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... peoples, who would occupy their place on the Colorado Plateau and the northern Rio Grande basin about A. D. 700. In the style of their ancestors, the new Anasazi Pueblo peoples acknowledged change with reflection, over many decades, implementing new concepts at changeable rates in various areas rather than in synchronization across their cultural region. Reflecting growing populations and increasing crop yields, they started building still larger and now more nearly enduring villages, which they set in groups of constitutions around plazas. They spent time in their villages all over the year. (Hunters, in pursuit of game and probable declaration of territorial claims, sometimes occupied temporary campsites some distances from their villages. ) (2) In the beginning, the early Puebloans built the traditional penthouse lodges and semi-subterranean kiva's, but they also began to raise jacal or masonry surface storage constructions. (Jacals are constructing with walls made of posts, sometimes roofed with adobe and rock facings. ) With the passage of time, they moved out of their pothouses and into the surface structures, adding more place for storage.
Within some two to three centuries, they had begun to construct planned villages, in many examples essentially standardized in arrangement across the Anasazi region. The constructions had "long, double arced rows of contiguous surface rooms with a deep squarish pit structure placed in front of the surface rooms, " according to Linda Cordell: "The surface rooms served both for storage and as residences. Back rooms that lack floor characteristics, particularly hearths, most likely were used for storage. Interior doorways connect these to front rooms with hearths.
These, in turn, may open on a portico or outside work area?" (Cordell 1984 pp. 135 - 136) The Puebloans often built the houses on a north to south direction. They typically lined the pit construction with masonry, underscoring its value to the village. They tossed their trash into a common heap, which archaeologists call a refuse midden. In some villages, perhaps with several hundred residents, they built more than 100 rooms and really large number of pothouses. As more serious peasants, the early Puebloans started "to improve the growing conditions of particular fields by terracing, irrigation, and grinding" according to Fred Plog in his "Prehistory: Western Anasazi." As they would throughout their history, the Anasazi still hunted and gathered to supplement their crops, which were for all time subject to failure in a dry land with capricious rainfall. Like their Basketmaker predecessors, they made simple styles of pottery, most commonly a gray ware with a corrugated surface.
They start, for the first time in the Anasazi region, applying cradleboard's which inflicted twist on the skulls of their children. In northwestern New Mexico, these people left proof of the dark clouds of disagreement. Cordell said that "numerous burned dwellings and human skeletons that had been burned and cannibalized are considered indicative of warfare. " (Cordell 1984 p. 137) On average, the early Puebloans lived in their hamlets only for a generation before they left them, possibly as a result of resource exhaustion (for instance, wood, game, wild plant foods); environmental calamity (especially extended drought); social disintegration (political fractures or factional feuds); outside threats; or some combination. (3) Late in the first millennium, the Anasazi Pueblo people began to transform their way of life. Energized by dynamic leadership or by outside possibly Mesoamerican influences or by a new self-awareness and community spirit, the Anasazi gave birth to the far-reaching development called the "Chaco Phenomenon, " with its heart in a 10 -mile segment of north-western New Mexico's Chaco Canyon. "the ruins there are enormous" stated Richard Wetherill in a letter reprinted in the Listers story Chaco Canyon. "there are 11 of the large Pueblos or houses containing from one hundred to 500 rooms each and numerous small one show many I do not know but there must be more than 100. " (Lister 1978, p. 83). Wetherill would cement his archaeological recognition at Chaco Canyon. The Chaco system included the cluster of Chaco Canyons colonies "magnificent pueblo great houses, " Cordell told about them in Archaeology of the Southwest and an incorporated network of big and small distant communities, most linked to the core by a network of meeting ways.
The Chaco Canyon nice houses communicated with their "outliers" by way of alarming stations perched on the crests of hills, where archaeologists have found the remnants of signal fires and highly reflective obsidian slabs, the tools of the ancient signalling trade. Chaco and its communities shared general principles, which almost surely were connected with around agriculture, astronomical interpretation, the seasons, water and desired prosperity, with seasoning from ancient hunting and gathering rituals. The Chaco network blanketed much of the Anasazi cultural region. Its impact radiated well beyond the region. (4) Looking back through time, which hides the history of the Anasazi, archaeologists fight to reveal the story of the Chaco Phenomenon. David E. Stuart and Rory P.
Gauthier in the work Prehistoric New Mexico, Background for Survey said: We conceive of Chaco Canyon and its 80 or more outliers as a vast wheel. The hub at Chaco Canyon, its spokes, or roads, directed outward to the rim, its outliers. The beauty of such a system is several-fold. The impacts of uneven crop years are spread over a vast area.
By managing surplus, a momentarily failed outlier can be subsidized by supplies sent down a spoke with little information passage between outliers. " (Stuart, Gauthier 1988, p. 88) Some archaeologists stated the roads may have been used as symbolic conduits for pilgrimages from the outliers to Chaco Canyon that may have offered regeneration of the spirit and astronomical forecasts for the coming seasons for planting and harvest. Others view Chaco Canyon as a dynamic commercial centre for agricultural production, food redistribution, pottery and turquoise crafts creating and long distance trade. By contrast, archaeologist Lynne Sebastian, says Cordell, stated that the Chaco Canyon great house colonies may have been mainly displays of power and wealth, seats for showy competing leaders who traded religious knowledge for community fidelity. (1). The American archaeologist Stephen H. Lekson published a very remarkable note) about these ancient movement. By studying the time when the Chaco Canyon culture was finished and the early development of the same culture in the Aztec colony and later at Casas Grandes in Mexico, the scholars found the two dates in strict succession, as if the populace, or at least part of it, had left one place for another ending up after a long march in Mexico, at Casas grandes.
But the most remarkable thing is that all the rural communities Aztec Ruins, Solomon Ruins, Chaco Canyon and Casas Grandes, are all rightly aligned on the one meridian American magazine Archaeology (Vol. 50 N. 1, Jan Feb 1997) This is most improbable by chance being instead much more believable an intentional fact. number 108. The author was mystified mainly by this issue: how could the prehistoric Anasazi follow such a exact configuration along a meridian for about 600 km? More correctly we have to admit that they used a compass. But no such tool was available in America at that time, and moreover, despite the fact that we assume they could have this opportunity, the important errors due to this device would have not permitted such exact placing of these four villages: Chaco Canyon, Solomon Ruins, Aztec Ruins to the north and Casas Grandes to the south. Definitely they must have used a kind of astronomical watching based on the place of the celestial North Pole, since the gnomon, that uses the Sun, was also unfamiliar to these people.
It is easy to assume an alignment to the pole, on the other hand we should think about the fact that, at the time of the Anasazi movement, the Polar star, because of American (magazine Archaeology the precession of the equinoxes was too far from the Vol. 50 N. 1, Jan Feb 1997), North Pole so it could not be a proper base for such a exact and long alignment. Unfortunately there are no documents to answer this question; we can only try to visualize some very easy method likely to be compatible with the culture of these ancient people. (7) To find the North Pole, the Anasazi, very skillful observers of the sky may have used a plain trellis of twigs, a kind of a net made of wood, tightly placed on a raised posture, while an observer would cautiously take sight from a meaningful pole towards the grating placed northwards. By for some time the circular way of the Polaris against the grating, the Anasazi astronomers could make some marks on the sprig corresponding to the trajectory made by the star around the North Pole. After that it became easy to find the center of this round, i. e. the North Pole and it wasn't complicated to put it among the stars around it to fix its exact position, although no star showed the celestial pole. (7) To make the new way along the meridian, a group of explorers, after lighting a fire on the initial point, moved to the south in the night as far as possible in sight of the fire.
From there they should have moved to the place where they possibly would see the fire precisely aligned with the celestial pole. They might have walked for a very long distance carefully keeping along one meridian. This very easy method may have allowed the Anasazi to align the four great villages exactly in the direction north south. At Pueblo Bonito for example we can find in the city plan several alignments all pointing along the meridian. (7) By the middle of the 12 th century, probably as a result of some grouping of drought, overpopulation, depleted resources and disgraced political and religious direction, the Chaco Phenomenon collapsed. The population scattered, probably in a series of migrations. Near the end, one remnant, perhaps social elites, moved 65 miles northward to build American magazine Archaeology one last "magnificent pueblo great house" near Animas River, (Vol. 50 N. 1, Jan Feb 1997) a few miles below the Colorado border.
Called "Aztec" by first Euro-American settlers, who thought that the indigenous Indians could never have built so elaborate a community, it, too, would fail. The residents left. (7) As the Chaco Phenomenon grew and then waned, another Anasazi branch the San Juan/Mesa Verde people who occupied south-eastern Utah and south-western Colorado, constructed small scattered pueblos on mesa tops and talus slopes. Starting early in the 13 th century, they built pueblos with mysterious and strangely shaped towers at the tops of canyons in Utah, and they built Wetherill's famous "cliff dwellings" in the great stone alcoves of Mesa Verde. By late in the 13 th, the Mesa Verde system collapsed, and the population migrated to new areas. (7) To the west, across northern Arizona into southern Utah and south-eastern Nevada, another Anasazi branch the Kayenta constructed pueblos so rare and miniature that Cordell defined them as "homesteads. " In the 13 th centuries, the Kayenta of north-eastern Arizona constructed and enlarged their own spectacular cliff dwellings, including White House, Antelope House and others in Canyon de Cell and Kit Site, Betatakin and others in Tsegi Canyon.
But by the end of that fatal 13 th century, most Kayenta hamlets, too, were destroyed. The population scattered, moving into new places. (6) To the south of the Chaco and Kayenta regions, immigrants from areas in decline apparently settled the Hopi villages in north-eastern Arizona and the Zuni, Acoma and Laguna villages in west central New Mexico. To the east of Chaco Canyon, in the upper Rio Grande drainage with its more steadfast water flows, the Anasazi populace started increasing during the 13 th century, presumably a result of displacement from the waning Chaco and Mesa Verde regions. True to their roots, the newcomers raised large, multi-storied pueblos, some with populations in the thousands, along both sides of tributaries as well as the main tributary of the river.
It is the pueblos of north-western Arizona and western New Mexico and those of the upper Rio Grande drainage which greeted the Spanish expeditions into the Southwest in the 16 th century. The last of those pueblos now serve as living monuments to the endurance of the Anasazi customs, the cultural power, the adaptability, the resourcefulness of an ancient people. Bibliography (1) Cordell, Linda S. (1984) Prehistory of the Southwest. New World Archaeological Record, James Bennett Griffin, general editor. Academic Press, New York, NY, LASS 382 text. (2) Cordell, Linda S. (1989) In Dynamics of Southwest prehistory, edited by Linda S. Cordell, and George J.
Gummerman, pp. 293 - 336. School of American Research Advanced Seminar Book. Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, DC (3) Willey, Gordon R. (1966) Mesoamerica. In An introduction to American archaeology, vol. 1; North and Middle America, edited by Gordon R. Willey, pp. 78 - 177. Prentice-Hall An tropology Series, David M.
Schneider, general editor. Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ (4) Robert H Lister, Florence Cline Lister (1978) Anasazi Pottery University of New Mexico Press (5) McNitt, F. (1957) Richard Wetherill: Anasazi. University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque (6) Plog, Fred, George J. German, Robert C.
Euler, Jeffrey S. Dean, Richard H. Help, and Thor N. V. Karlstrom. (1988) Anasazi Adaptive Strategies: the Model, Predictions and Results. In The Anasazi in a changing environment, School of American Research Advanced Seminar Series.
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge UK (7) Lekson, Stephen H. (1997) Anasazi Indians' villages on the same meridian American magazine Archaeology (8) Stuart, David E. and Rory P. Gauthier. (1988) Prehistoric New Mexico. Background for Survey Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
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