2000 BCE: The Pottery-Makers

"It is an old truth: outsiders will claim to want our cliff-side lands, our rare gold, our dry food, but what they covet the most is beautifully-packaged air."

—Hakidonmuya of Orayvi [Oraibi, AZ], interviewed by Waglékšúnginíla of Mayákang [Shiloh Mounds, TN] for his book Íčhihepíyaíčhimani, c. 300 CE

The region which our timeline calls Oasisamerica is dry, rocky, and quite hot indeed. Occupying the territories of New Mexico and Arizona, and parts of Utah, Colorado, Sonora, and Chihuahua, it was - and still is - occupied by a number of indigenous groups, who adopted agriculture from Mexico in earnest around the year 500 BCE. A thousand years after this, some of the earliest (and longest-lasting) "permanent villages" on the continent were established; locals built whole cities into the sides of cliffs, and buildings sited and constructed according to a complex astronomical calendar, and impressive irrigation systems for their harvests of maize and squash (and the tepary bean). The Ancestral Puebloans declined in the 13th Century CE (and the related Fremont culture by the 14th), opening up the region for the classical periods of the Hohokam and Mogollon civilizations. And then the Spanish arrived. Today, there are a number of peoples who live in the region - the Hopi, Zuñi, Acoma, Zia, Kewa, Cochiti, Tewas, Tiwas, and Navajo - with their own histories and cultures in a more or less direct line from these predecessors. (Not so much for the Navajo, but that's a story for another time.)

Key to this region's development as it did was the contact with Mesoamerica to the south. The majority of the region's crops were imported from the south; the Colonial Hohokam Period (from 550 to 900 CE) saw the import of ball courts, copper hawk bells, and other related elements of the southern cultures. And certain features, including the harvest of the pinyon nut, were shared with peoples further to the west as well, in the great river valley amidst the mountains.

In Timeline-1001, crops came earlier.

Amaranth, goosefoot, pinyon nut, ricegrass, and yucca were all foods the locals had been familiar with for millennia; ancient strains have been discovered that predate the arrival of any of the domesticated versions of these. It is likely that the domesticated yucca species (samowa in Hopi) had its origins here, rather than in the south of Lokloni; even aside from its edible fruit and seeds, its roots contain saponins (useful for washing hair, initially in rituals), fibres from the plant can be woven into sandals, and the dried leaves and trunk fibres catch fire relatively easily, having a low ignition temperature. Amaranth and goosefoot came from the lowlands to the east, spreading across the plains and into the during one of the Pagránda Culture's "bust" cycles around 3000 BCE. And the pinyon nuts, as in Lokloni, were always something of a locus for food-gathering; all it took was a little extra something - in this case the camas and chia - growing nearby to get them going. By the year 2000 BCE, much of the culture had shifted to a sedentary lifestyle, with silos for grain (and bulbs) constructed alongside increasingly large pit-houses atop mesas or on the floors of canyons.

What this meant for the locals was a chance to build bigger, spread further, and be more creative. Maize and squash would arrive in the region around the same time as in our timeline, but as supplements to the diet instead of mainstays. Big game, like nayoomee, could be hunted more easily, especially once someone picked up the bow and arrow (but again, that's a story for another time). The animals hunted not only provided food, but fur and hide, from which were made robes. Baskets were still made from yucca fibres, but they became increasingly complex in weave and make; they could also be used for cooking, hot stones being placed in pitch-lined and water-filled baskets to make stews and soups. And when you wanted to store food, or carry water, you could use earthenware pottery instead - a simple grey pottery to start with, but this would change.

And in time, they would build above-ground, too.

What our timeline calls the pueblo, Timeline-1001 calls the kiihu. Above-ground, flat-roofed, the kiihu is built in a crescent around a central courtyard out of adobe - in some older buildings out of wattle-and-daub, and in later ones (the vast majority found today), adobe bricks. With the older pit-houses becoming increasingly less relevant as dwellings, they found a new niche as kiva, subterranean centres of worship facing east or south.

The Kiihu Period (1500 BC-300 CE) saw the rapid-fire development of kiihu and kiva alike, alongside towers, canals, and eventually the carving of settlements into the sides of cliffs. Despite this, and despite the level of ingenuity it took to build these, there was little to nothing in the way of a centralized government. Villages protected themselves; if the population grew too large or the tribal elders too pedantic or abusive, people could always leave, to try to start a village of their own. The people were divided by region, by language, by local architecture…but like the Loklonichi to the west, they had their own points of unity. And first and foremost among these - beyond their lifestyle, beyond their reverence for the great canyon that seemed to reach to the roots of the world and the mountains that scraped the heavens of it - was belief in the katsinim.

A katsina is a spirit that protects the family. They are not deities; many of them are ancestors of some kind, an element which may have developed from the oklapna culture of Lokloni or may have developed entirely on its own. Rather, they are personifications, be it of the sun or moon, the amaranth or corn, bravery or joy, storm or wind, insects or nayoomee. They help humans along in their lives, typically during the first half of the year. They varied from community to community, and even their name was not standard; katsina is the Hopi version alone. They were often met with in the kiva, by means of mask-dances, or in the form of small dolls used to represent the katsina (but not act as the katsina; even the earliest of stories make a distinction).

Second among these was the pottery.

Since the initial grey wares were produced in the 21st Century BCE, pottery came a long way for the people of the region - a region mostly known by the name of Tuuwaqatsi in the modern day. Perhaps unsurprisingly, over the years the bowls and jars began to be painted, first in black and white, and by the 6th Century BCE in white, black, red, and orange. The subject matter tended towards the geometric at first, but eventually turned to people, animals, and birds. And people loved it. The ancient trade routes across the mountains didn't stop being active just because there were more people on either side, and Tuuwaqatsi became something of a meeting-place for a number of the more ambitious merchants. So they gained gold and abalone shells from Lokloni, tobacco and buffalo hides from the Ñíta and plainsfolk, copper from the Copper Complex, even honey from the Maya. And in exchange they gave beautiful jars and vases and pots and ladles, painted in brilliant colours, to adorn the chihchi dining halls of faraway Californians or the burial sites of Mississippian mound-lords. Each village had its own speciality; like German beer or Salish names, a skilled researcher can tell where a particular piece came from just by looking at it, even thousands of years later. There was surprisingly little war, too - why bother, when life was hard enough, and territory plentiful enough, and customers easy enough to drive away?

Of course, this didn't satisfy everyone.