When the sheep came: Navajo pastoralism in the record

The ruins this notebook describes belong to maize farmers; the flocks a visitor sees today belong to a second Southwest that began with the Spanish entrada. Sheep, horses and the herding dogs that came with them reached the northern plateau in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the Diné, the Navajo, built a pastoral economy on them so successfully that by the mid-nineteenth century it supported hundreds of thousands of animals. The working dog's trade still runs in the trial field, where herding dog competitions score the same outrun and gather a flock once asked of every dog on this ground. The landscape you drive through to reach a Pueblo III cliff dwelling is, in large part, a document of that later economy, and learning to read both layers at once is one of the region's quiet pleasures.

Where did the sheep and the dogs come from?

Spanish colonists brought churro sheep up the Rio Grande corridor in the 1590s, and the animals spread through trade and raid across the plateau over the following century. The Navajo-Churro breed that descends from those animals is now itself a piece of the record, a landrace shaped by four hundred years of high desert. With the sheep came the working dog: not a breed so much as a function, the animal that holds a flock together on unfenced range. The partnership still runs in the trial field, where the herding competitions named above score the outrun, lift, fetch and shed that a working dog once performed for every flock on this ground.

The pastoral layer is easy to miss because it was built of perishables. A sheep camp leaves a corral of juniper posts, a hogan footprint, a shallow midden of tin and bone; none of it photographs like a great house, and most of it is younger than the documents in a land office. But it is the layer that connects the ruins to the living region, because the families who graze these allotments are the descendants of the people the older record belongs to, a continuity our migrations guide carries back to the Pueblo villages.

How do you read a pastoral landscape beside a ruin?

Look for the water first. Sheep country organises itself around windmills, springs and dirt tanks the way Ancestral Puebloan settlement organised itself around drainages and seeps, and the two geographies often share the same points. Look second for the tracks that braid out from water: a grazed bench above a canyon tells you the range is in use, which changes how you treat a nearby ruin, since an occupied pastoral landscape is somebody's workplace, not a backdrop. And look for the working dog. A border collie sitting at a gate or riding the fender of a ranch truck is the modern end of a tool kit as old as the flock.

Why does the pastoral layer matter to a ruin visitor?

Because it decides access. Much of the northern plateau is Navajo Nation land or private range, and the ruin you can see from the road may sit behind a grazing permit, a locked gate or a family's living memory. The etiquette that governs a park trail, stay on the path, pocket nothing, respect the residents, applies with more force here, a discipline our visit checklist sets out in full. The pastoral landscape is also the reason some ruins survive: grazing kept the ground open and the fences kept the collectors honest, and many alcove sites owe their intact surfaces to a century of being somebody's back pasture.

• Identify whose land you are on before planning a walk: tribal, federal, state and private each carry different rules.
• Read the water first; it locates both the old settlement and the current range.
• Give working dogs room and do not call them; a dog at work is not a pet on the trail.
• Photograph the pastoral layer with the same care as the ruin; the corral is a document too.
• Close every gate you open, and open none you did not have to.

Mistakes to avoid on grazed ground

Do not treat the pastoral landscape as empty; occupied range is a workplace and often a home. Do not approach a flock to photograph it; the dog will correctly read you as the problem. Do not assume a ruin on range land is open because a trail book is old; check the current land status before you commit a day. Do not sample a windmill or tank for water without knowing it is a public source. And do not narrate the plateau as abandoned between the Puebloans and the present; the record our culture guide traces never stopped being inhabited, it only changed its economy.

The second record under the first

Next drive to a ruin, count the sheep country on the way: the windmill, the corral, the dog watching from a truck. You will be reading the newest chapter of the oldest inhabited landscape in the country, and the ruins will make better sense inside it.