As beautiful as these patterns are, this is probably not what the original residents saw. Remnants of colored plaster designs remain on some interior walls. Pueblo Indian oral tradition refers to Pueblo Bonito as the "white city," suggesting that the entire pueblo was originally plastered white.
Perhaps the builders were inspired by natural patterns, such as these
mud cracks in a dry wash.
The shapes of the walls that still stand were designed not by humans,
but by gravity and time. They nonetheless seem to echo the landscape
itself.
The organic forms of this eroded stone resemble the heart-shaped leaves
of the plant at its base. The monsoon rains of July cause a second
bloom in the high desert.
This pattern of pebbles caught in sandstone ripples bears witness to
three eras of water. A hundred million years ago, water deposited
sand on a Cretaceous seashore. The shore deposits were layered by
the lapping water, buried and turned to stone. Millions of years
later, the sandstone was uplifted and exposed at earth's surface.
Water eroded the stone, leaving ridges matching the bedding planes.
Perhaps just this summer, water washed the pebbles along this slope, where
they were caught in the frozen ripples of stone.
These nodules form when mineral-rich water seeps through the porous
sandstone and precipitates out. They have a remarkable resemblance
to the hematite "blueberries" discovered on Mars by the rover! The
watery origin of these nodules is one of the strongest pieces of evidence
for past water on Mars, just as these formations are evidence of past water
in this earthly desert. More
about hematite blueberries
Minerals also stain the fossils that are common in the local sandstone.
They look like mysterious tree roots, but are actually trace fossils, the
casts of burrows bored in the sandy shore of Cretaceous time. The
burrows are very plentiful, but it is hard to figure out who made them--the
digger was not fossilized along with his diggings. Today, similar
burrows are made by an animal in the shrimp family.
