Hopi Pottery Colors

Weather: Sun angles have been changing. The light came into my eyes over a neighbor’s roof for the first time this fall Friday morning. A little rain fell Monday afternoon.

What’s blooming in the area: Sweet pea, chrysanthemums; corn stalks now tan, apple trees mottled.

Beyond the walls and fences: Goat’s head, chamisa, broom senecio, áñil del muerto, golden hairy and purple asters. Younger trees of heaven turning yellow; river visible as snaky line of yellow cottonwoods.

In my yard: Winecup mallow, Mexican hat, black-eyed Susan, chocolate flower, blanket flower. Leaves on sea lavender turned bright red; beauty bush turning coppery red; spirea turning orange.

Animal sightings: Goldfinches continue stripping seeds from the Maximilian sunflowers, cabbage butterflies, hornets, large and small black ants.

Weekly update: Technology is the mediator between perceptions of color and their reproduction. Whatever colors the Anasazi or Hopi used before 1300 are unknown. Water-based dyes don’t survive well on basketry, clothing and exposed rock walls.

Our knowledge of their color schemes begins with mineral-based pigments and pottery.

In the thirteenth century there were two southwestern centers for pottery, the Anasazi in the four corners area and the Mogollon to the south. Both used black decoration on fired, clay paste. The first lived in an area with gray clay, which was coated with a white clay slip. The other lived in an area with brown. The backgrounds may have been dictated by raw materials, but potters tried to alter them to fit aesthetic ideals.

When drought arrived, they moved with the rest.

Individuals living in today’s Hopi area already were adding black decorations to pottery made from an orange clay. Around 1315, craftsmen in the village of Awátovi on Antelope Mesa began producing yellow pottery with black decorations.

The innovation wasn’t the clay, but the methods for firing. Individuals already knew the coal that gave the Black Mesa its name would burn; they had been using it for heat. They were the only natives in North America to use coal.

Some one or some small group learned how to control the fire to make a thin, hard pottery that was good enough to trade.

Anna Shepard fire-tested clays she found near the Awátovi ruins in 1938 to replicate fourteenth century processes. She found two types of red clay and two of gray that fired properly. When the reds were heated with wood, one turned gray, the other pale red. When coal was used, both turned red.

When the grays were subjected to wood fire for three and three-quarter hours they turned white or light gray. When exposed to coal for two hours, they became pink or pale brown. When they were fired for more than nine hours, both turned light yellowish brown.

After examining sherds removed from the ruins, Watson Smith concluded craftsmen experimented for another generation after producing the Awátovi black-on-yellow before developing a clay paste that used little filler. Once perfected, Jeddito black-on-yellow became a standard formula that was produced uniformly on an industrial scale for both local use and export.

Trade follows technology, and brings with it more specialization and better quality choices.

Charles Adams’ team notes the hard yellow ware has been found in southern California and southern Utah, as well as in many Arizona and New Mexico sites. They believe much of the exchange with Homol’ovi "may have existed to compensate for ecological imbalances. The pueblos near modern-day Winslow lacked good quality clay. However, their soils supported the growth of cotton, which those of Awátovi did not.

Notes:
Adams, E. Charles, Miriam T. Stark, and Deborah S. Dosh. "Ceramic Distribution and Exchange: Jeddito Yellow Ware and Implications for Social Complexity," Journal of Field Archaeology 20:3-21:1993.

Hayes, Allan and John Blom. Southwestern Pottery, 1996, on relationship between available clay and pottery color.

Shepard, Anna G. "Technological Note on Awatovi Pottery," in Smith, 1971.

Smith, Watson. Painted Ceramics of the Western Mound at Awatovi, 1971.

Shofer, Jeanne Stevens. "Awatovi Black on Yellow Information," Museum of Northern Arizona website. She suggests the 1315 date as a revision of Smith, 1971.

Photographs: Fall colors. Except where noted, all were taken 22 October 2014.

1. Goldfinch on Maximilian sunflower in my yard; its yellow coloring is camouflaged by the yellowing leaves; 10 October 2014.

2. Red amaranth after cold has killed many leaves; this is the plant that began the ruminations on the Hopi use of color.

3. Yellow cottonwoods and some lower growing, orange-red tree or shrubs that may be some kind of cherry; growing along an irrigation ditch.

4. Red Virginia creeping climbing through a piñon near the main road.

5. Yellow catalpa and red sand cherry along my gravel drive.

6. Unknown red tree and still green cottonwood along the village road; from its color, I would guess it’s some kind of maple.

7. Yellow cottonwoods along an arroyo; badlands and Jémez in back.

8. Two goldfinches, 10 October 2014.

9. One of the great mysteries is how goldfinches manage to keep attached to the narrow Maximilian sunflower stems when they turn upside down. It’s even more amazing when the wind is blowing as it was this day, 10 October 2014.

Stag Heads

Weather: Four mornings this week the thermometer on my front porch showed temperatures below 32 degrees; it was warmer in the village near the river; some rain yesterday.

What’s blooming in the area: Silver lace vine, sweet pea, chrysanthemums. Leaves on catalpas, grapes, and Maximilian sunflower turning yellow.

Beyond the walls and fences: Goat’s head, chamisa, broom senecio, áñil del muerto, golden hairy and purple asters.

In my yard: Winecup mallow, Mexican hat, black-eyed Susan, chocolate flower, blanket flower. Leaves on sand cherry and leadwort turning burgundy; rose of Sharon, ladybell, peony and coneflowers leaves going yellow.

Animal sightings: Goldfinches mining the Maximilian sunflower heads, cabbage butterflies, large and small black ants.

Weekly update: Trees of life appear in the Quran and in Revelations, on Indian textiles and Egyptian papyrus. The symbolic representations may have been diffused through trade and other exchanges, but the underlying recognition of trees as a life form different from that of humans was passed from generation to generation by people dependent on plants.

Oliver Rackham thinks that first-hand knowledge began to fade when the enlightenment redefined trees as having life spans like people. Scientists assumed a single set of laws governed creation. They generalized from what was understood. Men began to think of young trees, mature ones, ones with dead limbs that were old and needed to be felled before they died and did damage.

To Rackham, a tree is an self-perpetuating organism composed of roots and leaves connected by the cambium that transfers nutrients between the two through the xylem and the phloem.

In its early years a sapling produces branches to support a canopy at whatever speed the climate and soil allow. Unlike children of poverty, the worse the conditions, the longer a tree’s youth.

When it reaches its optimal height, a tree becomes mature. Every year it abandons the previous year’s wood and begins a new ring. As the girths of the trunk and branches increase, they create greater and greater demands on the chlorophyll factories in the leaf cells. The circumference of cells around the dead wood increase, but the range of the canopy and roots do not.

Eventually, the demands become unsupportable. Roots abandon branches. Bark and sapwood decay, fungi move in. Animals nest in hollows. The tree retrenches. From the roots it creates a new canopy of a size that meets it needs without undue stress. It continues until conditions arise again that make retrenchment necessary.

Trees don’t die. They reinvent themselves every year.

He notes the persistence of bare stag heads above canopies is not universal. Even in England their existence varies by region, not ownership or land use. They rarely are found in old woods. Instead, they live in parks and hedges where they are kept for their beauty or shade.

He also admitted they don’t occur every year, which would be the case if his perpetual motion vision were valid. He thought many stag heads he saw in England were survivors of the droughts of 1911 and 1921. He also thought there were more after the hot, dry summers of the 1990s.

It may not be height that’s the limiting factor, but roots. They can only go so deep before the soil conditions change. Once they reach that layer, they can no longer support the canopy’s natural inclination to expand. Height is the visual signifier for depth.

Tops are damaged by frost, ice, wind, and insects. When that happens, roots send messages and resources to repair the canopy. New leaves and twigs appear from dormant buds.

Roots have problems with drought. When less water comes up, fewer leaves can survive. When leaves can’t be restored, trees wall off unproductive branches.

The retrenchment pattern is the same in all woody plants, but some species perpetuate themselves better than others. Rackham believes the best in England are oaks, sweet chestnuts, ashes, and limes. But, maybe that is not a species imperative, but man’s. Trees categorized as junk are more likely to be cleared.

In this part of New Mexico, stag heads appear in cottonwoods and tamarix, Russian olives and Siberian elms. They don’t endure. Men raised to be good farmers clear dead wood. Good shepherds of the land believe they are helping when they remove exotic species.

People still burn wood to keep warm. Wherever wood is used for fuel, dead branches are harvested. They’re already dry and combustible. Rackham’s parks were the preserves of wealthy men who didn’t worry about trifles like heat.

When coal replaced wood, trees no longer were seen as a resource. Stag heads could survive because there was no incentive for removing them. It was only when congested areas developed where trees had grown that people feared the consequences of storms that broke branches and ripped trees from the ground. An urge to what Rackham calls tidiness took command.

Behind the survival of stag heads, Rackham noted a certain aesthetic preference for the "beauty and mystery of ancient trees," which he dated to the Shakespearean age. It may lie still deeper in the remnants of beliefs held by the Celts with their Druids, by the Norse conquerors with Yggdrasil, the world tree, or even by the followers of the German Georges.

Against those with an awareness of different modes of existence, there always has been the contempt of the simplifiers. Romans destroyed oak forests to suppress rebellion. Bureaucrats, be they insurance agents or utility company maintenance crews chiefs, have no patience with differences that demand understanding. They set rules for how may feet must be cleared, and don’t worry about species.

Trees are cultural constructs, even in the wild. But, within the boundaries of human perception, they live a life apart, a life recorded in the ancient symbols of immortality.

Notes:
Rackham, Oliver. The History of the Countryside (1986).

_____. Trees and Woodland in the British Landscape (1976, 1990 revised edition).

_____. Woodlands (2006).

Photographs:
1. Stag heads growing in row of volunteers along a ditch in the village. The ditch, which goes along the edge of city-owned land, is the local equivalent to an English hedgerow. Siberian elms grow between the cottonwoods at lower heights; trees of heaven have been sprouting below.

2. Egyptian tree of life, water color on papyrus, produced for tourist trade in the 1980s. The birds represent the stages of life. From the bottom right corner, going counterclockwise, they are infancy, childhood, and youth. The bird with the spreading wings is an adult. The one facing the other direction is old age. Death is always to the west.

3. Tamarix on edge of flood plain near village arroyo, 14 September 2014. Yellow flowers are áñil del muerto.

4. Pennsylvania Dutch tree of life, water color on paper. My mother did this around 1953. I don’t know if she used a stencil or copied a magazine picture. The Germans also used tulips as symbols of immortality. The reds may be stylized tulips above green hearts.

5. Russian olive near river north of town, 16 October 2014. Yellow leaves are cottonwoods near the Río Grande.

6. Wood pile on main road, 16 October 2014. A small tree or large limb has been hewn, and wood of many diameters cut to length. It might have been a stag head, a small tree that died, or one that sprouted in the wrong place.

7. Neighbor’s woodpile, 16 October 2014. Large pieces of wood have been split into uniform thicknesses and cut to similar lengths.

8. Siberian elm near tamarix above by village arroyo, 14 September 2014.

9. Realistic tree, oil on canvas, by Ruth Penzotti Henderson, late 1950s. Her grandparents were German and Italian immigrants, the last through south America.

Tree Rings

Weather: The remnants of hurricane Simon hobbled across the skies, trapping smoke from a controlled burn on Wednesday, before leaving some water Thursday and Friday. The smoke, which drifted south from 3,700 burning acres between Vallecitos and El Rito, enveloped the area in a white bubble that reached the ground by mid-morning.

What’s blooming in the area: Silver lace vine, datura, morning glories, sweet pea, Russian sage, red amaranth, zinnias from new seeds and reseeds, African marigolds from seed, Maximilian sunflowers, pampas grass.

Morning temperatures fell into the high 30s early in the week. Trees have responded by draining their chlorophyll. Cottonwoods are looking chartreuse, the big weeping willow shows some yellow, the exotic trees with fine leaves are yellower still. My apricot is beginning to reveal its orange.

Beyond the walls and fences: Pink and white bindweed, goat’s head, stickleaf, Queen Anne’s lace, chamisa, snakeweed broom, broom senecio, áñil del muerto, golden hairy and purple asters.

In my yard: Large-flowered soapwort, hollyhocks, winecup mallow, catmint, calamintha, David phlox, Mexican hat, black-eyed Susan, chocolate flower, blanket flower, anthemis, coreopsis, chrysanthemum, white yarrow.

Bedding plants: Blue salvia, French marigold.

Seeds: Reseeded Sensation cosmos from last year’s plants, yellow cosmos.

Animal sightings: Geckos, small birds, grasshoppers, large and small black ants.

Weekly update: Hopi history is retold as a series of migrations. People look out over local ruins and say, once a clan lived there, now they live here. Once we lived below, and now we are here. Once the kachinas lived with us, now they are below.

It is not the progressive history of Anglos. There is no once I was poor, now I am rich, no once I was damned, now I am saved. There’s no odor of feudalism binding individuals to specific places.

Elsie Clews Parsons said the Hopi narrative was, simply, a record that extended to plants, animals, even specific Kachinas. They’re all something encountered on a journey. If there’s a moral, it’s an inbred willingness to try new things, to experiment.

In the 1920s, Andrew Ellicott Douglass looked at tree rings in the beams of ruins to determine habitation dates for Mesa Verde, Canyon de Chelly and Pueblo Bonito. By chance, he discovered a period of drought between 1276 and 1299. He believed that dry period explained why people had abandoned the upper San Juan where the modern states of Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and Utah abut.

Historians place the drought in the Little Ice Age that began in Europe in 1258. The year of famine followed massive crop failures. Thousands died in London.

Recently, scientists have suggested the event that triggered the climatic change was the eruption of Mount Rinjani on the island of Lombok in Indonesia in 1257. They had learned the destructive possibilities of volcanic ash from Krakatoa. When it flared in Indonesia in 1883, cattle died on the open range in a winter so severe, the cattle industry in this country had to be reorganized.

A team at the National Center for Atmospheric Research had already established that ice cores from Iceland showed the types of changes between 1275 and 1300 that would have been produced by such volcanic activity. Franck Lavigne’s group was looking for the event predicted by Gifford Miller’s team.

When the climate changed in the late 1200s, people either adapted like the Inuit and Eskimos, migrated like the Navajo, or died out like the Norse in Greenland. Groups fled the Anasazi villages. Some moved east to the Río Grande, others went south.

Anthropologists aren’t so sure drought was the reason people left. Some argue depredations by the aggressive Navajo, Apache and Ute were the cause. They note the Hopi originally lived in small, isolated settlements along the base of Black Mesa. Its dense sandstone trapped water from the Upper Cretaceous that seeps in permanent springs.

In the early 1300s, the original settlers, who still had water, joined the refuges on defendable mesas where they crowded into large communities in buildings of several stories. The material responses to crisis are seen as more telling than theoretical causes.

Historians had the same reaction when confronted with climate data from Europe. They are more inclined to see human actions resulting from the actions of other humans than from some natural force.

In 2011, a team at the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research published the results of its study of 9,000 tree rings for 2,500 years in central Europe. They showed the Roman Empire thrived during a period of climatic stability, but that years of instability between 250 and 600 coincided with the Empire’s collapse.

Even a sudden, permanent change would have been easier to accept than the conditions suggested by Ulf Büntgen’s colleagues. Barbarians at the gates or Christians within are easier to understand than a climate that changed every few years so farmers could never adapt. When seeds that worked one summer failed the next, it was difficult to ship agricultural surpluses to Rome.

Our view of current events and history as the actions of individuals, often violent deeds by abnormal humans in failed or rogue states, makes it hard to accept some external factor like rain could be more important. Commentators attribute Sudan’s civil war to lust for oil. They describe John Garang de Mabior as a leader who recognized the dangers of Islam. Spreading Saharan drought is dismissed as propaganda from scientists bent on turning any current event into support for their dubious agenda.

We believe our advances in technology have insulated us from climate. If crops fail in Ukraine, wheat is exported from Kansas. If fish stocks are depleted on the Grand Banks, cattle ranches are developed on the borders of the Amazon.

Travelers were more than irate in 2010 when a relatively small volcanic eruption in Iceland closed airports in 20 European countries. Businessmen couldn’t understand why ash was worse than snow that was cleared with deicers. They kept thinking there was some mid-level bureaucrat who should be fired for negligence.

Our belief in human’s ability to see, record and analyze makes dairies and autobiographies more comfortable sources for historians than passive records of trees.


Notes:
Büntgen, Ulf, et alia. "2500 Years of European Climate Variability and Human Susceptibility," Science 331:578-582:2011.

Douglass, A. E. "Dating Our Prehistoric Ruins: How Growth Rings in Timbers Aid in Establishing the Relative Ages in Ruined Pueblos of the Southwest," Natural History, 1921.

_____. "The secret of the Southwest Solved by Talkative Tree Rings," National Geographic Magazine 56: 736-770:1929.

Lavigne, Franck, et alia. "Source of the Great a.d. 1257 Mystery Eruption Unveiled, Samalas Volcano, Rinjani Volcanic Complex, Indonesia," National Academy of Science Proceedings, 2013.

Miller, Gifford H., et alia. "Abrupt Onset of the Little Ice Age Triggered by Volcanism and Sustained by Sea-Ice/Ocean Feedbacks," Geophysical Research Letters, 2012.

Parsons, Elise Clews. Pueblo Indian Religion, vol 1,1939.

Photographs: Tree rings are consistent within species. Büntgen’s team used oak from lowland parts of France and Germany to reconstruct spring rains. It used stone pine and larch from the Austrian Alps for summer temperatures.

1. Peach tree where limb was cut in 2013.

2. Russian olive cut down in 2013.

3. Remains of porch rafter, installed in 1994. Wood purchased from Conley Sawmill in Arroyo Seco, wood not identified on receipt, but assumed to be local.

4. When a tree is felled, the cut is horizontal across the girth; the rings are circular. Mazzard cherry cut down in 2013.

5. When a felled tree is turned into lumber, the trunk is sliced vertically; the rings become the long lines of the grain. Cherry wood in table, probably late 1800s; varnish over stain.

6. Soft pine floor in house probably built during World War I. When the wood dries, the rings separate and splinter off. Varnish over cherry stain with wood filler.

7. Red oak floor installed in 1994. The hardwood does not splinter or easily gouge; varnish only.

8. Cedar paneling purchased in 1994. The wood is not coated when fumes from the drying oils are desired to keep away insects.

9. Southern yellow pine post purchased in 2012. Yellow pine may be one of four species. Most often it is loblolly pine grown in plantations on the Atlantic coastal plain from Maryland to Texas. Rainfall encourages fast growth so the rings are much wider than those in #3. Pressure treated with copper azole to slow aging and deter insects.

Palettes

Weather: The weather service says the rain this past Monday was the last of the monsoon season, probably because we’ve passed the equinox and the sun’s heating patterns on the oceans are changing; cold yesterday morning; last rain 9/29.

What’s blooming in the area: Silver lace vine, datura, morning glories, bouncing Bess, sweet pea, Russian sage, red amaranth, zinnias from new seeds and reseeds, African marigolds from seed, Maximilian sunflowers, pampas grass. Virginia creeper leaves turning burgundy.

Beyond the walls and fences: Pink and white bindweed, goat’s head, stickleaf, Queen Anne’s lace, chamisa, snakeweed broom, broom senecio, áñil del muerto, golden hairy, heath and purple asters.

In my yard, looking east: Large-flowered soapwort, hollyhocks, winecup mallow.

Looking south: Betty Prior and floribunda roses.

Looking west: Catmint, calamintha, David phlox.

Looking north: Yellow potentilla, Mexican hat, black-eyed Susan, chocolate flower, blanket flower, anthemis, coreopsis, chrysanthemum.

In the open, along the drive: Buddleia, white yarrow.

Bedding plants: Blue salvia, French marigold.

Seeds: Reseeded Sensation cosmos from last year’s plants, yellow cosmos.

Animal sightings: Rabbit, geckos, small birds, grasshoppers, large and small black ants.

I’ve had more problems with rodent droppings this year than normal; they didn’t go away in the spring like they usually do. When I went into the local hardware store, the shelves were picked over. The clerk said Thursday they had had to reorder stock several times this year.

Weekly update: Chemists tell us absolute colors exist. They are functions of light reflected by atoms and molecules. Arsenic is green, gold is red, cadmium is yellow, cobalt is blue. Copper oxide is bluish-green, iron oxide is brownish-red.

We can see many gradations in rainbows, but there are ultraviolets and infrareds we cannot see. White is pure light, black the absence of light. Gray and brown somehow don’t appear in this schema.

Botanists specify the molecules that cause color in plants are pigments. Green and yellow are the most common with one coming from chlorophyll, the other from xanthophyll or a carotene. Anthocyanins may be red or blue, depending on the pH, but betalains, like those found in amaranths, always are red.

As a child, I was taught a different classification for colors, one based on the empirical work of painters. There were three primary colors, red, yellow and blue. The secondary colors (orange, green, purple) were derived by mixing the primary colors with the one nearest to them in the color wheel. If you mixed colors that weren’t neighbors, you got something murky. Thus, red and yellow made orange, but red and green made something ugly.

The artists palette was reinforced by our tools - the eight crayons and eight watercolors we were given in school.

At the same time we were exposed to the variety of colors, we were warned bright ones were low class. I remember a junior high art class exercise where we systematically added white or black to each of the six colors in the water color box to create more tasteful, subdued shades.

So far as I remember, we never were encouraged to mix red and orange to get variations. That was something we did on our own, either in the rinse water glass or in the paint box lid.

The worlds of color I was taught no longer exists. Computers and digital cameras work with three colors: blue, green and red. The scientific rationale lies in biology. These correspond to the three color receptors in the human eye. In our more narcissistic age, color is a function of what we see, not what is.

There is no yellow, brown or gray in the RGB charts. Attempts to create them are, in IBM’s famous words to programmers, highly unpredictable. A color that works on one screen doesn’t work on another. Colors are reproduced differently by printers that translate the RGB back to magenta, cyan and yellow.

I mention the worlds of color I’ve been taught to note none corresponds to the views of colors of native Americans living in this part of the world. However, their palette, like mine, is rooted in both theory and experience.

Mayans valued four colors they associated with cardinal directions. The red of the east was most important. South was yellow for the sun, west black for the disappearing sun. The north of cool rains was white, and blue the center. They were embedded in their astronomical observations and calendar.

The Aztec valued four colors. They were the same ones, but the directions were different. Red was still east, but blue was south, white west and black north. They were controlled by four gods. Red was associated with spring and the god of germination, Xipe Totec. Blue was Huitzilopochtli, the god for whom amaranth figures were made. White was the best known Quetzalcoatl of fall. Black represented the north of death and the spirits, the winter world of Tezcatlipoca.

Hopi directions were aligned with the solstices. Red was the winter sunrise, blue the sunset. White corresponded to the sunrise on the summer solstice and yellow with sunset. Black represented the world above, all the colors spotted together the world of germination below. They used the same word for dark green and blue, merged red and violet, and didn’t recognize orange as separate from red or yellow.

Most pueblo communities recognize associations between color and direction. However, many use the cardinal directions of western Europeans. What they recognized originally is unknown. Even the Hopi have altered their colors to fit the familiar compass, probably because it is easier to say south in English than southeast.

Within the shared pueblo culture, Tewa speakers used yellow for west and blue or green for south, according to Watson Smith. Zuñi reversed the colors for the zenith and nadir. They also had more words to differentiate pale blue, gray, turquoise, light green and dark blue.

One might think, oh those color choices are obvious, they’re the primary ones. What’s important is the discrepancy between what’s used and what’s available. Red and blue are rarely seen in nature, while pinks and lavenders are common but ignored. Yellow is common in this region and used, but green and brown are not.

Hopi connect the yellow Mariposa lily (Calochortus aureus) with the northwest and a white evening primrose (Oenothera pinnatifida) with the northeast. The southwest is the blue tall mountain larkspur (Delphinium scaposum), the southeast the red painted cup (Castilleja linariaefolia).

There is no correlation between rarity or commonness and values. Red and blue are esteemed despite the difficulties in producing them, but so are yellow, white and black. Cultural inheritance overrides practicality.

Notes:
Smith, Watson. Kiva Mural Decorations at Awatovi and Kawaika-a, 1952.

Whiting, Alfred F. Ethnobotany of the Hopi, 1939.

Photographs:
1. Local red wildflower, Indian paint brush in far arroyo, 3 September 2011. This is a close relative to the Hopi painted cup.

2. Cultivated red Maltese cross in my garden, 20 June 2010.

3. Local yellow wildflowers common this time of year, broom senecio (front) and chamisa in far arroyo, 4 October 2009. Senecio grows in northeastern Arizona, chamisa does not.

4. Cultivated wildflowers in my garden, 8 June 2012. Lance-leaf coreopsis (darker) and golden spur columbine are selected versions of wildflowers from other parts of this country.

5. Local white wildflower, tufted evening primrose in my driveway, 25 April 2014. This is a close relative to the Hopi one.

6. Cultivated David garden phlox by my garage, 13 August 2011.

7. Local blue wildflower, blue gilia, on the rim of the far arroyo, 22 May 2011. It doesn’t grow in western New Mexico or Arizona.

8. Cultivated blue larkspur near my drive, 13 July 2013. This is a garden cousin of the Hopi one.

9. Local green wildflower, four winged saltbush, in my yard, 10 September 2007. This grows in the Hopi area.

10. Local lavender wildflower, purple aster in my drive, 3 October 2014. This grows in the Hopi area of northeastern Arizona.

Red Amaranth Seeds

Weather: Rain Monday night; last rain 9/22.

What’s blooming in the area: Silver lace vine, datura, morning glories, bouncing Bess, sweet pea, Russian sage, red amaranth, zinnias from new seeds and reseeds, African marigolds from seed, Maximilian sunflowers, pampas grass.

Beyond the walls and fences: Pink and white bindweed, goat’s head, stickleaf, leatherleaf globemallow, Queen Anne’s lace, pigweed, ragweed, chamisa, Hopi tea, snakeweed broom, broom senecio, native sunflowers, goldenrod, áñil del muerto, golden hairy, heath and purple asters.

In my yard, looking east: Large-flowered soapwort, hollyhocks, winecup mallow.

Looking south: Betty Prior and floribunda roses.

Looking west: Catmint, calamintha, David phlox.

Looking north: Yellow potentilla, hosta, Mexican hat, black-eyed Susan, chocolate flower, blanket flower, anthemis, coreopsis, chrysanthemum.

In the open, along the drive: Buddleia, white yarrow.

Bedding plants: Blue salvia, French marigold.

Seeds: Larkspur, reseeded Sensation cosmos from last year’s plants, yellow cosmos.

Animal sightings: Geckos, small birds, bees, grasshoppers, hornets, large and small black ants.

Weekly update: Whenever I hear people argue there’s no such thing as species alteration, I think how isolated we’ve grown from our agrarian past when peoples’ lives depended on observing plants.

For years anthropologists believed farming had been invented one time in the middle east about ten thousand year ago. They assumed the activity was too complex to have been created more than once. They, of course, were thinking of farming as they knew it, not as it had been.

In 1961, Richard MacNeish reported evidence for separate invention in the Tehuacán valley southeast of Puebla, México. In the Coxcatlán rock shelter his team found seeds for moschata squash and amaranth in strata dating between 4700 and 4300 bc. The National Research Council has identified the last as a form of Amaranthus cruentus.

The red-leaved plant was not native to the area. The dark-seeded annuals descended from Amaranthus hybrida in what is now Guatemala and southern México. The seeds found ready for threshing in Coxcatlán had been selected for their light color.

Given an opportunity, the wind-pollinated cruentus interbreeds with its neighbors. In Guatemala, it mates with its parent hybrida. In México, the plants cross with the local grain amaranth, Amaranth hypochondriacus.

Two thousand years later, a Franciscan friar, Bernardino de Sahagún, recorded the plants important to the Aztecs. He himself probably knew little about farming - he was from a family wealthy enough to send him to the royal university at Salamanca. He transcribed what his informants said without obvious editorial revision.

In the 1570s, natives of the Mexican valley distinguished the types of amaranth in their area by their seeds. Bird amaranth had a white seed. Another had seeds that were red or black. The mirror stone amaranth had glistening black seeds, while those of the one now identified as hypochondriacus were described as becoming like "coarse sand."

The last was the one used to make the blood and dough figures that were distributed during festivals honoring Huitzilopochtli. The Spanish were so horrified by what they saw as a mockery of the Eucharist that they suppressed both the festival and the grain. Soldiers aren’t trained to discriminate between types. They destroyed all cultivated amaranths.

Cruentus survived as a crop in Oaxaca and Guatemala. In 1947, Jonathan Sauer found both dark- and light-seeded varieties. The later were preferred for tortillas, and used "in various other ways, much like maize." The dark seeds were used only for tortillas.

In the late nineteenth century, Jesse Walter Fewkes reported a red-topped amaranth was being used by the Hopi to dye the red flat bread used in kachina rituals. Alfred Whiting said they still were growing red-leaved amaranths in irrigated, raised beds in the 1930s.

Matilda Coxe Stevenson saw Zuñi women tending the annuals in small gardens around their villages in the 1890s. Like the neighboring Hopi, they used it to dye the thin wafer bread used in ceremonies.

The anthropologists didn’t note the seed color. Sauer says morphological features indicate the southwestern red amaranth is a dark-seeded strain of cruentus created by selection.

Selecting seed is time consuming. After World War II, mass marketing made it easy to buy packaged seeds. Then, economies of scale made it less expensive to buy finished products that seeds.

When Sauer returned to Guatemala in 1967, red amaranth no longer was treated as a crop. He still saw plants growing on the edges of milpas and in dooryard gardens. But, they were naturalized plants with dark seeds. No one had kept light-colored ones.

In the 1960s, he says the Hopi were substituting commercial food coloring for ko’mo. The Zuñi no longer were bothering to select the best l’shilowa yäl’tok a seeds. They used reseeded plants that had interbred with a local green amaranth species, Powellii.

As the plants growing in the Española valley this summer show, when plants are neglected, species that have been selected can degenerate. It takes human effort to keep some strains pure. Thousands of years aren’t enough time to stabilize them.

Notes:
Fewkes, J. Walter. "A Contribution to Ethnobotany," American Anthropologist 9:14-21:1896.

MacNeish, Richard Stockton. Tehuacán Archaeological-Botanical Project, Annual Report, 1961. More on his work appears in the post for 21 February 2010.

_____. The Prehistory of the Tehuacán Valley, volume 5, 1972.

National Research Council. Amaranth: Modern Prospects for an Ancient Crop, 1984, edited by F. R. Ruskin.

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.

Sauer, Jonathan D. "Amaranths as Dye Plants among the Pueblo Indians," Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 6:412-415:1950.

_____. "The Grain Amaranths and Their Relatives: A Revised Taxonomic and Geographic Survey," Missouri Botanical Garden, Annals 54:103-137:1967.

Stevenson, Matilda Coxe. Ethnobotany of the Zuñi Indians (1915).

Whiting, Alfred F. Ethnobotany of the Hopi (1939).

Photographs:
1. Red amaranth growing near village, 17 August 2012.

2. This year’s offspring of #1, same location, 4 September 2014.

3. Red amaranth seed, purchased from Native Seeds/Search. It appears black when it comes from the package.

4. Unidentified amaranth in Florentine Codex, illustration 963, after Francisco del Paso y Troncoso. His version of the codex was published in three volumes in 1906 and 1907.

5. Red amaranth seed, purchased from Horizon Seeds. One seed is redder than the others. All Sauer and others say is light and dark, but not how light or dark.

6. Red amaranth seed, purchased from All Good Things Organic. The lighter colored seed looks like an unviable one that won’t sprout if its planted.

7. Local green amaranth in my yard, 13 August 2012. The earliest leaves and the stems are reddish.

8. Reseeds from #1, growing behind the 2012 plants; 4 September 2014.

9. Reseeds from #1, growing across drive from 2012 plants; 4 September 2014. Differences in height probably are due to differences in runoff from the road.

10. Red amaranth seeds, purchased from Seeds of Change. Similarities between seeds from different vendors may be inherent in the species, or may be because many seed companies purchase their stock from the same wholesale source.

Hurricanes

Weather: Remnants of hurricane Odile were diverted; instead of water we got cold temperatures Thursday morning; last rain 9/5.

What’s blooming in the area: Hybrid roses, silver lace vine, trumpet creeper, datura, morning glories, bouncing Bess, sweet pea, Russian sage, zinnias from new seeds and reseeds, African marigolds from seed, Maximilian and cultivated sunflowers, pampas grass. Pyracantha berries turned orange.

One man reaped his hay this week in four stages. He first drove through to cut stalks. Next he threw the mown stalks into heaped rows. After they dried, he baled them. Finally, three men picked up the bales. One drove the tractor. A second walked beside the flat-bed trailer and handed the bales to the third who stacked them on the trailer floor.

Beyond the walls and fences: Pink and white bindweed, goat’s head, stickleaf, leatherleaf globemallow, pigweed, ragweed, Hopi tea, snakeweed broom, broom senecio, native sunflowers, goldenrod, plains paper flowers, áñil del muerto, tahoka daisy, golden hairy, heath and purple asters.

In my yard, looking east: Large-flowered soapwort, garlic chives, Jupiter’s beard, hollyhocks, winecup mallow.

Looking south: Betty Prior and floribunda roses.

Looking west: Catmint, calamintha, David phlox, purple coneflower.

Looking north: Yellow potentilla, hosta, Mexican hat, black-eyed Susan, chocolate flower, blanket flower, anthemis, coreopsis, chrysanthemum.

In the open, along the drive: Buddleia, white yarrow.

Bedding plants: Sweet alyssum, blue salvia, moss rose, French marigold.

Seeds: Larkspur, reseeded Sensation cosmos from last year’s plants, yellow cosmos.

Animal sightings: Ground squirrel, geckos, other small birds, bees, grasshoppers, hornets, large and small black ants.

I’ve been cleaning house and finding more than the usual numbers of spider webs. I’ve also found more species than the familiar daddy long-legs. I blamed my negligence for the arachnid diversification until I talked with a friend in Santa Fé. He said he had more spiders his year than usual and more varieties. He attributed them to the warm winter and wet summer.

Weekly update: It’s a commonplace to say what you learn is defined by the questions you ask.

This week I’ve been trying to identify how red amaranth moved from southern México to the Hopi in northeastern Arizona.

Jonathan Sauer reviewed the available literature in 1950. He found only one possible reference: "In the state of Guerrero in Mexico, immature amaranth inflorescences are ground on a metate and the resulting bright red paste is used to color maize dough."

My ignorance of Mexican history and geography is profound. I didn’t know Guerrero lies on the Pacific northwest of Oaxaca or that Acapulco is its main city. My knowledge of Acapulco was limited to celebrity news stories. However, I did notice its location on the southern end of the Mexican land mass coincided with an area where tropical storms have been forming this summer.

For the past several years I’ve been trying to discover where our rain comes from. Last year I realized humidity levels didn’t matter if the moisture was being pulled from local streams, soils and plants. Many rain showers were simply recycling our existing water as the weather was slowly moving it elsewhere.

I thought hurricanes might be the source for the moisture that fueled monsoons. I had a vague sense we sometimes got rain when a tropical storm moved near the mouth of the Río Grande in the Carribean. When I looked at the National Hurricane Center’s website I discovered there are more storms than those in the Atlantic that threaten US cities.

NHC has a separate map for hurricanes in the eastern Pacific. Most of the disturbances this summer originated along Mexico’s western coast between Acapulco and Puerto Vallarta, some a bit farther south, some to the west in the ocean.

I also learned Acapulco had been the port for Spanish trade with the Orient that went through Manilla. It took advantage of the western trade winds used by Ferdinand Magellan in 1521. Later, in 1565, Alonso de Arellano and Andrés de Urdaneta discovered, to get home, sailors had to sail north to reach the east bound westerlies at 38 degrees north off Japan.

I was aware of the two wind streams in the Atlantic. The trade winds are the ones sailing ships used in the triangular trade that moved slaves from Africa to the Carribean. Then ships moved north along the US coast dropping off slaves and picking up cargoes until they reached New England. They returned to England on the westerlies with raw materials sold in the ports of Bristol and London for cash needed to fund the next slave trip.

Arellano and Urdaneta reasoned winds must behave the same in both the Atlantic and the Pacific. North and south have the same patterns. The equator runs between with no winds. Sailors call the dead area the doldrums. Scientists term it the Intertropical Convergence Zone.

Hurricane formation is a function on the earth’s movements around the sun. After the solstice, the ocean waters heat enough for storms to form. Rotation isn’t possible near the equator, because it doesn’t spin fast enough. The southern boundary for hurricane formation is 310 miles north of the equator. Acapulco is 1,166 miles distant.

The northern boundary for very warm water is the Tropic of Cancer. The northernmost point that has the sun directly overhead on the solstice lies at the 23.5 latitude. Canton, which became the primary export center for China, is at 23 degrees north.

There are, of course, other factor contributing to hurricane formation, but this was enough to explain how hurricanes affect our weather. The Hopi know monsoons come from the southwest, the direction associated with blue corn.

Whether or not the water that moves up through the Gulf of California reaches the Española valley is determined by other wind forces from the north and east which redirect its course. Christina arrived in mid June, Douglas in early July, Marie in late August. Last week the remnants of Norbert were deflected by winds from the east. They flooded Phoenix and Las Vegas when they dumped their water in Arizona and Nevada. This Thursday Odile stayed to the south as cold air moved in from Colorado.

The potential for destructive storms between the solstice and the equinox is the main reason sailing ships using the trade winds could only make the round trip once a year. Winter conditions were the other.

Acapulco, as the port for the Spanish trade with China, would have had good roads to Mexico City. Once communications existed between the two areas, more than trade goods would have moved northeast from Guerrero, even after the Spanish trade ended in 1815. Anything in the market stalls of the capital could move north to the Hopi.

It’s unknown if anything did. I’ve not been able to read Sauer’s original source. Pedro Hendrichs’ book is out of print, but not out of copyright. Google confirmed the words metate, maize and alegría appear on the page cited by Sauer, but wouldn’t let me see them.

Hendrichs identified alegría elsewhere as Amaranthus paniculatus var esp Leucocarpus, a synonym for the Hopi’s Amaranthus cruentus that grew in nearby Oaxaca. The word alegría is more commonly used in México for the Amaranthus hypochondriacus used by the Aztec for ceremonial dough figures. Hendrichs also said "In ancient times, the Indians made idols of the little" paniculatus seeds they offered to the gods. They ate "them after finishing the ceremony."

It’s not obvious Hendrichs identified the plant correctly. He was not a botanist, but the son of a German hardware salesman who sent him to México before World War I to expand his markets. He returned after the war to write ethnographic studies.

This book was about the Río Balsas that flows through Guerrero to empty into the Pacific at Lázaro Cárdenas, some 200 miles north of Acapulco in Michoacán. The 479-mile-long river could have been a separate conduit for seeds to follow to reach Mexico City.

It’s well known that discoveries, whether by the Hopi, sailors or me, involve more than asking the right questions. It also helps to be open to serendipitous happenings. Or, as scientists say one forms hypothesis, but must pay attention to anomalies.

Notes: Much of my information is from Wikipedia.

Hendrichs Pérez, Pedro Rodolfo. Por Tierras Ignotas, volume 1, 1945.

Sauer, Jonathan D. "Amaranths as Dye Plants among the Pueblo Indians," Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 6:412-415:1950.

Photographs: The daily cloud cycle echoes the effects of the sun’s heat that form hurricanes.  Clouds on Friday, the day after Odile failed to arrive. All were taken looking southwest between two lilacs toward the Jémez in the general area between Los Alamos and Puye Cliffs.

1. 6:30 am. Clouds from night revealed at dawn.

2. 7:29 am. Sun rising, picking out the lime layers in the badlands; clouds dissipating

3. 7:47 am. Night clouds nearly gone.

4. 8:58 am. First clouds of new day are small, isolated puffs of white.

5. 10:01 am. Clouds joined in bands above the Jémez, with new clouds rising behind. Density of lime is fading in the badlands.

6. 10:29 am. Clouds in a denser band with some patterns to them.

7. 12:37 pm. Clouds reaching their densest state. They stay the same until late afternoon.

8. 4:44 pm. Clouds begin moving higher, streaming out overhead.

9. 6:11 pm. Clouds thinning at the south end of the Jémez and developing more to the north.

10. 6:40 pm. Winds developing, clouds thinning.

11. 7:11 pm. Few clouds left as sundown approaches.

12. 7:40 pm. No clouds left.