Anasazi Indian Culture

Introduction

This culture (Anasazi means “Ancient Ones”) began emerging about 100 BC around the modern juncture of Ariz., N.Mex., Colo., and Utah. It paralleled the Mogollon Culture in creating sedentary agricultural villages and developing handcrafts. The Anasazi were the most advanced Indian basket-makers to AD 750, and were the first Indians to build pueblos from stone or adobe, instead of pit-houses, after 750. Between 1276 and 1299, an extended drought led to the abandonment of mesa-top pueblos like Mesa Verde, Colo., and the people's resettlement along the Rio Grande in N.Mex.

Evidence of their Existence

In the dry heat of the desert canyons, evidence of their civilization is all around. Their stone and mortar buildings, granaries, and ceremonial kivas sit abandoned, largely untouched and decayed. Pottery, arrowheads, grinding stones, and many other century old artifacts lie in the stillness as if the inhabitants of these walls had picked up and left only weeks ago. Petroglyphs and rock art, drawn a millennium before and sheltered beneath rock overhangs, give mute expression to a culture once rich in symbolism and spirituality.

The archaeological record shows little evidence of disease or war, so what caused these people to abandon the place where they had lived and built a civilization over centuries? A number of alternatives are possible: death, migration, or aggregation into larger sites. Cannibalism and climatic change give way to the most common explanations developed as well as witch craft and the raiding of their pueblos by Toltecs.

A few pictographs, some slab-lined storage cists, plus some ambiguous evidence turned up in an archaeological excavation of a cliff shelter suggest that a small community of Pre-Puebloan Basketmakers succeeded the hunter-gatherers in the canyon. These people, the earliest Anasazi, presumably cultivated the uplands and canyon floors on a small scale.

Middle of the First Century

As the middle of the first century A.D. passed, introduction of ideas from the south gradually transformed the Basketmaker culture into the first of the Puebloan culture. Much evidence of this culture has been found in nearby Canyon de Chelly. Houses became more substantial than those of earlier eras. Farming developed, and pottery surpassed the remnants of basketry that had characterized the previous phase. During the period between about 600 and 1000 A.D., there is evidence of an increasingly heavy utilization of domesticates as well as more intensive agricultural strategies.

The reason, many believe, for modification was population. It is thought that they had no choice but to turn to corn as a substitute for pinon because the resource was becoming scarce. As populations grew, people were also forced into areas where fewer hunted and gathered resources were available (the deep canyons of De Chelly for example), which increased their dependence on agricultural products. With more population, the need for additional agricultural expansion grew along with continuation of building and intensifying their city.

During periods when rainfall was abundant, population expanded onto marginal lands, while during hard times of less moisture, a collapse of population into areas of better land occurred. As soil depletion took place, ...