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The history of Anasazi Abstract In this paper I will discuss the development of the Anasazi culture. The ancient remains of prehistoric people found by archaeologists the southern part of the Colorado Plateau appeared in these areas 10 thousand years B. C. First people, who occupied 1500 B. C. a southwest of Colorado, were called Anasazi.
There is not very much information available about the first Anasazi. In my paper I will refer to archaeological books and articles. The problem I would like to discuss is the reason for their abandonment from dwellings from Mesa Verde and Chaco Canyon. Also I would like to touch upon an interesting topic: the "four corners" perfect alignment along same meridian of a distance more than 600 km, created by them so precisely without modern accurate instruments. It will be discussed whether they came up with such an exact alignment based on astronomical observations via North Pole. The name "Anasazi" means "ancient people, " notwithstanding that the word is Navajo and it really means "enemy ancestors. " Many of Native Americans even consider this word to be offensive.
Archaeologist Linda Cordell discusses its etymology: The name "Anasazi" has come to mean "ancient people, " although the word itself is Navajo, meaning "enemy ancestors. " It is unfortunate that a non-Pueblo word has come to stand for a tradition that is certainly ancestral Pueblo. The term was first applied to ruins of the Mesa Verde by Richard Wetherill, a rancher and trader who, in 1888 - 1889, was the first Anglo-American to explore the sites in that area. Wetherill knew and worked with Navajos and understood what the word meant. The name was further sanctioned in archaeology when it was adopted by Alfred V.
Kidder, the acknowledged dean of Southwestern Archaeology. Kidder felt that is was less cumbersome than a more technical term he might have used. Subsequently some archaeologists who would try to change the term have worried that because the Pueblos speak different languages, there are different words for "ancestor, " and using one might be offensive to people speaking other languages. My own preference is to use Ancient Pueblo or Ancestral Pueblo, where possible, but this too is problematical. Such usage obscures the observation that the Mogollon tradition is also considered by many to be ancestral to Pueblo peoples. Further, archaeologists are themselves tradition bound and would not be dissuaded from continuing to use the term Anasazi, which features so prominently in their professional literature. " (Cordell, 1984, pp 134 - 135) The culture of Anasazi is divided into two basic periods: Basket Maker Period and Developmental Pueblo Period.
In a southwest of Colorado the Basket Maker Period proceeded from 1500 B. C. to 700 A. D. Masters "basket makers" were very skilful in the craft. They made baskets for storage and preparation of food, and also for delivery of water.
Initially they lived basically in the small caves formed in mountains of a plateau as a result of erosion. Basketmaker's raised and processed cereal cultures and beans. For 500 years B. C. ancient inhabitants began to dig out holes - caves for the dwelling - and to cover them with roofs; they seized potter's craft and began to use pottery instead of baskets. People, living in Colorado in these times, already built the houses of stones and the clay plates dried up on the sun.
Their settlements basing in areas of plateau caves are referred to as "pueblo." Approximately from the beginning of 12 century people began to gradually move the settlements to other areas. By 1200 they began to create new villages - along the walls of a canyon, under eaves of caves of a plateau. Inhabitants of such settlements were called "Cliff Dwellers. It is supposed that by the end of 13 -th century constantly growing population, change of the climate and often droughts forced Anasazi people to migrate to area of Pueblo where modern descendants of Cliff Dwellers " live now. Map of the Southwest Tradition. Source: Desert USA web Like their civilizing kin in the arid region to the south, the first Anasazi peoples underwent the currents of radical transformation in the first part of the first millennium.
Probably in answer to Mesoamerican inducement from Mexico, they started turning away from the nomadic life of the ancient food searching and crowd life, the migratory rounds calibrated to the faction of game and the maturing of wild vegetation, the material insolvency caused by the limitations of the load they could have on their backs. They ploughed the land and began to grow plants. As time went by, they obtained more belongings, conserved food, made ceramic, leaned to use the bow and arrow, domesticated birds and dogs. They kept hunting and gathering, not as their only options for obtaining food, but as addition to cultivated grain, beans, gourd and other crops. At the beginning of their history, the Anasazi were remarkable mainly through the originality of their basketry, which they created from the plants filament. Later they made more noticeable contribution through the building of perhaps the most magnificent ancient communities in the United States. (1) Cautiously having looked over the edge of the abrupt deserted canyon, one can see the outlines of the buildings going beyond the rocks.
First you will see only lines of stones, the circles similar to amphitheatres, wide passes between them - and suddenly, in one instant, everything will change. You will see brightly dressed people, engaged in something and fussing in streets, houses and areas. These canyons are not simple faces made of sandstone; it is a portal into the human history. About 14 centuries ago nomads of tribe Anasazi chose these places for a constant settlement and cultivation of crop. The tribe prospered, and people began to settle, building houses in rocks in many places, Mesa Verde is the most famous and significant among them.
Cities were created, and the culture of Anasazi prospered for hundreds years. Then, approximately 400 - 500 years ago, Anasazi disappeared. Today Mesa Verde is one of the main archaeological reserves in the system of parks in the USA. (3) The centre of the Anasazi region was situated across the southern Colorado Plateau and the highest Rio Grande drainage. It occupied north-eastern Arizona, north-western New Mexico, south-eastern Utah and south-western Colorado place of forested cliff ranges, brook-dissected mesas, droughty grasslands and scattered river bottoms. Wetherill, a Colorado rancher and a famous archaeologist of the Southwest, had already discovered some of the main Anasazi "cliff dweller" villages of Mesa Verde, in south-west of Colorado. (Frank Mcnitt tells the story in Richard Wetherill: Anasazi. ) Now, in neighbouring Utah, he had discovered the Basketmaker's, who emerged from their 6000 -year-old Desert Archaic gathering and hunting habits about the spin of the first millennium. They started getting settled although their unquiet spirits still summoned them from their small settlements and fields to seasonal hunts and wild plant harvests.
Richard Wetherill reported from his investigation in south-eastern Utah's Cottonwood Wash in December, 1893: "Our success has surpassed all expectations In the cave we are now working we have taken 28 skeletons and two more in sight They are a dissimilar race from anything I have ever seen. They had feather cloth and baskets, no pottery six of the bodies had stone spear heads in them" (Mcnitt 1957 p. 2) Earlier A. D. 500, Anasazi Basketmaker groups perhaps extended families found their home in caves and rock ledges "rock shelters" within canyon walls, desirably facing the south for them to benefit from on warmth from the sun during the winter. From time to time, like the early Mogollon and Hohokam population, the early Basketmaker's resided in miniature semi-sedentary villages in open areas. They left many proofs of their dwelling in the northern part of the Anasazi region, from Utah to Colorado, particularly in the neighbouring area of Durango. In one site, situated on mounds above the Animas River in south-western Colorado, "The floors of 35 houses were found, many of them superimposed over others, " according to Gordon Willey.
An early Basketmaker group made the houses, something like circular and typically eight or nine feet in diameter, over depressions with a shape of saucer. They were called "pothouses. Willey described their appearance: "They were walled with a curious wood-and-mud mortar masonry. Entrance must have been through a small side door, without a passage entryway. The constructions were heated by placing large hot stones in a small central heating-pit. " (Willey, 1992, p. 95) The Basketmaker's regularly scooped open storage bins with a form of bottle or egg in the floors of their houses, clothing the pit walls with plaster or plates of stone. In some examples, they built bigger structures, 25 to 30 feet in diameter, which they may have applied for village gatherings or ritual.
The early Basketmaker's dressed themselves in fur- or turkey-feather dresses, string aprons, loin-cloths and round-toed, plant-fiber sandals. They had ornaments created of shell, stone or bone. They grew their yield at this time, mainly corn and pumpkin in garden-like patches rather than in large grounds. Apparently uninformed about the bow and arrow, the men hunted the larger game brutes with the spear, which they hurled with the throwing device we call the "atlatl. " Women picked wild food plants such as pigweed, pinyon nuts, Grass of Indian rice, seeds of sunflower and tansy mustard, and they used stone plates to champ domestic and wild seeds into meal. Unaware of pottery or unwilling to accept it the women cooked meal and put it into pitch-lined baskets, preparing food with stones dropped directly into the food mixture. In an evident signal of a passion for diversion, the early Basketmaker's played games with a diversity of small disk-like "gaming pieces. " Possibly as part of ceremony, they smoke pipe with a form of tubular, blowing smoke rings into the air, imitating and entreating rain clouds in the sky.
In an unmistakable expression of their affection for beauty, they carved the flowers and leaves from pieces of wood. They buried their dead in a bent position, fully dressed, either within or close to their lodges. They left a body with oblations of basketry, arms, tools and ritual objects. (5) The Basketmaker people dropped behind their southern neighbours by centuries in making and using pottery, but they raised the ancient craft of basket making to high art. They made one style of basket from tightly coiled pliable plant fibers and another from plaited plant fibers.
They fit their baskets to a wide array of forms and sizes, often incorporating elaborate designs into the texture. They used the baskets, not only for carriage of possessions, preparation of meals and offerings in burials, but also for sifting of seeds and flour, storage of grain and personal and ritual items, carrying of water and, as Wetherill tells, even as promising head covers and as nominal caskets. Archaeologists have found the baskets primarily in early Basketmaker sites within dry caves and rock shelters, which have saved normally perishable items through time. (5) About the middle of the first millennium, the Basketmaker's fastened their pace of change and enlarged the variety within their culture. They began to construct some larger rural communities, with far more storeroom bins, possibly demonstrating increased yields from their fields.
In west central New Mexico, for example, two village sites apparently "embraced over 50 pothouses apiece, " according to Willey. Though they kept hunting and gathering, the later Basketmaker's invested more work to construct more considerable and strong lodges, some round, some oval, some rectangular in floor plan. At a village in north-western New Mexico, they lined the excavated walls as Willey said "with large stone slabs" or "with mud plaster, "The roofs were supported by four posts put in the floor at some distance from the corners, or the approximate corners, of the pits. " In Linda Cordell's paper, "Prehistory: Eastern Anasazi, " she said that the interior characteristics of lodges at the hamlet included "antechambers, central often slab-lined fire pits reflectors and sip apus. " A sipp a tiny hole in the centre of the lodge probably served as a symbol for the mythological opening through which, according to Anasazi belief, the people appeared from the world of the underground. (1) The later Basketmaker's also constructed the first Anasazi large semi-subterranean ritual chambers, or kiva's. At the village in north-western New Mexico, they built a circular kiva nearly 40 feet in diameter. "Its walls were carefully faced with stone slabs, " said Willey, "and a low encircling bench had been built up around the interior support of the wall with smaller facing slabs and rock and adobe fill. " (Willey 1992 p. 93) In addition, the later Basketmaker's expanded their trading range, acquiring marine shells which they used to make beads and pendants.
They became more distinctly agriculturists, adding beans to their collection of food crops thereby significantly improving the dietary worth of the food of their fields. They domesticated the turkey, which joined long-domesticated dogs in the village compound. They adopted the bow and arrow for the hunt, gradually giving up the lance and atlatl. They created new and more efficient grinding basins to work with grains. For the first time, the Basketmaker's begin to create and use pottery, at first, a simple grey ware and later, decorated gray and white wares.
As they turned increasingly to pottery as their containers and cooking vessels of choice, they allowed their age-old skills in basket making to decline. (2) Probably most significantly, the Anasazi Basketmaker's made the step to the rise of the Anasazi Pueblo...
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