The Murals of Awat'ovi

The Hopi mesas. I looked at Haskell. She smiled and nodded her head. Yes, these are the ones.

I reached into my pocket, searching for my journal, but then I stopped. The paintings were beautiful. What could I possibly write about them? They had come from a time and a place so far from here that I felt dizzy, as if I were lost. I thought about Awat'ovi, about where it is in the land. I remembered being in that place, that windswept desert of northern Arizona, and for the moment I was in two places at once.

Awat'ovi lies mostly buried in a pale, curry-yellow landscape. Dunes and sheets of sand migrate with the wind. The mesa edge that lines the west side of the pueblo drops into boulders and brief cliffs. I had come with a tribal archaeologist to this far side of the Hopi Indian Reservation. We drove a maze of back roads to arrive at this pueblo of up to 5,000 rooms, some of its masonry walls still reaching up from the ground as if gasping toward the sky.Stubs of cold-desert cacti grew up through the cracks in fallen wall stones. The land was clutching this place, preserving it in sand, and at the same time tearing it apart with wind. We walked over these remnants of rooms, and Yeatts unfolded a site map. It turned into a flag in the wind, and he held it tight.

The pueblo is huge, one of the largest known in the Southwest. It was occupied from the 11th century A.D. and was perhaps one of the first Hopi settlements encountered by Spanish conquistadores.

"One of the kivas is right over here," he told me.

A kiva is a ceremonial room. I imagined what it might have looked like, its floor smooth with flagstones, various pieces of ceremonial architecture standing around, deflector stones and benches. But I could see none of this. Instead, it was covered with the remnants of a Spanish mission.

"When this kiva was excavated," Yeatts said, "underneath the mission, they found that it had been filled with clean sand."

The occupants of Awat'ovi had been commanded, or likely forced, to build a mission there in the 1600s, and directed to put it on top of their ceremonial kiva that had stood since long before the Spanish arrived. One religion attempted to topple another there, knocking the kiva away and replacing it with a cross. Instead of filling the kiva with rubble as a foundation, the people of Awat'ovi gently packed it with sand. Preserved behind this bulwark of clean sand were kiva walls covered with paintings, the preserved remains of ancient ceremonies.

When excavators arrived in the 20th century, they dug into the mission and then the kiva below it. There they found these murals. They stripped them from the walls, yet again one religion overcoming another, science burrowing straight through Catholicism into the kiva-heart of this pueblo. By covering the paintings with fabric impregnated with hardening resin, they were able to peel the layers away. They packed them in crates and sent them off to the Peabody Museum at Harvard University.

It seemed to me like a strange thing, to find an item so sacred and whisk it away to the other side of the continent. At the time, in the 1930s, the Hopis had little say in what happened to their ancestral material. Archaeology decreed that evidence be gathered, studied and stored. The paintings could not be allowed to remain in this desert, in the bowels of this silent pueblo.

I knew, standing above the hidden kiva, among the wind-chewed walls of the mission, that I would have to track down the paintings.

I moved silently in the museum basement. The murals were slightly grayed with age, but still remarkably detailed in their colors. I put my eye right up to one, studying its brushstrokes. The colors were rich blues, yellows, reds, blacks, whites. The artists seemed to have had unlimited access to pigments. Purples, oranges, charcoals, rusts.

I walked by human figures, animals, objects. Specific aspects of clothing were revealed, the number of strands in a sash worn around someone's waist, a hairstyle, an embroidered pattern in the hem of a man's kilt. Some of the geometric designs were outlandish, explosions of colors and symmetrical forms spraying across the walls.

Outsiders are almost never allowed into Hopi kivas. These are the off-limits places, the sacred chambers buried within the pueblos. Was I even supposed to be in this kivalike place? I wondered. I couldn't help but feel that these paintings were uprooted, their context utterly lost. I was a tourist, a mistaken time traveler walking through something that I would otherwise never be allowed to see.

I had talked to people at the Hopi mesas before coming here, asking if going to see the murals was an appropriate thing for me to do. The answer was, I can do whatever I wish. As an outsider I would be uninformed in the face of these murals, not knowing the significance of any particular image. It meant nothing that I was here. A Hopi person here, though, was different. Clans and societies have their own kivas, and for one clan to see the ceremonial paintings of another is against tradition. I was protected by ignorance.

Even if I knew what I was looking at, it was difficult to piece together the entire array of any one mural. They were presented in fragments, whatever the excavators had been able to peel away. Heads were missing. Legs were cut off.

Hung along with these portions of original murals were full-size reproductions that had been made by artists at the excavation. The reproductions appeared to be more brilliantly colored than the originals; paint on these was newer, made with bright, synthetic pigments. But they lacked the antiquarian polishing of age I saw in the originals. The older paintings had deeply toned reds and whites that had been time-worn like old ivory piano keys. The newer ones seemed almost cartoonish. The hand of the early Hopi work simply could not be duplicated.

Mostly, Haskell stood back as I pored through these wall hangings. Now and then, she pointed out details, observations she had made, points of archaeological fact. Mainly, she remained quiet, a step behind me, admiring the paintings. I lingered on an image, an elongated animal passing through a shield, as if being born from it.

"Mountain lion," I suggested. I pointed my finger along its body, telling her that I could see the same general markings, shifts in coloration, that you would see on a mountain lion. The long tail with the dark band at the end. The claws. That would be my logical guess.

She considered this and nodded herhead. We moved on, walking slowly down the wall of paintings with the pace of art critics in a gallery. I felt as if I were moving through a disarray of rituals. Whatever images had once been carefully, ceremonially aligned in the kivas had been arranged here for entirely different purposes, hung on the walls by virtue of size, or maybe provenance: The rituals of ancestral Hopis were replaced by the rituals of archaeological cataloging.

There was an image of a person holding perhaps a drum surrounded by birds of various species, one identifiable as a macaw from the tropics of the Yucatan Peninsula. There were female figures standing side by side, each in different patterned kilts, different kinds of necklaces, one balancing a large painted pot on her head. The imagery seemed randomly organized, out of place in ways I could not imagine. The murals had been torn apart, some by erosion and some by the hands of excavators. Here they were brought together, sewn back into each other like rows of Frankensteins, weirdly beautiful, disorienting and alluring. What kind of kiva had I walked into here?

The murals have been lost, I thought. They have been thrown to the winds, scattered far from their origins, and re-formed here in this storage basement of the Peabody. No doubt, certain Hopi elders would be able to piece together some of the ceremonial stories, but mostly it would be broken trails of hearsay, imagination and rumor. There is too much missing. Whatever was once contained in the kivas of Awatovi has been displaced.

Something else has been created instead. The lost murals have found themselves. They have been reassembled into a new artwork, plastered up on the walls of a latter-day kiva, a sunken ceremonial room of science hidden beneath this museum. Only the devotees are allowed in here, wearing their crisp lab coats, scratching in notebooks, stepping quietly from one panel to the next. Haskell and I were priests, or at least servants of a different diety than that of the Hopi people, bowing in front of these murals.

The paintings seemed to glow, their colors vibrating under the soft basement lighting. I finally put my journal away and stood quietly, devoutly, as required of a worshiper. All