosa, skunkbush is Rhus trilobata, and dunebroom Parryella filifolia. Bear grass is Nolina microcarpa , the Pima cat tails are Thypha latifolia, and the Hopi galleta is Pleuraphis jamesii. The yucca leaf is usually from Yucca elata. Sandbar willow is Salix exigua, but the Zuñi used Salix irrotata, the Pima Salix nigra, and the Hopi Salix laseolepis.

Fleming, Tim. “The Basketmaker,” The New Mexican, 19 July 1984, on Trujillo.

Fewkes, Jesse Walter. Two Summers' Work in Pueblo Ruins, 1904, on Chevlon.

Guernsey, Samuel James and Alfred Vincent Kidder. Basket-maker Caves of Northeastern Arizona, Report on the Explorations, 1916-17, 1921, on White Dog cave.

Kissell, Mary Lois. Basketry of the Papago and Pima, 1916.

Mahoney, Jane. “Winding willow,” The Albuquerque Journal, 18 April 2004, on Naranjo.

Mason, Otis Tufton. Indian Basketry, volume 2, 1905, describes baskets collected by Fewkes and James Stevenson.

Rhode, David and David B. Madsen. “Pine Nut Use in the Early Holocene and Beyond: The Danger Cave Archaeobotanical Record,” Journal of Archaeological Science 25:1199-1210:1998.

Robbins, William Wilfred, John Peabody Harrington and Barbara Friere-Marreco, Ethnobotany of the Tewa Indians, 1916.

Stevenson, Martha Coxe. The Zuni Indians, 1904, reprinted by The Rio Grande Press, Inc., 1985.

Teiwes, Helga. Hopi Basket Weaving, 1996, on Mexican history of coiled baskets.

Photographs:
1. Sandbar willow with some remaining catkins growing along the Rio Grande in Española, 29 December 2011.

2. Coiled basket made by Rachel Pablu, Tohono O’odham; the detail showing the stitching technique and grass is from a joint on the back, not the front.

3. Red willow wicker basket made by Carol Naranjo.

4. Sandbar willow with some persisting leaves, 29 December 2011.

Rice Grass

What’s blooming in the area: Tamarix, Austrian copper and double pink shrub roses, Apache plume, snowball, silver lace vine, skunkbush, yucca, red hot poker, peony, tumble mustard, western stickseed, cryptantha, fern-leaf globemallow, oxalis, alfilerillo, white evening primrose, bindweed, alfalfa, Dutch and yellow sweet clovers, white and purple locos, sweet pea, purple salvia, native dandelion, goat’s beard; June, brome, needle, rice, and three-awn grasses; buds on milkweed; buffalo gourd up; cheat grass turning red.

In my yard: Spirea, raspberry, beauty bush, iris, winecup, oriental poppy, Jupiter’s beard, snow-in-summer, Bath’s pink, sea pink, baptista, catmint, pink salvia, blue flax, vinca, pink evening primrose, golden spur columbine, chocolate flower, blanket flower, perky Sue and Mount Atlas daisy; buds on Persian yellow and Dr. Huey roses, daylily, hollyhock, coral bells, snapdragon, anthemis and coreopsis; buddleia has new growth from root; last year’s morning glories up.

Bedding plants: Zonal geraniums, nicotiana.

Inside: Aptenia.

Animal sightings: Rabbit, hummingbird, gecko, ladybug, cricket, baby grass hopper on first blanket flower, large black harvester and small red ants.

Weather: Ice in hose Tuesday morning, near 80 when I got home at night; a little rain Friday; winds began almost every day by late morning; 14:22 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: This is the time when needle grass is at its peak. Foot long strands of fine hair and unreleased seed ripple in streams of white light that follow ridge lines across the river and reveal the underlying shape of dissected foothills.

Here and there along the edges, an occasional clump of rice grass grows, shorter and squatter. The narrow green leaves look the same, but needle grass blades tend to open flatter. The stalks end in crisscrossing U-shaped branches with globular cases at the tips, each holding a single rounded dark seed.

I always let Achnatherum hymenoides grow from a superstitious respect for things I suspect have survived from the distant past. Today it’s found from the Nebraska sand hills to the Cascades, from lower Canada to northern México. There is a general belief that it was once grew in pure stands in areas like Utah, but that it was decimated by overgrazing beginning in the 1870's

Archaeologists think it was widely eaten in the distant past. However, when corn was adopted by the Anasazi, it became less important. Michael Brand found it reported in most of the Basketmaker and Pueblo sites he reviewed, but there appeared to be a slight decline in use through time. It appeared more often in charred remains and pollen studies, then in fossilized feces.

Anthropologists recorded its use in the recent past among the Hopi, Zuñi, White Mountain Apache and Navajo, including those near Chaco Canyon. The Hopi, however, considered it a famine food that had been eaten in the past.

I noticed that for something that was supposed to be native, it didn’t increase when left alone. Instead of producing new seedlings, the clumps grew by adding segments to the outer perimeter, and dying in the middle, creating a fire hazard. People trying to restore lost grasslands or reclaiming disturbed sites have reported it doesn’t germinate reliably, and when it does emerge, it begins to die out after five years.

Oryzopsis hymenoides, as it once was known, is so well adapted to the lands west of the Continental Divide that it doesn’t respond to modern cultivation. The dormant embryos are protected by a hard shell that doesn’t begin to disintegrate for several years so there’s seed available in those rare wet years when it can emerge.

Even though the plants are wind pollinated, the perennial bunch grass compensates for its sparse distribution by fertilizing itself. Many of the seeds are sterile and remain on the plant, while the heavier, viable seed is quickly prepared for release. During this time, the seed stalks become unpalatable to discourage grazing by rabbits and other predators.

Researchers led by Kent McAdoo discovered that rodents in the pocket mice and kangaroo rat family removed the outer shell before storing seeds for future use and that those cached seeds were the primary source for stand renewal in the area they observed. The local harvester ants and deer mice also bury the seeds, but they don’t aid germination, only themselves.

Almost as soon as the seedlings emerge, sand grains collect around the fibrous roots. Leroy Wullstein found the rhizosheaths aided nitrogen fixation and helped prevent water from escaping.

The life cycle, however, is more dependent on heat than water: it does well facing south, and doesn’t tolerate shade. In my yard, it grows in the drive and on the windy, eastern side of the house. In the area, I don’t see it in the established needle grass prairie, but along the roads near the arroyos.

Established clumps begin growing, when the soil temperature at the tips of the roots reaches 39F degrees for three or four days. Although water helps, the plant height, usually about a foot in my yard, is related to soil temperature.

Come summer, the leaves and stalks dry light brown, creating cured winter forage. During this annual drought, carbohydrates concentrate in the plant’s crown, not the roots. When the monsoons arrive, when they come, the bases green slightly for the winter and the carbohydrates decrease.

When water fails, plants may die and seeds stay buried until the weather improves. In the rio arriba, one can only be sure the current year won’t repeat the past, but not even nature can predict if it will be better.

Notes:Brand, Michael James Brand. Prehistoric Anasazi Diet: A Synthesis of Archaeological Evidence, 1994.

Bristow, Caryn E., G. S. Campbell, L. H. Wullstein and R. Neilson. "Water Uptake and Storage by Rhizosheaths of Oryzopsis hymenoides: a Numerical Simulation," Physiologia Plantarum 65:228 - 232:1985.

Jones, T. A. "A Viewpoint on Indian Ricegrass Research: Its Present Status and Future Prospects," Journal of Range Management 43:416-420:1990; summarizes research of others.

McAdoo, J. Kent, Carol C. Evans, Bruce A. Roundy, James A. Young and Raymond A. Evans. "Influence of Heteromyid Rodents on Oryzopsis hymenoides Germination," Journal of Range Management 36:61-64:1983.

Moerman, Dan. Native American Ethnobotany, 1998; summarizes data from a number of ethnographies.

Tirmenstein, D. "Achnatherum hymenoides," 1999, United States Forest Service, Fire Effects Information System, available on-line.

Wullstein, L. H. "Nitrogen Fixation Associated with Rhizosheaths of Indian Ricegrass Used in Stabilization of the Slick Rock, Colorado, Tailings Pile," Journal of Range Management 37:19-21:1980.

Photograph: Rice grass growing next to the back porch, 27 May2010.

More Pigweed

What’s still green: Arborvitae, juniper and other evergreens, some rose stems, cholla, prickly pear, yuccas, grape hyacinth, Japanese honeysuckle faded, vinca, buried sweet peas, coral bells, some sea pink leaves, buried snapdragons, beard tongues, pink and yellow evening primroses, purple asters, buried chrysanthemums, cheat grass.

What’s grey, blue-grey or grey-green: Piñon, pinks, snow-in-summer, yellow alyssum, saltbush, winterfat.

What’s yellow: Weeping willow and forsythia branches.

What’s blooming inside: Christmas cactus and aptenia.

Animal sightings: Large flock of birds by orchard Saturday.

Weather: Mornings stayed above 20; wind yesterday; last snow 02/08/09; 11:11 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: There’s always more pigweed. The annual thrives on my neighbors’ disturbed lands, although it hasn’t penetrated the unbroken soils of the prairie grassland downhill from my house.

My first uphill neighbor had horses he let roam his already over-grazed land. In the early summer, they ate the white pigweed but later, as it grew and flowered, Charley and Missy preferred their hay and oats. At the end of the season, he’d have someone come in with a tractor and cut his weeds which he left to blow away.

The man who bought his property still uses a rider mower every couple weeks, but at least he hauls away the larger plants. Unfortunately, another pigweed defense is the ability to produce enough flowers on plants shorter than a mower blade to perpetuate the population.

Other men down the road have brought in sheep in late summer, who refused to be tempted. It’s probably just as well they didn’t bring the animals when the plants were more appetizing. Joseph DiTomaso says passage through a sheep’s digestive system increases the ability of the seed to germinate.

The Indians had a better way to control the pest. They ate it. Species didn’t matter. If it came within their range, they ate it.

The local Tewa speakers boiled and fried the leaves of redroot and mat pigweed before they could produce seeds. Jemez treated redroot leaves as greens, as did Cochiti and Isleta. The Cochiti also ate tumbleweed greens, while the Hopi ate mat and Powell leaves. Acoma and Laguna boiled young mat, smooth, and Powell plants, while the Navajo boiled, fried and canned redroot. Various Apache groups cooked redroot with meat and chile.

Later in the season, the Acoma and Laguna ground mat pigweed, smooth amaranth and redroot seeds into meal. The Zuñi used mat seeds for meal, while the Hopi turned mat and Powell seeds into mush. Outside the pueblos, the Navajo mixed mat pigweed seeds with goat milk into a gruel, chewed careless weed seeds for sugar, and turned redroot into meal. The Apache made flour of redroot and ate mat seeds.

Pigweed is part of a tropical American genus that apparently moved north during the ice-free periods of the glacial age. Scientists can’t differentiate species in samples, but Amaranthus seeds and pollens are unique enough to be identified as a group.

When Richard MacNeish excavated Coxcatlan Cave in the Tehuacán valley of México, he found evidence of domesticated foods in a layer dated between 5000 and 2000 bc. Corn and squash were the earliest to appear, followed by gourds, and then, in a higher strata, beans, pumpkins, chile and amaranth.

In the 1570's, more than three thousand years later, Bernardino de Sahagún listed five foods in the Aztec diet: corn, beans, chia, amaranth, and gourds or squashes. At that time, his native informants recognized 11 types. Of those, two were boiled, two were made into dough and one was very bitter.

One has been identified as Amaranthus hypochondriacus, which has a much larger, denser head than the local weeds, and another was planted, transplanted and threshed. Richard Ford believes the only time hypochondriacus could grow in the arid southwest was around 500 ad when the Hohokam in Arizona developed massive irrigation systems.

In 2005, tourists noticed a leather pouch near the confluence of the Colorado and Green rivers in Utah which has been dated to sometime between 770 and 970. Phil Geib and Michael Robins believe it belonged to a flintknapper looking for chert. At the time he was carrying marsh elder seeds, but the bag had previous held amaranth, goosefoot and dropseed.

Up river, local species appeared in the diet of the sedentary Basketmaker III people around 1000. By then, they had adopted corn and were more sedentary. Both crops and settlement would have brought more protein rich seeds and iron filled leaves.

Karl Reinhard analyzed fossilized feces found at several sites of their descendants on the Colorado plateau several hundred years later, after the adoption of the bow and arrow had altered their foodways, and found people still ate pigweed seeds in both places, and ate the greens at one. His team also detected pollen in some samples that suggested it was plentiful enough to be inhaled.

The Spanish were offended by the way the Aztec gave amaranth dough figures to commoners in ceremonies that appeared to mock the Eucharist, and began punishing farmers who grew the grain. However, not even the Inquisition couldn’t kill pigwwed. Amaranthus cruentus survived as a crop in Guatemala, while the Zuñi were still making a wafer bread with smooth amaranth seeds and corn that was thrown to spectators between dances in 1915.

I finally resorted to the oldest method for treating a plague, quarantine. When I built a cedar fence on my eastern border, I discovered the wide vertical boards stopped most of my neighbor’s seeds from blowing my way. I then put up a fence against the man with horses, and later against Russian thistles coming in after people with off road vehicles churned up the prairie by my south fence.

Some seeds still get by, but most land in the drive where they can be poisoned young or emerge in the shadow of a fence where they don’t get enough water or sun to grow. For the moment, complete isolation works.

Notes:Davis, Owen K. "The Late Pleistocene Development of Sagebrush Steppe in the Eastern Great Basin," American Association of Stratigraphic Palynologists meeting, 1994.

DiTomaso, Joseph M. Weeds of California and Other Western States, volume 1, 2007.

Ford, Richard I. "Gardening and Farming Before AD 1000: Patterns of Prehistoric Cultivation North of Mexico," Journal of Ethnobiology 1:6-27:1981.

Greib, Phil R. and Michael R. Robins. "Analysis and Dating of the Great Gallery Tool and Food Bag," Canyonland National Park website.

MacNeish, Richard Stockton. Tehuacan Archaeological-Botanical Project, Annual Report, 1961.

Moerman, Dan. Native American Ethnobotany, 1998.

Reinhard, Karl J., Sherrian Edwards, Teyona R. Damon, and Debra K. Meier. "Pollen Concentration Analysis of Ancestral Pueblo Dietary Variation," Paleogeography, Paleoclimatology, Paleoecology 237:92-109:2006.

Robbins, William Wilfred, John Peabody Harrington and Barbara Friere-Marreco. Ethnobotany of the Tewa Indians, 1916.

Sahagún, Bernardino de. Historia Universal de las Cosas de Nueva España, c.1577, translated as Florentine Codex: General History of the Things of New Spain, Book XI - Earthly Things by Charles E. Dibble and Arthur J. O. Anderson, 1963.

Stevenson, Matilda Coxe. Ethnobotany of the Zuni Indians, 1915.

Photograph: Dead white pigweed that grew above a 4' farm fence, 7 February 2010.