The Anasazi– America 's Ancient Peoples
By Ray Chatelin
(For Travel Writers' Tales)

Ancient cliff dwellings in Arizona (Photo: Toshi)

You needn't travel to Europe to find ancient civilizations, nor need you venture deep into Mexico or Peru. For in the American Southwest are the remnants of the pueblo peoples who built their homes of mud, rock, and poles.

Many of the ruins of these places are deep in the desert and when you drive along the hard-packed dirt roads that lead to many of them from off the paved highways, you find yourself in what seems as countless miles of vast, unending desert.

I started just outside Santa Fe, at Bandelier National Monument, and began an expedition that took me through New Mexico, into southern Colorado, across the painted desert and then down in southern Arizona. Along the way I was witness to what remains of a vast civilization that eventually simply disappeared.

This collective land mass was the land of the Anasazi, the ancient ones, who lived in the desert regions of America from the 9th through the 13th Centuries. What their real tribal names were, is anyone's guess.

The Hopi Tribe, a sovereign nation located in northeastern Arizona, call themselves descendants of the Anasazi, and changed the name of their ancestors from Anasazi to the “Hisatsinom”, which means the “Ancient Ones”.

However, in many texts and among researchers, the name Anasazi has become the generic term for the early Pueblo sites and peoples.

Some of the roads turned to slippery ice-like clay in even the most light falling rain and I wondered how it was that anyone could have lived in this arid, unforgiving landscape. And—if I somehow managed to get lost—would anyone ever find me?

At some of the sites, like Keet Seel Ruin in Navajo National Monument in Arizona, you can reach them only by horseback or by a hike of several hours with park guides.

Inside an Anasazi house (Photo: Toshi)

Others, like at Chaco Canyon, NM that once was a thriving place of 7,000 inhabitants, you can simply drive to and walk among the ruins or hike the hundreds of miles of trails the native peoples carved out of the rugged, 1890m (6,200ft.) high plateau.

The truth of the matter is that no-one is totally convinced about what happened to them, why they simply disappeared from the face of the earth many centuries ago.

Wandering through their remaining small, crumbled walled towns still evokes a quiet wonder about exactly who they were and what happened to them. The evidence of their existence left the same sense of wonder and excitement in me that I get when walking the ruins of the Pharaohs in Luxor and in Valley of the Kings; or the Grecian ruins at Delphi or at the Ancient Agora of Athens.

The Anasazi grew crops by irrigation, crafted beautiful pottery and jewelry, and traded with distant peoples—as far south as the Mayan civilization, say archeologists.

Certainly, they were plentiful at one time since their evidence is everywhere in this part of the world—the Cave dwellings of Betatakin and Canyon de Chelly National Park, in Arizona: and Mesa Verde National Park in Colorado, and elsewhere.

It's estimated that the great exodus of these communities began in the early 12th Century and ended a hundred years later—probably due to drought and disease. The void was filled by the Navajo Tribe sometime in the 1700s and the Navajo continue to occupy the region.

Because the “ancient ones” left behind the most marvelous ruins, I found myself walking through ceremonial buildings that were their social focal points, and many ruins throughout the region had a similarity in construction.

Monument Valley, Arizona where ancient dwellings
can be explored with a guide (Photo: Toshi)

The most spectacular were the cliff dwellings such as the one at Canyon de Chelly; and at Mesa Verde, the largest of them all with some 600 cliff dwellings and 4,700 archaeological sites.

These cliff dwellings were built on south-facing ledges in deep sandstone canyons with the sun providing heat in the winter. The overhanging lip of the cliff offered cool shade from the high summer sun.

Agricultural fields were maintained on the mesas above and, sometimes, in broader canyons below these dwellings. Access to most cliff dwellings consisted of a series of small hand- and toeholds in the steep sandstone walls.

There were no handrails back then and no volunteers among the visiting tourists—me included—anxious to attempt scaling a sheer rock wall without ladder or rope to enter a cliff dwelling 75 feet above the canyon floor.

Still, I couldn't help wondering here and elsewhere in the land of the Anasazi, how these people faced the trials of their time – how they worked together in feeding themselves, in building these incredibly complex dwellings, and exactly whatever became of them.