A beautiful day here on the Left Coast, the sun is finally burning through the clouds, just in time for afternoon...and, another glorious sunset...)
Posted on 02/19/2003 12:10:55 PM PST by vannrox
By LEE BOWMAN DENVER - The well-preserved villages of the Anasazi and other native peoples who lived in what is now the high desert of the U.S. Southwest more than a thousand years ago suggest that the canyon cities were suddenly abandoned. But new evidence presented by researchers at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science on Monday indicates that occupation of many of the ancient pueblos was an on-again, off-again thing over the centuries. "There's been an erroneous impression that all or most of the pre-Hispanic archaeological sites were occupied for relatively short periods of time," said Linda Cordell, director of the University of Colorado Museum in Boulder. "The pre-Hispanic farmers did not disappear, rather, they moved and maintained their life ways by frequently shifting around this vast desert and mountain landscape," said Arizona State University researcher Michelle Hegmon, who studies sites in the Mimbres region of southwestern New Mexico. People in the region have often been referred to as "urban nomads," Cordell said, and it has been difficult for archaeologists to untangle occupation histories at sites that were lived in for just a decade or two, from those occupied for centuries, even using modern survey techniques. Cordell argues that people persisted in the desert by changing how they farmed - by using irrigation canals, placing crops at the mouths of usually dry riverbeds and even spreading gravel mulch over fields to reduce runoff and preserve warmth at ground level to ward off frosts. "Much of the land they cultivated successfully for centuries is only sparsely inhabited and cultivated today, despite modern technology," Cordell said. Mark Varien, research director of the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center in Cortez, Colo., took cues from a massive survey of tree rings and household objects at 8,000 sites. He estimated that people of the Mesa Verde region tended to increase the length of time they stayed in a particular area over the centuries. Fewer trees harvested at a given place and time indicates that the population was in decline, while more broken pottery suggests a longer stay. "Our data indicates that individual communities persisted for long periods of time," Varien said. "The centuries-long persistence of communities is a sharp contrast to the incessant movement of houses." The Mesa Verde region, stretching from southern Colorado and Utah into northern New Mexico, was permanently inhabited by ancestral Puebloan people in small villages as early as 600 A.D. While the typical occupation of a household around 600 A.D. was limited to less than 10 years, by the 11th century, this had increased to about 20 years, or about one human generation, Varien said. By 1200 A.D., the length of occupation had increased to 50 years in some villages, and suggests that houses and property rights were passed from one generation to another. One of the greatest cities of the region, Chaco Canyon in northern New Mexico, featured a dozen huge, multi-storied sandstone buildings known as "great houses" that surrounded a plaza. It appears that 100 or more members of an elite ruling class lived in each great house, supported by another 1,000 or more people living in single-family dwellings outside the city center. Steven Lekson, curator of anthropology at the University of Colorado museum, said the city appears to have been a religious, economic and social capital that ruled over other Pueblo villages up to hundreds of miles away. While some researchers have suggested that severe drought and cold destabilized the budding empire, Lekson and colleague Catherine Cameron suggest the collapse of Chaco began with a spiritual split between the rulers and a second group with new religious ideas that sprang up in the southern part of the territory around 1125. There was warfare as "Chaco could no longer control its region," Lekson said. Yet the rulers managed to set up a second capital city at Aztec Pueblo that was connected to Chaco by a great road 60 miles long. That city dominated the region until 1275. Another major drought around 1275 uprooted the Chaco people again, with thousands moving to new pueblos to the west and east. But a large number, including the ruling elite, marched 450 miles south to build an even bigger city at Paquime in the Chihuahua state of Mexico that endured until about 1450. Cordell noted that even though the villages were abandoned, the pueblos are still revered by the builders' descendants, who live and farm along the rivers of the Southwest to this day. On the Net: www.aaas.org
NATIONAL
New theories on the Anasazi
Scripps Howard News Service
February 18, 2003
Ruling elite? Building cities? I thought only white folks did that sort of thing. The Indians were all pacifists who got along great until whitey ruined everything. Right?
A beautiful day here on the Left Coast, the sun is finally burning through the clouds, just in time for afternoon...and, another glorious sunset...)
I think it's probably an accurate distinction -- the dividing point for most of these cultures is dated from the Spanish Conquistadors, not from Columbus.
The "Anasazi" departed the four-corners region over 200 years before Columbus. The Conquistadors encountered the amerinds that came in after the Anasazi cleared out.
The word "Anasazi" is no longer politically correct, BTW -- the local Forest Service personel that give tours of the sites are required to refer to them as "ancestral puebloans."
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