The Anasazi
Time-worn pueblos and dramatic cliff towns, set amid the stark, rugged mesas and canyons of Colorado and New Mexico, mark the settlements of some of the earliest inhabitants of North America, the Anasazi (a Navajo word meaning “ancient ones”). The Anasazi ("Ancient Ones"), thought to be ancestors of the modern Pueblo Indians, inhabited the Four Corners country of southern Utah, southwestern Colorado, northwestern New Mexico, and northern Arizona from about AD 200 to AD 1300, leaving a heavy accumulation of house remains and debris. Recent research has traced the Anasazi to the "archaic" peoples who practiced a wandering, hunting, and food-gathering life-style from about 6000 BC until some of them began to develop into the distinctive Anasazi culture in the last millennium BC. During the last two centuries BC, the people began to supplement their food gathering with maize horticulture.
Ancestors of the Mogollón, Hohokam, and Puebloan peoples begin horticulture in the lands now known as New Mexico and Arizona. Unlike a random harvest from wild crops, predictable yields from gardens of corn, beans, and squash let families increase in numbers. Cultural arts flourish.
Mogollón, Hohokam, and Puebloan ancestors develop a planting pattern to compensate for an arid climate. They trellis bean vines on corn stalks and plant big-leafed squash over the other plants’ fragile roots to shade them and hold in precious water. They supplement garden plants with game and wild piñons, and desert succulents, returning seasonally to regular places to gather wild crops. Although corncobs in this era are tiny compared with those selected and bred in later centuries, regular harvests can support growing families.
Although they continued to move around in pursuit of seasonally available foods, the earliest Anasazi concentrated increasing amounts of effort on the growing of crops and the storage of surpluses. They made exquisite baskets and sandals, for which reason they have come to be known as "Basketmakers." They stored their goods (and often their dead) in deep pits and circular cists - small pits often lined with upright stone slabs and roofed over with a platform of poles, twigs, grass, slabs or rocks, and mud. Basketmaker II houses were somewhat more sturdy than those of their Archaic predecessors, being rather like a Paiute winter wickiup or a Navajo hogan. Very few have been excavated.
| Pecos Classification | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Basketmaker I | pre-1000 BC | (obsolete term for Archaic) | |
| Basketmaker II | c. 1000 BC to AD 450 | ||
| Basketmaker III | c. AD 450 to 750 | ||
| Pueblo I | c. AD 750 to 900 | ||
| Pueblo II | c. AD 900 to 1150 | ||
| Pueblo III | c. AD 1150 to 1300 | ||
| Pueblo IV | c. AD 1300 to 1600 | ||
| Pueblo V | c. AD 1600 to present | (historic Pueblo) | |
Yet by the year 1300, they had abandoned their settlements, leaving their pottery, implements, even clothing — as though they intended to return — and seemingly vanished into history. Their homeland remained empty of human beings for more than a century — until the arrival of new tribes, such as the Navajo and the Ute, followed by the Spanish and other European settlers.
The story of the Anasazi is tied inextricably to the beautiful but harsh environment in which they lived. Early settlements, consisting of simple pithouses scooped out of the ground, evolved into sunken kivas (underground rooms) that served as meeting and religious sites. Later generations developed the masonry techniques for building square, stone pueblos. But the most dramatic change in Anasazi living was the move to the cliff sides below the flattopped mesas, where the Anasazi carved their amazing, multilevel dwellings.
The Anasazi lived in a communal society. They traded with other peoples in the region, but signs of warfare are few and isolated. And although the Anasazi certainly had religious and other leaders, as well as skilled artisans, social or class distinctions were virtually nonexistent.
During the 1100s and 1200s the Anasazi population began once again to aggregate into large villages. This period is known as Pueblo III, and it lasted until the final abandonment of the Four Corners country by the Anasazi during the late 1200s. Numerous small unit pueblos continued to be occupied during this period, but there was a tendency for them to become more massive and to enclose the kivas within the room block. A number of very large villages developed. It was during this period that most of the cliff villages such as the famous examples at Mesa Verde National Park and Navajo National Monument were built.
The cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde (Spanish for “green table”) are some of the most notable and best preserved in the North American Continent. Sometime during the late 1190s, after primarily living on the mesa top for 600 years, many Ancestral Pueblo people began living in pueblos they built beneath the overhanging cliffs. The structures ranged in size from one-room storage units to villages of more than 150 rooms. While still farming the mesa tops, they continued to reside in the alcoves, repairing, remodeling, and constructing new rooms for nearly a century. By the late 1270s, the population began migrating south into present-day New Mexico and Arizona. Between A.D. 1100 and A.D. 1300, during the Classic Period, the population may have reached several thousand. It was mostly concentrated in compact villages of many rooms, often with the kivas built inside the enclosing walls rather than out in the open. By 1300, the Ancestral Puebloan occupation of Mesa Verde ended.
By AD 1400 almost all the Anasazi from throughout the Southwest had aggregated into large pueblos scattered through the drainages of the Little Colorado and Rio Grande rivers in Arizona and New Mexico. Although the Anasazi dispersed from their ancestral homeland, their legacy remains in the remarkable archaeological record that they left behind, and in the Hopi, Zuni, and other Pueblo peoples who are their descendants.
Religious and social motives undoubtedly played a part in the building of the cliff communities and their final abandonment. But the struggle to raise food in an increasingly difficult environment was probably the paramount factor. As populations grew, farmers planted larger areas on the mesas, causing some communities to farm marginal lands, while others left the mesa tops for the cliffs. But the Anasazi couldn’t halt the steady loss of the land’s fertility from constant use, nor withstand the region’s cyclical droughts. Analysis of tree rings, for example, shows that a drought lasting 23 years, from 1276 to 1299, finally forced the last groups of Anasazi to leave permanently.
The climate during the Pueblo III period was somewhat unstable with erratic rainfall patterns and periods of drought. This weather problem climaxed with a thirty-year drought starting about 1270 that coincided with a cooling trend that significantly shortened the growing season. Perhaps the expanding population had pressed the limits of the land's capacity to support the people so that they were unable to survive the climatic upheavals of the thirteenth century.
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