Posted on 02/29/2008 6:33:25 AM PST by blam
WSU Researchers Study Fate of an Ancient American Southwest Civilization
Salem-News.com
Evidence suggests that the Anasazi fled the region and joined related groups to the south and east.
While the cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde are easily the best known of these settlements, the region is dotted with some 4,000 known archaeological sites, including communities which supported as many as several hundred families.
(PULLMAN, Wash.) - Using computer simulations to synthesize both new and earlier research, a team of scientists led by a Washington State University anthropology professor has given new perspective to the long-standing question of what happened more than 700 years ago to cause the ancestral Pueblo people known as the Anasazi to abruptly end their 700-year-long occupation of the now-famous cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde and other nearby communities in southwestern Colorado.
In an article to be published in the upcoming issue of "American Scientist," WSU Regents Professor Tim Kohler and three colleagues describe how computer simulation techniques were used to integrate nearly a century's worth of archaeological research with new climatic, ecological and demographic data to analyze two major cycles in population growth and decline among the ancient Anasazi.
Ultimately their data suggests that the final population collapse within the region resulted from a complex set of environmental changes and societal pressures-including climate change, population growth, increasing competition for resources and escalating conflict and violence among local societies.
Preserved in 1906 by President Theodore Roosevelt as Mesa Verde National Park, the ancestral Pueblo homeland also encompasses what is known today as the Four Corners Region of the American Southwest, an area marked by the intersection of Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah.
While the cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde are easily the best known of these settlements, the region is dotted with some 4,000 known archaeological sites, including communities which supported as many as several hundred families.
Archaeological evidence has shown that the Anasazi inhabited the region and prospered there from about A.D. 600 until sometime in the late 1200s, when they abandoned their communities abruptly - often within the span of a single generation - and migrated southward.
Since the discovery of the Mesa Verde sites in the late 19th century, archaeologists have frequently invoked single factors-such as climate change or conflict - as explanations for the depopulation of more than 600 cliff dwellings in Mesa Verde, as well as the thousands of small residences and large community centers across the Four Corners. More recently, some scholars have even suggested that better conditions or new types of social organization may have drawn the Pueblo people south.
In their recent article, however, Kohler and co-authors Mark D. Varien, Vice President of Programs at the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center in Cortez, Colo., Aaron M. Wright, WSU anthropology doctoral candidate and Preservation Fellow at the Center for Desert Archaeology, and Kristin A. Kuckelman, Senior Research Archaeologist at the Crow Canyon center, say their research demonstrates the factors leading to the Anasazi exodus were likely far more complex.
"Instead, it was a cascade of events that included climate-induced immigration from peripheral regions resulting in overpopulation, in turn generating resource depletion that was exacerbated by a decline in maize productivity.," the authors write. "These changes provoked conflict, which in turn induced more scarcity. As these societies began to lose population, they also functioned less successfully and became vulnerable to aggression."
In the end, the researchers write, "violence and famine provided potent motives for departure. Evidence suggests that the survivors of these final events moved south, following kin who had pioneered migration streams in that direction at least a century earlier."
Archaeological evidence, in combination with some oral traditions among modern Pueblos, suggest that the Anasazi fled the region and joined related groups to the south and east, mostly along the northern Rio Grande of New Mexico, Kohler and his colleagues conclude.
"The societies that they joined and helped build there were substantially different from those they left behind," the authors note. "Perhaps this suggests the degree of trauma that the Pueblo people experienced toward the end in the Four Corners region, and why they never returned to farm the Mesa Verde."
Kohler earned a doctorate in Anthropology from the University of Florida in 1975. Since joining the faculty of WSU in 1978, he has increasingly specialized in Southwestern archeology.
In the late 1970s through the mid-1980s, he collaborated with Anthropology professor emeritus William D. Lipe on the Dolores Archaeological Program in southwestern Colorado.
Since then, he has directed excavations in Bandelier National Monument in New Mexico, and an NSF Biocomplexity Project devoted to understanding the causes for changes in settlement systems in southwestern Colorado between A.D. 600 and 1300. He is a Research Associate at the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center, Cortez, and an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, New Mexico.
Some new people arrived:
"Did a group of thirteenth-century Japanese journey to the American Southwest, there to merge with the people, language, and religion of the Zuni tribe?"
GGG Ping.
I thought the Anasazi crawled through some kind of trans-dimensional hole into a parallel universe.
A cascading series of complex events led to a very simple simple conclusion; the people lost faith in their leaders.
“Why you come to land of heart-ripping Aztec and fierce Yaqui?”
Looking fearfully over his shoulder, the chief said, “Man, there’s some mean sumbitches on my trail.”
Living in semi caves, gathering pine nuts and killing rabbits to live on is not CIVILIZATION !
“Archaeological evidence, in combination with some oral traditions among modern Pueblos, suggest that the Anasazi fled the region ........”
This is true in regards to oral tradition since the anasazi were cannibals so they did flee orally through each others mouth and out their sphincter.
I would say the simple climate change theory caused the complex factors the researchers found.
If the Spaniards hadn’t arrived when they did, we probably wouldn’t have any existing Pueblo cultures. They were in a state of decline and coming under attack by the newly arrived Athabaskan people. The Spaniards and their Mexican successors were barely able to sustain a civilization until the Americans came, and now that the Americans have established successful civilizations, the migrants that the Spanish and Mexicans could never get to come here, can’t be stopped. The story is still being written.
These movements occurred over hundreds of years.
They are alive and well on Hopi mesa where they have lived for 900 or so years. Hopi Mesa villages are the longest continuously occupied sites in the USA
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oraibi
Go visit Chaco canyon and say that
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Thanks Blam and Renfield. |
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Too bad the Goracle wasn't around back then -
He could have convinced them it was Bush's fault...
Since the Navajo/Nadene language is a relative of those tribes much further to the north (like the Dakotas/Montana), the greater liklihood is that a northern tribe moved south following herds, found river valleys, and either conquered or married into local river agricultural tribes.
Amen. Mrs. Renfield and I visited Chaco, Mesa Verde, and Aztec Ruins a couple of years ago. These mysterious people had a remarkably advanced culture, especially given that they did not (as far as we can determine) have any system of writing (beyond a few simple pictograms).
There were bad people on the other side, supposedly from the Mayan legend of "Xibalba".
Navajos? This research has nothing to do with the Navajos.
There is research into where the Anasazi came from, if not related to the Pueblo. The infusion of a new, “outsider” culture could explain the loss of the Anasazi culture. Like the fall of Rome to the barbarians.
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