The Ancient American Anasazi

The ancient Americans that emerged as a culture in what is now called the Four Corners area of the United States are commonly known as the Anasazi people. This is a term from the old Navajo language which variously translates (according to pronunciation and interpretation) as the "ancient ones", "ancient strangers", "ancient enemy", "enemy ancestor" or more broadly as "ancient people who are not us". The modern day Hopi tribe, the closest direct descendants to that legendary culture, prefer the name "Hisatsinom".

The Place

Northwest New Mexico, southwest Colorado, northeast Arizona and southeast Utah make up the Four Corners, the only place in the U.S. where four states meet. About 10,000 BC this region was moist, forested and home to mammoths, bears and a group of nomadic people called the Clovis culture. The climate began to get hotter and dryer which led to the disappearance of the forests, the mammoths and the end of the Clovis as a viable group.

The loosely knit nomadic tribes that journeyed through this same area began to coalesce into what is known as the Anasazi people about 1200 BC. These hunter-gatherers started a primitive form of cultivation wherein they grew maize and squash at the lower altitudes and hunted the higher altitudes in the summer. Using stone tipped spears that were accurately and powerfully thrown with the aid of an atlatl they brought down big horn sheep and rabbits with equal ease. They wove intricate baskets, sandals and some clothing from plant fibers but had no pottery for almost another thousand years.

The Time

During the period between 1200BC and 500 AD they built pit houses with storage spaces that indicate an extended period of residence, developed a shamanistic religious structure evidenced by the petroglyphs and other rock art they created and ground the maize they cultivated using mano and metate. The high incidence of severe arthritis in the female skeletons from this era suggest they spent long hours kneeling and rocking back and forth as they rolled the heavy, rolling pin shaped stone mano across the shallow depression in the metate rock to crush the kernels of maize and other seeds they gathered into flour.

Between 500 and 900 AD the climate became more extreme with less moisture and higher temperatures but the process of civilization continued. The pit houses began to have above ground rooms attached, the bow and arrow came into general use and a simple round bottomed form of pottery, made of sandstone and shale clay, was developed.

The continuing social integration brought more systematized agriculture with canals and reservoirs, villages with kivas and above ground jacal (a variety of wattle and daub) housing. To their normal diet of maize, squash, amaranth, pinyon nuts, Indian ricegrass, sunflower seeds, tansy, mustard seed, small mammals (ie. rabbits), and domesticated turkeys they now added beans which may have been brought to the area by trade with meso-american cultures.

Apartment Living

This type of commerce may have influenced what is called the Chaco Phenomenon that occurred around 900 to 1150 AD. In the Chaco canyon of northwest New Mexico the Anasazi culture reached its peak of social sophistication. Over a period of years they built fifteen complex pueblo "great houses", some five stories high with 100 to 500 rooms each.

To build the major great houses the Anasazi hauled 200,000 trees over 60 miles from the nearest timberland, the logs being fifteen feet long and weighing about 600 pounds each. The Anasazi constructed roads that were thirty feet wide with stone and dirt berms along each side to help convey their materials. These pueblos and roads, many still existing today, show the tremendous organizational capabilities of the Anasazi at this period and remained the largest buildings in north America until the 1800's.

Drought

This was a point in time when the climate had stabilized enough for the residents to engage in an intense agriculture utilizing irrigated terraces that they built to grow squash, beans and the various cultivars of maize they had developed over the centuries. But not for long, in 1130 AD a severe drought lasting fifty years struck the area and foundations for further construction were started but left unfinished as the occupants left Chaco canyon, one group at a time, until it was completely abandoned by 1300.

The famous Mesa Verde cliff houses were built about this time and the Anasazi took up residence in these and other similar defensible positions. The Navajo tribes were moving into the region and as the name "ancient enemy" implies, they were not friendly to the original occupants of the area. Close upon the heels of the Navajo came the Spanish conquistadores. As early as 1528 Cabeza de Vaca and his crew were shipwrecked on the coast of Texas and ventured north to the Four Corners region but it is not known if they had contact with what was left of the Anasazi. In 1539 Fra Marcosde Niza did visit these tribes and soon after nothing more was heard of the Anasazi as a group.

The People

During the late 1800's a Colorado rancher and part time archaeologist, Richard Wetherill, gave us a glimpse of what the people of the Anasazi actually looked like. In his diary from an Anasazi dwelling site at Cottonwood Wash, Utah in December 1893 he wrote, "In the cave we are now working we have taken 28 skeletons with two more in sight. They are a different race from anything I have ever seen. They had feathers, cloth and baskets, no pottery - six of the bodies had stone spear points in them."

From these remains we know they ranged in height from five feet tall to five feet six inches, were stocky, with big bones and were dolichocephalic (long headed). This description is amazingly similar to the Olmec and other cultures from southern Mexico of a thousand years before.

This would coincide with the legends of the descendents of the Anasazi, the Hopi, that claim their ancestors arrived in Central America by boat from the west, before historic record, and before they reached the Americas the ancestors of the Anasazi came from another world. The Anasazi and the Hopi after them have built their kivas with a sipapu, a central hole in the floor, that represents the entrance way from the third world, underground, into this the fourth world.

Kokopelli

Two flute playing Mahus insects, represented by the Kokopelli figure, that carried the power of heat (fire?) led their people into the fourth world and scattered seeds about the barren earth and warmed them to life with the flutes that drew their heat from the center of the earth.

Whether Kokopelli was a Mahus or a Toltec trader bringing goods such as shells, Macaw feathers and beans from meso-america, the mystery of the Anasazi people is far from being solved. Were these people part of a culture that existed in Central America thousands of years earlier before migrating to the north and where did they come from before that? Or did they travel over the land bridge that formed across the Bering Straits and then made contact with another civilization to the south? The answers lie in our own unknown future.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Pueblo_Peoples
www.mnsu.edu/emuseum/cultural/northamerica/anasazi.html
www.desertusa.com/ind1/du_peo_ana.html
www.crystalinks.com/anasazi.html
www.anasazi.org/
www.co.blm.gov/ahc/anasazi.htm
http://sipapu.gsu.edu/
www.cliffdwellingsmuseum.com/anasazi.htm
http://media.graniteschools.org/Curriculum/anasazi/
http://teacher.scholastic.com/researchtools/researchstarters/native_am/