A Lesson in Impermanence Taught Through a Pueblo Ruin
An elaborate brick and mortar city was constructed in the desert by the Ancestral Pueblo people of northern New Mexico, only to be abandoned within the same century. What lessons did they leave behind for us to find?
The Rise of Aztec
To the south of the Animas River Valley in what we now call New Mexico, a new kind of city was rising. In Chaco Canyon, generations of workers began cutting sandstone from the one hundred-foot-high canyon walls, shaping it into bricks, and constructing great masonry houses of astonishing scale. Chaco became a cultural epicenter—a place for ceremony, trade, and community for the Ancestral Pueblo. Those ideas did not stay contained within Chaco’s boundaries. They radiated outward.
Later in that era, in the north, regional inhabitants of Mesa Verde moved into cliff alcoves carved into canyon walls, their houses tucked beneath the shelter and shade of overhanging stone. Building the cliff cities was a massive feat of manual labor and a marvel of engineering; their craftsmanship showcased in carefully cut blocks, finely plastered interiors, painted murals, and kivas hidden within. Mesa Verde was its own flourishing cultural center—its population possibly numbering in the thousands at its height.
And then builders came to Aztec, nestled squarely between these two regional centers, bringing with them masterful skills in construction, farming, and craft.
Both men and women shared in building the Great House at Aztec. A local quarry, a few miles to the northwest of the site, became the source for the sandstone to manufacture bricks for construction. Men worked the stone with hammers and mauls, first hammering out rough blocks, then grinding the rocks together to form rectangular bricks.
Back at the townsite, women tirelessly mixed mud, water and sand together in shallow earth pits to make a thick mortar. The bricks brought from the quarry were stacked in rows around rough fill cobblestones and cemented together with the mortar. As each house row came together, adjoining rooms were added, and then more built above them—two or three-stories high.
The ceilings that held the rooms above them were marvels of construction in their own right. Heavy timbers of pine, juniper, and spruce formed the base layer of construction, set deep into recesses in the stone. Across the tops of the beams, peeled saplings were laid in a sturdy cross pattern, then layered with woven rush matting and cedar bark. This formed a solid structure to be sealed with adobe mud, sturdy enough to hold a heavy layer of fill dirt and sand.
The builders set a thick band of dark green stone into the western wall of the structure, which must have held a deeper significance beyond aesthetics. The striking feature would have been invisible beneath layers of adobe plaster that coated the walls—a paint that gleamed white from the addition of crushed white gypsum. Decorations were reserved for interior walls, with murals painted in red pigment and handprints in white adorning the wooden beams of sacred spaces.
Although new building projects at Aztec were continually in progress, by the time the first major phase of construction was complete the rectangular structure soared to over thirty feet at its height—containing some four hundred residences, earthworks, and kivas surrounding a central plaza—cleverly oriented to the south to catch the warming rays of the winter sun.
The Pueblo at Aztec, as in Chaco Canyon, closely observed celestial alignments. The position of the sun, moon, and stars served as a great calendar to inform agricultural and ceremonial practices. The builders positioned Aztec’s north wall in alignment with the movements of the sun. At summer solstice, the first light of dawn rose over the eastern corner of the wall; at winter solstice, the setting sun sank over the western end of the same wall.
Inside the Great Kiva, the precise positioning of openings enhanced the drama of the earth’s position relative to the sun. At dawn and dusk of the solstices, a beam of light entered the darkened semi-subterranean chamber, casting a vibrant rectangle of fire on the opposing wall with a striking effect. Perhaps a sun priest standing at the central altar would have been illuminated by this shaft of golden light, striking awe in the eyes of the beholders.
Trade connected Aztec to distant places. From the south came turquoise stones, copper ornaments, and macaws—prized for their vibrantly colored feathers—for use in ceremonial objects and dress. Perhaps trade with Mesoamerica also brought cacao—its chemical signature found in an abundance of vessels belonging to Chaco Canyon farmers, suggesting that the rare and bitter chocolate drink was enjoyed not just by the elite. In return, crafted goods of fine pottery, woven textiles, and ceremonial objects traded into the eager hands of the Pueblo’s neighbors.
Aztec rose quickly, flourished for a short time, and then declined just as fast. Almost as soon as the construction of the great city was completed, its residents would leave again, leaving the city vacant for a new wave of inhabitants to follow a century later.
The new inhabitants were also of the Pueblo culture, bringing with them their own variant practices in craft, construction, and ritual. These new builders spent more years renovating the structure—adding new kivas over older ones, knocking out doors, sealing others, and creating rooms within rooms to house the new population. Unlike the previous inhabitants, when someone died, pots would be placed at their head, along with tools and clothing needed to carry them on the long journey through the afterlife.
These people also left after a short time, taking their belongings with them and sealing up the windows and doors behind them. Why they left is a mystery that has yet to be solved.
For centuries, the buildings lay buried under windblown sand and sediment. Time forgot the ancient builders; their memory crumbled and faded just as the sandstone walls of Aztec did. But it was only for a while. Euro-American settlers would discover the skeletal ruins rising up out of the sand, and, misunderstanding their origin, gave it the name that has endured until today.
A Lesson in Impermanence
Standing within the sandstone walls of Aztec today, it’s impossible not to wonder why anyone would go to such lengths to build something so carefully planned, so architecturally ambitious, only to walk away. People lived real, full lives there, then they packed the necessary things and moved on.
For some, that question feels like a maddening riddle. But to the Hopi people—modern day descendants of the Ancestral Pueblo—there’s nothing mysterious about it at all. The ancestors were simply on a journey that had paused for a time. But “it didn’t mean that they didn’t have time to set up a society that was quite sophisticated in nature.” A place can be both home and temporary, made meaningful through its very impermanence.
That idea mirrors something fundamental and inescapable: the simple truth that nothing lasts. In Buddhism, impermanence is the foundation on which everything else rests—the understanding that all things are in motion, taking on new forms, and eventually disappearing. Not just buildings and societies, but emotions, hopes, ideas, and the sense of security that we build around ourselves. Suffering begins when we cling to permanence where none exists.
It’s the same reason Buddhist monks spend days constructing intricate sand mandalas only to sweep them away once complete. The beauty doesn’t lie in preservation; it lies in the making, the attention to the task, and the acceptance that even the most careful work is temporary.
The people who built Aztec knew this intuitively. They lived by the cycles of the earth, experiencing periods of abundance and long periods of scarcity. Droughts—like the great drought of the Altithermal period—forced migration, experimentation, and adaption. It also prompted new innovations and technologies, many that we take for granted today.
Yet impermanence doesn’t diminish the value. If anything, it sharpens the experience of our temporary existence. The people who built Aztec poured their labor, intelligence, and identity into a place they understood would not be their home forever.
Modern-day challenges may wear a fresh mask: political and social upheaval, economic instability, large-scale ecological disruption, and global pandemics. We also stand at the brink of another climate change event. How will we adapt to these inevitable changes?
The walls of Aztec will eventually be lost to time, but will remain long enough for us to learn from them. The rest is up to us—what we carry forward, and how we adapt when changing circumstances ask us to move on.
The Quieting of Aztec
The woman sat on a braided rush mat on the floor, her feet braced against the white plastered wall. She rocked and scraped the grinding stone against the hard grain, crushing it into a fine powder against the smooth curved stone between her thighs. Her arms were strong from many years of grinding the corn into meal.
Her daughter sat at her side, her black hair falling into her eyes as she pulled the tough protective fibers away from the dried corn. The woman asked her daughter to take the shreds to great-grandmother’s place—the room where her mother’s mother was placed when she passed after the long journey from the old home in the north.
The corn was from last year’s harvest. The yield from the fields was less than it had been only a few summers ago, and the kernels were smaller. The men and boys had spent hard labor reshaping the earth, digging irrigation ditches deeper and wider than before. But the river’s water was vanishing quickly under the hot sun. There were fewer deer and rabbits to chase away in the cornfields. The creatures were leaving, and the people would soon follow.
The man sat behind her in front of a wide stone table, smoothing his fingerprints away from the soft coiled clay of the bowl with a polishing stone. He stopped for a moment to check the symmetry of the pottery in his hands. There, in the coolness of their home, the clay would not dry too quickly before he had finished. In two days’ time, the man would take it to the pit to heat with the others in the flames of dry mesquite wood. The last bowl had broken, as so many others had before, and needed to be replaced.
The woman paused from her work for a moment and remembered the child that had come before the girl. The child was a boy. When he had joined the spirit world, he was only a baby. She had laid him gently in a pit scooped out below the hearth, wrapped in a soft cloth and bound with cord. She knew that the smoke of her fire had helped his spirit to find the way back to the lands of the ancestors. Her thoughts turned to the boy every time she cooked food to feed her family.
The woman poured water from a pitcher into the ground corn to make batter, mixing in ash of the juniper bush, and spread the liquid with her fingers across the hot cooking stone in the hearth. The movements of her hands were deft, her thickened fingers felt no pain from the heat.
The bread was not for her to eat. When it was finished she would make many more for the man to take to the ceremony in the evening. The ceremony would be very important. The men would ask the spirits for guidance on the long journey. She had much to do to prepare for the leaving. She was anxious. The man told her that she should not worry because the spirits of the ancestors would be watching over them on the way to their new home.
