Seashell Traders of the Desert

ANCIENT SEASHELL TRADERS OF THE DESERT

THEIR REMNANTS OFFER INTRIGUING CLUES ABOUT A LOST CULTURE BY CRAIG CHILDS

In the dappled shade of paloverde trees, a shell lies abandoned on a sidewalk. I kneel and pick up the polished cowrie, turning it in my hand. The shell is cut so that it can be strung, something that would be found in a bead shop. Tucson vibrates around me with traffic and people teeming along the sidewalk, but for a moment all goes quiet as I examine this shiny ornament. Which ocean surrendered this shell so that I could find it here in the city? How many miles did it travel, through how many hands?

At the moment I am on my way to the Arizona State Museum to research artifacts from an older Arizona. I am interested in the Hohokam Indian culture, as well as the Salado, the Mogollon, the Puebloans-names given to the previous people who a thousand years ago built cities in the Southwest and scattered their belongings across the desert. There were wars here, elaborate canal systems for irrigating and complex trade networks that stretched to Guatemala. Before the many-colored peoples of Europe, Asia and Africa ever imagined this country, it was busy with citizens going about their lives.

This sidewalk shell reminds me that shells were a fundamental trade item for the ancient people. From a single excavation site in Phoenix, 7,500 shell artifacts were found, most dating back a thousand years or so. I remember coming across the remnants of a shelltrade route that once ran between Phoenix, Tucson and the desert western coast of Mexico. The route brought shells up to manufacturing sites where they were carved and encrusted with turquoise and argillite, then traded into the vast Hohokam settlements where Phoenix and Tucson now stand. I had walked legs of this shell route, finding along the way remnants of a lost civilization in the wilderness. I had found shells in this same manner, crouching on my way somewhere, lifting an artifact off the ground.

Walking in a country of sand dunes in northern Sonora, Mexico, I found in the middle of nowhere a shell that had been carried from the sea. Two of us had come with a month's worth of supplies, setting water caches into the far dunes of the Gran Desierto, an erotic and bitter landscape with nothing but sand for 2,000 square miles. Elegant dunes swept 300 feet into the sky, gushing around each other. Backpacking through the baptismal heat of afternoon, we arrived at stony heads of mountains standing out from the dunes. Sand crashed against every side of these mountains so that only a few oftheir summits stuck out. There was a bit of wind shelter, a little shade. Sand poured like paint through wind-hounded notches in the rock. It was there, crouched and resting, that I reached down and picked up a shell. I turned it in my hand, feeling its sandblasted polish. Someone had brought it here.

For thousands of years, shells from the nearby Sea of Cortes had been traded into North America. Carried across these dunes, they had gone as far as Oklahoma. Most of them ended up in Arizona. They were elaborately carved, jeweled with precious stones, then turned into trumpets and pendants.

With that shell in my hand, I envisioned the movement of trade goods across the countryside-corn and shell beads and copper bells taken to the edges of the known world, bartered in the loud bustle of markets. Shells were probably treated like diamonds-objects of desire that were gathered, manufactured elsewhere into ornaments and then sold in far-reaching plazas. They reveal in this ancient civilization a complicated network of distribution centers, manufacturing sites and trade markets across the desert.

Objects like the shell from the sand dunes fueled ancient economies, as gift items, passed down as family heirlooms or perhaps worn to mark the lineage of dynasties.

I sat for a long time rubbing this dune-lost shell, looking across the sandscape in front of me. On occasion a black beetle would come steaming through on a mission. Even more rarely, two bee-tles would bump into each other and shamelessly wrestle across the sand. That was all. There was nothing else alive. Yet there had been people before me, shell traders walking through this wilderness.

Carrying in my pocket the polished cowrie shell, which probably originated in the Philippines or the Ivory Coast of Africa, I walk down a hallway in one of the annex buildings of the Arizona State Museum. Artifacts rest around me, a Hohokam red-on-buff jar and a platter of Clovis points 10,000 years old.

The assistant curator of archaeology leads the way, unlocking a door and showing me inside. He strikes a switch and we both stand in the dim of 1930s lights hung from the ceiling. The room is large and filled with shelves, the shelves burdened with old pottery, selections from Zuni and Hopi pueblos.

I am here to examine artifacts from a Salado ruin near the Mogollon Rim, but instead ask if I could first see some of the shell collection. The cowrie has me thinking about shell trade, and I want to see where these shells have now come to rest.

When he opens the doors to a cabinet, I see blades of Mayan jade and the silver grips of Spanish pistols. He pulls a drawer and the shells come into the light like small, dark animals. Some are jeweled with turquoise, some hollowed into rings of bracelets. Most are carved to look like spadefoot toads, creatures of the Sonoran Desert, characteristic spines raised along their backs. Strings of shell beads lie coiled like snakes beside animal figures carved out of abalone. I recognize many of the shells immediately, species carried across those dunes long ago from the Sea of Cortes.

One theory asserts that dune traders living in the lower Sonoran Desert brought goods to the Hohokam population centers in Tucson and Phoenix. In trade, they were able to purchase corn, cotton and beans-the sorts of things that would be scarce in dry areas farther south. In fact, evidence indicates that most shell manufacturing was done in these desert sites far away from the irrigated urban cores of the time.

Worked shells moved on to the rest of the Southwest, and some even slipped through to the Great Plains. Shells that were intricately decorated in turquoise passed farther, and were kept by the mound builders living along the Mississippi River, the same way we might now appreciate an exotic bell from Tibet, or even my faraway cowrie.

Of course, shell trade changed over time. Ornaments began to be made in the Phoenix and Tucson areas instead of in the distant deserts. Pueblos were built atop tall, walled mounds, becoming factories of shell items that traded less and less with surrounding areas.

I pluck one of the frog shells from the drawer and roll it between my fingers, imagining how many hands it had touched. Was it a wedding gift, a burial offering for a child, a familiar charm kept near the bed like a favorite book? I place the object back into the drawer,

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(Continued from page 11) Coming to no conclusion, not wanting to invade the privacy of those who once held this.

At the edge of the dunes farthest from the sea, my partner and I came to a clearing where a patch of hard desert floor had been revealed. Across it we found an ancient camp surrounded by high wings of dunes. Globes of ceramic vessels lay broken, their broad, curved pieces gathering sunlight. We walked beside tools of basalt worn smooth, grinding stones left where they were last used. Immediately we could see how this remote settlement was organized, small groups of campfires, pottery and shells set into private outposts. This is where the shell traders had slept. I knelt beside one of the fire marks and saw their last meal, the teeth and jawbones of four badgers, and the charred dish of a desert tortoise's shell.

The dunes had preserved this site for hundreds of years. Sand had moved in, sealing each artifact in place, holding it until now. The dunes are migrating, rubbing against one another as the wind pushes them, and here and there, at the far margins of the dune sea, the ground is revealed. Artifacts come briefly to the light. Soon they will again be buried.

I imagined this encampment during the height of the shell trade, night fires scattered in the distance, laughter and the rasp of grinding stones breaking down meal for morning. I heard the clatter of shells as traders sorted through their goods, tossing out the small ones that would not be carried all the way to Phoenix.

As I walked I saw these unwanted shells, the small ones cast away, and some larger ones with imperfections and cracks. I looked around, seeing that the tide of dunes was coming again. Waves of sand lifted everywhere, promising to crash down onto these camps and again seal their artifacts.

Still carrying the sidewalk cowrie shell in my pocket, I travel to Phoenix seeking two archaeologists who once studied the Sea of Cortes shoreline nearest the dunes. They had walked the beaches and terraces taking an inventory of ancient camps. Sitting in an office, maps spread over the floor and across a desk, they tell me that they found very few signs of long-term habitation along the Mexican coast near the dunes. They saw only brief camps where people had come, gathered shells, made a few fires and turned around with their loads.

When I tell them of the broken pottery and shell scatters I found at the clearing in the dunes, they perk. We begin tracing our fingers back and forth across the map, and I tell them where in a nearby mountain range I had found water holes, while they tell me where along the coast they had found the most campfires. I explain the easiest courses through the dunes to the sea. They answer me with discoveries they had made by digging trenches in the ground. Soon We have a web of routes defined across the desert, all three of us close around the map, excitedly comparing notes.

These shell traders had gathered water in the far mountains, set base camps along the dune margins and made quick forays to the sea where they gathered shells and crossed back over the dunes, returning to their camps. We are two kinds of archaeologists pleased in the sharing of information. They accumulate data about specific sites and publish papers on the matter. I walk across the land and take note of what I encounter. Between us, we can see more clearly these ancient people crossing the desert with their loads.

When I leave their offices, I go straight to a bead store a few blocks away. I walk in asking if there are any shell beads, and I am directed to a table of small boxes of shells. I fish into my pocket and pull out this smooth cowrie, matching it up to a cache of cowries selling for 25 cents each.

Trade to the great desert cities is far from over, I think. In all of these hundreds and thousands of years, in the rising and falling of civ ilizations, we have hardly changed. There are still merchants dis playing exotic wares. Shells continue to move so frequently that they can be found abandoned in the far dunes or lost on a city sidewalk.

I am reminded that if I want to know about archaeology, all I need to do is look at myself to see how I travel the land, where I pause to sleep, what kinds of artifacts I carry. I buy a couple of shells from the store and go along my way. AllAuthor and National Public Radio commentator Craig Childs lives in western Colorado. His recent books include Soul of Nowhere published by Sasquatch Books and The Desert Cries published by Arizona Highways Books.

AN ELEGANT HOTEL A DREAM UNFULFILLED 'C.P.' Sykes' Grand Southern Arizona Venture Proved Overambitious for Its Time

He HAD THE KIND OF FACE that would have looked well engraved on a dollar bill or imprinted on an investment prospectus. He had that high brow of intelligence, the maturity of the full beard, the touch of humor around the mouth. Charles "C.P." Sykes of Calabasas, Arizona Territory, looked like a man you might want to know and, boy, could he throw a party.

On October 5, 1882, C.P. Sykes officially opened the doors of his new Hotel Santa Rita in Calabasas, 50 miles south of Tucson and 10 miles north of the border with Mexico. He extended an invitation for Tucsonans to travel to Calabasas by train, an all-day adventure on rails as new as the hotel.

Tucson's Arizona Weekly Star predicted, "This entertainment will excel anything of the kind ever experienced in Arizona."

The host for the event had not been in the Territory very long. A resident of San Francisco, Sykes bought the Tumacacori y Calabazas land grant in 1877. The 50,000 acres south of Tucson had been part of the Spanish mission system established in the 1700s but had become privately owned under independent Mexico. The ink on the sale to Sykes had barely dried before full-page advertisements about Calabasas, the English spelling of the Spanish word meaning "pumpkins" or "squash," began appearing in the East. Appealing to investors, the ad in New York's The Daily Graphic, October 18, 1878, showed the holdings of Sykes' Calabasas Land and Mining Co. as including old missions, new mines and a two-story hotel, "as it will appear when completed."

by KATHLEEN WALKER

dried before full-page advertisements about Calabasas, the English spelling of the Spanish word meaning "pumpkins" or "squash," began appearing in the East. Appealing to investors, the ad in New York's The Daily Graphic, October 18, 1878, showed the holdings of Sykes' Calabasas Land and Mining Co. as including old missions, new mines and a two-story hotel, "as it will appear when completed."

Born in New York in 1824, Sykes worked as a newspaper editor before his successful career as a miner and mine company developer in Colorado City, Colorado. Now he saw his future in southern Arizona. In addition to the potential of its mineral wealth, the rolling land of the Santa Cruz Valley could support vast herds of cattle. Even better, the most modern of transportation, the railroad, would soon serve the area. Calabasas would become a city, home to the businesses nec essary to keep trains rolling on the line connecting Arizona with Mexico. Calabasas would be the centerpiece of international commerce.

Sykes built a hotel to match the dream. The bedrooms had hot and cold running water. Gentlemen could enjoy billiards and