Hidden History: The Amad and the Gallina
I have been wondering who the Amad might have been in the times of Gehn and earlier.
There is a group of ancient New Mexican peoples called the Gallina, who were wiped out in the late 1200s it seems. One of the intriguing bits is that their architectural structures were somewhat unique compared to the other native peoples of those times. They are noted for their rounded stone towers, though the exact purpose of those towers is debated.
Ruins of a Gallina tower:
Ruins of a hidden village:
Another very interesting bit of the Gallina history is how they seem to have been hated and feared by the other natives. No one knows why, though I suspect some of the current-day tribes know but aren’t telling… for I found an interesting reference to an Anglo researcher speculating that the Jemez peoples were descendants of the Gallina; her report was met with anger by the Jemez peoples who insisted adamantly that they most certainly were not of Gallina ancestry. Sure sounds to me as though they know a great deal more about the Gallina than they are revealing to outsiders…
Earlier that month, I had made a brief trip into the Gallina region, a broad valley extending north from Cuba, New Mexico. The area remains a cultural backwater well off the tourist track: poor villages, largely Hispanic, are scattered along the trickling headwaters of Capulin Creek. My guide was U.S. Forest Service archaeologist Bill Wyatt.
Archaeology in the Gallina area began relatively late. In 1937, Frank Hibben dug the Cerritos site, finding burned rooms and towers and eighteen bushels of burned corn. Two of the towers contained human skeletons; one still had three arrows embedded in its chest, another two arrows in the hip, yet another a severe wound above one eye. Hibben also found the skeleton of a female still holding a bow and some arrows.
From Hibben’s time to the present day, no part of the Anasazi domain has produced as much evidence of prehistoric violence as Gallina. More than half the excavated sites contain the remains of murdered men, women, and children. And though the valley lies far to the east and south of the Colorado Plateau, it too ceased to be occupied around 1300.
As I toured the valley with Wyatt, I realized that I had come across no stranger ruins anywhere in the Southwest. The normal height for Anasazi walls is about five feet. In Gallina, they average nine, and the walls are thicker than could possibly be required just to hold up the roofs. Each living site is guarded by a tall circular structure that may have been a lookout tower. In gloomy, cul-de-sac side canyons, small villages huddle on cramped ledges. “This whole place just breathes paranoia,” Wyatt said at one point. And later: “You get the feeling these were the bad guys. It’s as if the others said, ‘OK, you can live in this area, but we don’t want you showing up anywhere else.’”
From Gallina I drove south to Jemez Pueblo, where I met William Whatley, a long-haired maverick who for nine years has worked at the Pueblo, the last four as official Jemez tribal archaeologist. Like Bruce Bradley, Whatley had learned how to listen and not to ask rude questions. By fiercely championing Jemez claims for land and sacred objects, Whatley slowly gained the trust of the people.
Earlier ethnographers had concluded that the Jemez were the descendants of the Gallina Anasazi. Whatley flatly contradicted this assertion. As we sat on the porch of the visitor center, he told me the parts of the Jemez migration epic that he was allowed to share. “They have no Gallina stories,” he said. “You’ve seen those sites? They don’t look anything like Jemez dwellings. These people aren’t descended from Gallina.
“Over the years, the elders have given me pieces of the migration story. The whole thing takes twelve hours to tell. But the gist is this. The people came from the Four Corners area, somewhere near Sand Canyon. As they migrated south and east, they left markers. I’ve actually found some of these on the ground, just from the elders’ descriptions—markers that no living Jemez have ever seen.
“On their way here, an advance party of Jemez came through the Gallina area. At first they were treated hospitably by the people living there; then the Gallina turned around and killed the Jemez. The Gallina people didn’t realize that the large main body of Jemez was coming right behind. That main body eliminated all of Gallina, maybe in only a few days.”
I mused on the Jemez oral tradition, which, before Whatley, no Anglo had been privileged to learn. I realized that it explained a lot. It accounted for the end of the Gallina in 1300 and for the extensive evidence there of violent death. And it might be one more piece of the complex puzzle of the abandonment.
--David Roberts, “In Search of the Old Ones”, 2010
Many of the excavations done of ancient Gallina settlements reveal blitzkrieg-like massacres, where villagers were suddenly slaughtered and their bodies left to rot; or were dumped into their towers and burned. What could have inspired such fear and hatred in the other natives? What made the Gallina so different?
Perhaps they were a lost colony of D’ni settlers? Particularly if they had kept some of the D’ni technology and developed some variants of their own, they would have seemed odd to the other natives. Archeologists seem to think that the Gallina tended to keep to themselves, were reclusive, which ties in with the D’ni tendency toward isolationism.
At any rate, if any of this speculation holds water, it could explain how Gehn came to meet Keta during his surface wanderings. If her people were all but extinct, then she would have lived in fear, either by living in a secret, hidden location, or perhaps even as a maligned slave of another native tribe. Either way, Gehn would have pitied her as someone whose life mirrored his own history. And so perhaps Keta led Gehn to a cache of her people’s old technology.
Certainly, nothing now remains of that technology on the surface here in New Mexico. So once Gehn found it back in the 1700s, he must have removed it to Riven. It could well be that he spent many of those wandering surface years collecting all the Amad technology he could find. Many years later, long after Keta’s death, he wrote about the connections he believed the Amad had with the D’ni. Perhaps these early years helped to inspire his later obsession with all things D’ni.
One of Gehn's linking book "cages", powered on:
One of Gehn's linking book "cages", powered off:
One of Gehn's linking book "cages", powered on, viewed from the back; note the power cable:
Gehn's personal hand-powered imager, containing Keta's recording:
Hand-powered schoolroom imager, containing Gehn's recording:
Gehn's temple imager, closeup:
Amad technology seems to feature the rounded or “spider” cage structure, which apparently localizes and focuses energy streams of various sorts. With the imagers, the photons are focused inside the ball structure; with the linking books, the power activates the book’s linking ability. Apparently, most forms of this technology require power cabling; a connection to an external power source. This is most easily seen with the linking book cages. However, the smallest imagers, in the schoolroom and in Gehn’s bedroom, are hand-powered via a simple crank.
