By Gregory McNamee on History
On a winter morning more than a century ago, an Arizona rancher went searching for a lost calf deep in a winding canyon on the Colorado Plateau. Descending into a draw so steep that his horse could not follow, he stumbled upon an astonishing find: a large cliff house that seems almost to hang in midair before a sheer, high sandstone wall. In the ruin, he found baskets, pots, and preserved grains and ears of corn that lay out on wooden benches as if ready to be eaten. It was, he recalled, almost as if its occupants had been chased away in the middle of a meal.
The rancher’s discovery excited the attention of generations of archaeologists. Through their work, much is now known about the people once called Anasazi, now more often referred to as Ancestral Pueblo.Homeimage
That people was a blend of migrants from central Mexico and descendants of the so-called Basketmaker culture. By the 12th century, the Ancestral Pueblo numbered in the many tens of thousands, possibly even more. Having given up the old hunting-and-gathering ways, they settled into scattered farming villages and soon developed great skill as builders.
One of the largest of their cities, now encompassing more than 4,000 archaeological sites spread out over more than 50,000 acres, stands near the spot where the states of Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, and Colorado come together. Mesa Verde, whose name means “green plateau,” rises like a giant island from the floor of the nearby desert in far southwestern Colorado, affording a fine natural defense against enemies and, in the bargain, sweeping views of the rumpled red-sandstone territory below.
The Ancestral Pueblo first began to build permanent structures at Mesa Verde about AD 550. The mesa had a few lakes and springs from which they could draw water, and it harbored great groves of pine that afforded them abundant building materials. About 750 years later, they abandoned it as a severe and long-term drought drove them east to lands bordering the Rio Grande, just at the time that invading peoples arrived to claim the Colorado Plateau as their own.
Mesa Verde lay silent for generations, a place that the neighboring Ute and Navajo feared as haunted. The Spanish explorers of the region placed the great mesa as a landmark on their maps, but even they kept their distance. Only when another rancher, a man named Richard Wetherill, began to poke around on Mesa Verde in 1888 did the great city begin to give up its secrets. Bits and pieces of its remains were soon scattered to the winds, for Wetherill and subsequent explorers shipped great quantities of pottery, arrowheads, and other goods to museums as far afield as New York and London.
Archaeologists found plenty to occupy them all the same. At first they supposed that the Ancestral Pueblo had built their elaborate cliff dwellings to protect grain stores from scavenging rodents, though war may have been a more pressing cause. They also supposed that the Ancestral Pueblo were a religious and ritualistic people, arguing that the high ratio of the circular rooms called kivas to other living areas meant that Mesa Verde was a ceremonial center of some kind. Some modern scholars, however, believe that the kivas more likely served as storage rooms—or perhaps even private spaces for the crowded residents.
Whatever the case, over the centuries the Ancestral Pueblo built a labyrinthine city of pueblos, plazas, and kivas, as well as a sprawling temple that was never completed. By the 12th century, perhaps because of overpopulation and a resulting shortage of housing, the Mesa Verde people began to settle in the caves and rock niches that dot the plateau. The elaborate cliff dwellings they left behind are among the best-preserved ruins in the New World, rivaling the great Mayan architectural complexes of Mexico and Guatemala in sophistication.
South and east of Mesa Verde lies Chaco Canyon, in what is now northwestern New Mexico, enshrining the remains of one of the largest cities in the prehistoric Americas, a place that represents Ancestral Pueblo culture at its height. It contains more than 2,000 monumental structures, with large apartments and ceremonial complexes on the valley floor, and other apartments and grain-storage areas built high in the cliffs above. One such apartment, Pueblo Bonito, stood five stories tall and had more than 800 rooms and some 40 kivas, rivaling contemporary dwellings in Europe. Judging by material remains from Chaco—copper bells and parrot feathers from Mexico, beadwork from the Great Plains, wooden artifacts from east of the Mississippi, and seashells from the Pacific coast—its people were prosperous enough to afford expensive imported goods in great quantities.
Like Mesa Verde, Chaco Canyon holds its share of mysteries so profound that archaeologists refer to the whole matter as “the Chaco phenomenon.” The city was abandoned, too, and no one has settled in it since. Historians have yet to explain why a people who lacked wheeled vehicles should have needed to build a network of straight, graded roads that resemble those of the Inca Empire, yet there they are, often in better condition than portions of the modern unpaved road that leads into the canyon.
Perhaps some scholar will one day stand among the rubble of Chaco and piece together the answers. Even in ruins, it is among the continent’s greatest cultural treasures. So, too, is Mesa Verde, one of the first national parks in the American Southwest, protected by conservation-minded President Theodore Roosevelt in 1906. So important is Mesa Verde that the United Nations included it among the first places to be given the designation World Heritage site.
