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 In the tradition of Alfred V. Kidder, Andrew Duff, assistant professor
at WSU, is adding to the ever-growing fund of knowledge about the fate
of the Anasazi. While supervising students, he carefully drafts a site
plan for his own use and for future archaeologists who want to learn
from the Cox Ranch dig.
A legacy of archaeology
No one better exemplifies Blinman’s observation than legendary
archaeologist Alfred V. Kidder. A century ago, he responded to an
advertisement in the Harvard Crimson for students to photograph and
note sites in southwestern Colorado. The future world-renowned
archaeologist spent a summer climbing through ancient ruins and was
hooked. His professors discouraged his interest in the Southwest,
saying nothing new remained to be discovered. But Kidder knew
better.
The early explorers, though they had cleaned the sites of
hand-painted pottery and made note of hundreds of villages, hadn’t
begun to discover the breadth of this civilization. Kidder pursued
his archaeology doctorate at Harvard, and then pushed for more work
in the Southwest. Guiding, collecting, and protecting, he set the
standard for field methods for archaeologists the world over.
Hundreds have followed in Kidder’s footsteps, including WSU’s
Lipe, Kohler, and Andrew Duff. Using a range of tools from the
meager trowel to the high-speed computer, they’re eagerly pursuing
their pieces of the mysterious history of this ancient
civilization.
Anasazi farmers occupied the Mesa Verde region for more than
2,000 years. And many ideas have been argued about how the culture
lived and why it vanished.
Some Native American tribes claim them as their ancestors.
Archaeologists show evidence that they are among the predecessors
of the modern-day Pueblo people of Arizona and New Mexico.
But the biggest mystery is why, in the late A.D. 1200s, they
suddenly left large areas of Utah, Colorado, Arizona, and New
Mexico, abandoning fields, towns, and territories in the space of
one generation.
Until recently, the general consensus was that a great drought
drove them away. But that theory changed in 1990, when WSU graduate
student Carla Van West presented a paper arguing that in spite of
weather changes, the area could have produced enough food to
sustain communities. The idea sent a shock through the field, but
it got people past the “one big drought idea” and sparked thinking
about other possibilities, says Kohler, her major professor.
Another hypothesis is that violence caused the departure.
Attacks from nomadic tribes, like the ancestors of the Utes and the
Navajos, might have driven the Anasazi away. But could small bands
of hunters and gatherers really have threatened established farmers
in large settlements? Maybe the communities fought one another.
While some people see the cliff dwellings as architecture in
harmony with nature, others believe they were fortresses carefully
hidden beneath the hills, with treacherous footpaths for access
making them nearly impossible for an enemy to reach.
Probably the best evidence that warfare and violence affected at
least some Anasazi communities in the 1200s comes from excavations
at Castle Rock Pueblo, directed by Ricky Lightfoot and Kristin
Kuckelman in the 1990s. There they found that a small village of
perhaps 75 people had been massacred in the late 1200s, not long
before the depopulation of the region.
Other researchers are looking at whether a new religious system
came into place, causing people to move to a new spiritual center.
They are also considering whether dense population and aggressive
farming practices wiped out the natural resources.
“People have been working in the Southwest for a hundred years.
You’d think there aren’t any surprises left,” says Kohler. “But
there are.”
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While hundreds of people line up in the hot sun at the Mesa
Verde visitor center for a turn on a guided tour through the
much-visited cliff dwellings at the park, a much smaller group gets
an intimate and up-close view of archaeology at work at a site
called the Goodman Point Pueblo, a few miles west of Cortez,
Colorado.
Wandering down a steep hillside trail to a spot where a woman
is scraping down a square pit, they stop to see what she is doing.
Dressed in a long-sleeve shirt and a rough-looking hat, project
archaeologist Kristin Kuckelman quickly drops her trowel and stands
to meet the group. She pulls her findings from a small paper sack,
fingers a sherd from a black-on-white pottery bowl, and then points
out a turkey bone. The people pull in tight around her. “That’s a
lot of stuff to come out of a pit that we had thought was
finished,” she says.
Continued
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