Swain Wolfe - The Parrot Trainer

Researching The Parrot Trainer

A question and an image were the seeds of The Parrot Trainer.

The question was: what is the value of culture? Why do we have culture, and what do we pay for the privilege, are questions that generally color the underlying observations, descriptions, and humor of the characters in the novel.

Beginning with the question of culture, I was looking for characters and a situation that would embrace the many conflicting ways of thinking about culture, its value and the penalties it demands from the individual. Archaeology and its foes became a point of departure for me when I learned about the Kennewick Man conflict in Eastern Washington State – a fight between the local native tribes and several archaeologists over the ownership of the bones of the ninety-three-hundred-year-old male found on the shore of the Columbia River.

Having lived and worked in New Mexico and knowing something of the conflicts between archaeologists and antiquities looters – also known as pot hunters – I began searching through books and monographs on Southwestern archaeology. Most of what I encountered involved various pueblo dwellers and the ancient Anasazi of Chaco Canyon and the later cliff houses period.

But one book had a photograph of a painted Mimbres bowl. The image inside the bowl was of an animal with a long tail on which sat a parrot. The animal had a man's face. The animal/man and the parrot appeared to be in the midst of a conversation. The creature was quite playful and somewhat menacing.

Two and a half intense years of everything Mimbres followed. I went to New Mexico to interview archaeologists, to look at museum collections, and to search out obscure books on this tribe that was said to have vanished in AD 1130.

One warm winter day near the main square in Santa Fe, I was looking through the Mimbres section in Dumont Maps and Books, found J.J. Brody's Mimbres Painted Pottery, and leafing through, discovered a bowl with the painting of a parrot trainer. She became my obsession and the pivotal character of the novel.

The image is from a nine-hundred-year-old clay bowl (upper right) made by a Mimbres Indian potter, an evocative portrait of a young woman balancing a parrot in a hoop. I believe the woman was painted by someone who loved her deeply. It was the gesture made by her stance, a sensuous, playful, gesture, that drew me to her. Perhaps she was dancing.

Cynthia Bettison, the Director of the museum at Western New Mexico University in Silver City, became my first guide to the Mimbres culture. The museum houses the largest permanent display of Mimbres artifacts in the world. Cynthia devoted many hours to answering my questions and shooting down my more extreme crackpot theories as I gained enough knowledge to make outlandish leaps, kindly referred to as fanciful.

The basements of museums house objects that often never see the light of a display case, and for the most part are not of interest to the general public, but for the obsessed they are a treasure trove that lead to new insights and theories while destroying others. Basements were the place to be. One of the larger Mimbres collections, rarely seen for lack of display space, is housed in the basement of the Maxwell Museum at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. They also have an extensive, cross-referenced photographic collection of Mimbres bowls. At last count, they had photographed six thousand Mimbres bowls.

The Museum of Natural History has an enormous collection of artifacts, including a few Mimbres, that languish in hundreds of thousand of drawers in a building the size of a football field that's three stories high outside Washington, D.C.

I returned to Silver City several times to haunt the museum and to discuss theories of the Mimbres Culture with Dr. Bettison, but that was only part of the reason for my excursions to Silver, as it is known in the area. Hidden away in the hills were those elusive men and women who were once pot hunters, who for obvious reasons were difficult to find. Serendipity was an important element in discovering people who would dare talk about their activities. Of course, late nights and heavy drinking were involved – something shared with many in the archaeology trade. One claimed a collection of bowls larger than that at the Maxwell. But I have forgotten their names, what few gave me their names. Even their faces have blurred into gentle obscurity.

Equally as interesting, though less melodramatic, were the encounters with J.J. Brody, Steven LeBlanc, and Anthony Berlant – the three men who founded the Mimbres Foundation and saved several Mimbres sites from the previously mentioned "pot hunters".

I would not like to choose between the official saviors of ancient cultures and those who remove antiquities from the physical context of their discovery. To the archaeologist, context is everything – the key to information, the writing of books, their jobs and status, and most importantly, we all want to believe, to their passions. To the pot hunter/looter it is the object that counts most, as it was to the vast majority of museum curators until the middle of the twentieth century.

I found the looters’ motivations were varied, sometimes misguided, conflicted, and complex. Of course, a lot of them were in it for the money, but many had simply pursued a family tradition of going out into the hills on weekends to dig up things no one else seemed to care about. For some, it was the love of beautiful objects, and for all, I think, it was the desire to uncover a mystery. More than one "looter" has gone on to acquire a degree in archaeology, and many archaeologist have their own secret collections. The data produced by archaeology and the lust for ancient objects represent a conflict that is part of the romantic allure of the field.

It wasn’t until I had finished my research and written the better part of the story that I began to understand the meaning of the Parrot Trainer’s gesture.

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