By OBBM Network Editorial Staff

Derived from an episode of The Buried Archive.

What if the stone columns in the petrified forest were not just the remnants of ancient trees, but the remnants of a lost architecture? A 1906 photograph of government surveyors in northern Arizona has led to a reexamination of the petrified forest and its mysterious stone columns. The photograph shows a group of surveyors standing at the edge of a petrified forest deposit, with a column-like structure half-buried in the red dust behind them.

The Discovery

The surveyors logged the column as specimen number 47 and moved on, but what they did not log was the presence of an old Hopi man named Talayesva, who was watching them work. Talayesva was not just any Hopi elder; he was one of the last to remember the stone trees and what they really were. According to an ethnographer named Horatio Voth, who had earned the trust of the Hopi people, Talayesva described the removed objects as pillars, not scattered randomly like fallen logs, but arranged in a pattern he called the pattern of the first house.

The Pattern of the First House

The pattern of the first house is a concept that appears in Hopi cosmology, describing a spatial arrangement that was the organizing principle of the structures built during a period known as Tokpella. This period, according to the Hopi, was a time when the boundary between the living and the non-living was different than it is now, and structures grew without the need for soil, water, or sunlight. The Hopi word for this earlier world is Tokpella, which is usually translated as endless space, but the elders who used the word in ceremonial context were not talking about the sky above, but a condition that once existed on the earth itself.

The Evidence

A researcher named Darlene Whitehorse found the photographs and field notes of the surveyors in the archive of the University of Arizona, where they had sat unexamined until 2011. Whitehorse was working on a project about indigenous land use in the Petrified Forest region and was looking for documentation of traditional land use that could support a water rights claim. When she found the photographs and field notes, she noticed that the location coordinates of the most anomalous formations matched almost exactly the locations described in a set of Hopi oral testimonies she had encountered in a separate archive.

The Significance

The discovery of the photographs and the testimony of Talayesva have significant implications for our understanding of the petrified forest and its history. As Whitehorse noted, the evidence points to a period in which the landscape itself was in some sense alive, not metaphorically, but structurally. The closest framework we have for understanding this is crystalline growth, the way certain minerals can self-organize into regular, complex, architecturally coherent structures. What if there was a period in which this kind of self-mineral growth operated at a scale and complexity that went far beyond what we observe in crystals today?

In the words of Talayesva, the removed objects were not just stone trees, but the bones of the first sky. The Hopi word for this earlier world is Tokpella, which implies that what came before was not less real than what came after, but more real. The full episode of The Buried Archive is available on OBBM Network TV.