Thanks Theoria.
Posted on 05/08/2015 7:35:15 AM PDT by Theoria
Among the things they left behind are beautiful ruins, a gorgeously woven basket and a nearly impossible to get to granary on a cliff.
David Roberts is a well-known mountaineer who made the first ascents of some of Alaska’s most challenging peaks. For his new book, The Lost World Of The Old Ones: Discoveries in The Ancient Southwest, he set off with a backpack to explore some of the remotest corners of the American Southwest. Rappelling down cliffs to reach ancient granaries, or stumbling across artifacts that have not been touched for 1,000 years, he follows the trail of long vanished peoples.
Talking from his home in Boston, he explains why artifacts should be left where they are found and not locked up in museums; why the Dine leader, Hoskinini, should be remembered in the same way as Geronimo; and why the cave paintings of Desolation Canyon are so precious.
Obvious first question: Who are The Old Ones?
I use the [term] Old Ones because their descendants often refer to their ancestors that way. We’re talking about prehistoric peoples all over the Southwest, including ancestral Puebloans, who used to be referred to as the Anasazi, but also the Fremont, Hohokam and other peoples identified by archaeologists. Some are clearly the ancestors of today’s Puebloan Indians from Hopi to Taos. Others have vanished from the records.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.nationalgeographic.com ...
Ancient Indian settlement found in remote Utah[FR]
Archaeologists Reveal Utah Canyon Filled With Ancient Settlements[FR]
Mr. Wilcox
Waldo Wilcox: Range Creek's Fremont Artifacts
One of his theories that has always interest me:
'The first residents of Range Creek, Waldo believes, were a race of dwarfs he calls "the Little People." "I seen some of their skeletons comin' out of the ground," he said. "They wasn't but four foot tall. I think they got inbred and hungry, and they just went downhill."
At some point, argues Waldo, the Fremont came into Range Creek and killed off the Little People. Then later the Utes wiped out the Fremont. One day while we were out hiking, Waldo pointed out a petroglyph panel with two distinctive styles of rock art. "I tried to show this to ole Duncan [Metcalfe]," Waldo explained. "You got crude stuff and you got good stuff on the same rock. There's two different cultures here.'
South West, ping..
Hopefully, this fellow will be able to answer the questions about the Pimas, and all the various connected Colorado River tribes, which are completely different than the other tribes in the California/Arizona areas.
“Talking from his home in Boston, he explains why artifacts should be left where they are found...”
Why is it that every self-important shmuck who’s ever explored a ruin has some Big Opinion on what should be done with it and every other ruin on Planet Earth....?
Meh. Compare my wife and me. Same culture, but she's an artist through-and-through. She has talent. I'm one of those guys who couldn't draw a stick figure with numbered dots and a ruler.
I'm in full agreement with Red Green. If I can do it, it ain't art.
Pong
Evidenc of moronic Jewish Indians? Anyone??
Joseph smith beuller)?))
I’m suspicious of a person who uses the phrase “Concentration Camp”, everybody knows darn well that most people associate the phrase with Nazis, and in case people miss it, this guy uses “final solution” as well.
“In 1863, this crazy general, James Carlton, came up with a “final solution” to the Navajo problem: To force them to march 300 miles from their homeland to where there was a concentration camp in eastern New Mexico.”
When I visited my home in NW New Mexico, I asked the rangers at the AZTEC RUINS about them and they assured me that there was NO TRIBE called the Gallina People and it was just a made up story for a magazine.
Then years later, after I got internet, I began to find stories about this “non existent” tribe.
http://anthropology.net/2007/07/16/parallel-life-and-death-1275-ad-massacred-gallina-and-vanishing-anasazi/ I wonder what other juicy bits of info are hidden from us because they may be "politically incorrect", like the rampant cannilbalism found in the 4 Corners area.
Why, native american cultures were idyllic paradises until the white man showed up, doncha know. Natives spent their days frolicking in flower-covered meadows, and lived to be 300 years old! Fish jumped into their boats. Rainbows appeared every day over every village.
Life was hard everywhere.
Thanks Theoria.
There is no mystery. They are alive and well in New Mexico and Arizona.
If you want to see the real Anasazi dwellings in situ, not park service enhanced, take the tour hosted by the Ute Mountain tribe. Their reservation is adjacent to the Mesa Verde park. They take a group of 15 or so in a van far back into the reservation and you can walk and climb ladders to the ruins.
They are fantastic
bert’s rule (as valid today as it was 900 years ago on the colorado Plateau.) The kids move away and the old folks die.
That explains why there are so many Anasazi sites scattered all over. The kids moved and the old folks just died. No plague, no horrendous war, no cataclysm.
bert’s rule is perhaps a corollary to Stephen Lekson’s rules:
Every body knew everything
Distance was not a problem
There is no coincedence
"Did a group of thirteenth-century Japanese merge with the people, language, and religion of the Zuni tribe? For many years, anthropologists have understood the Zuni in the American Southwest to occupy a special place in Native American culture and ethnography. Their language, religion, and blood type are startlingly different from all other tribes. Most puzzling, the Zuni appear to have much in common with the people of Japan"
Having a family member married to an archaeologist and Paleo-Indian expert, my husband, cub and I visited many sites over the years in the season his digs were being done-our awe at the beauty and practicality in the design of those places has never left me-some of those people were the ancestors of a couple of my ancestors, too.
The outdoor museum is a wonderful concept-being able to go on a tour where you see everything just the way someone left it centuries ago-unfortunately, once a sight is discovered and viewed, someone with no respect for the past will smell profit to be had, go back when all is quiet and steal as many artifacts as possible to sell on the black market-it happens all the time, which is why the only place we get to see most of it is in a museum, where it can’t be easily stolen...
“Life was hard everywhere”
And those people didn’t have much advance notice of changes in weather patterns-like drought, temperatures far above/below what they were used to, geological disasters, etc. They didn’t realize crowding too many in a space would deplete their resources, result in illness, and the deterioration of their society, either. When it happened, it appears that those who wanted to survive packed their stuff and moved on to another place.
When you think about it, people in big overcrowded cities still don’t seem to have figured that out...
It wouldn’t take much of a drought to make much of the West and SW uninhabitable.
I remember the long drought in S. Texas during the late 50s. You could drive from San Antonio south and fields had virtually zero grasses. Ranchers had to thin their herds and burn the thorns off prickly pear cactus to feed the rest.
We’d get dust storms from the north that spread a fine red dust over everything, got in your house, and your nose and mouth if you were outside. Not as publicized as the Dust Bowl of the 30s, but it was very bad for Texas.
I remember that wells dried up and some folks had to go to their neighbors with deeper/better water in order to have drinking water to survive.
People forget that the old maps of the U.S. showed EVERYTHING west of the Mississippi as the Great American Desert.
I remember droughts and dug wells going dry all during the 1950s and 1960s. Ours included. A neighbor had a deep drilled well and we went to his house and filled milk containers (the big metal ones) to take home.
Yep and a lot of wells started giving bad water with lots of minerals and sulphur.
The family of An old girl friend of mine down near Karnes city had one of the only potable water wells and that’s where a lot of folks brought those milk cans. Might be the same area. :-)
Thanks Texan5! Sounds great.
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