|
HOW DO WE KNOW ABOUT
THE ANASAZI?
Unlike many ancient cultures
around the world, the Anasazi did not leave books or scrolls detailing their history. Yet
we seem to know so much about this culture. How can that be?
During the 19th and the beginning of the 20th Century, much of what we know about the
Ancient Ones was determined by simple and, often, unscientific techniques. For example,
two Colorado cowboys are said to have discovered the magnificent Cliff Palace structure at
Mesa Verde on a bitterly cold day in December, 1888. The male members of the ranching
family soon became amateur archaeologists, digging, gathering and selling pottery,
weapons, tools and other artifacts, mostly to museums. Even without formal training, they
were able to identify major distinctions in the pottery they found and conclude that
different sites were occupied during different time periods. For more
information, see Major Anasazi Sites: Northern San Juan
Region.
In the late 20th Century, the melding of more sophisticated scientific techniques and
contemporary Native American Indian knowledge has dramatically increased our understanding
of these peoples. For some time, many scientists have gone about their business privately
evaluating the physical evidence and positing theories about the long-gone Anasazi.
Scientific speculation about the "mysterious disappearance" of the builders of
the cliff dwellings continued up to the current era. Many descendants of the Ancient Ones,
who had forgotten neither their ancestors nor the ancient towns and cities they built,
were angered by what they saw as White Man's presumption. Recently, however, the circle
has been completed, and science has had help filling in the blanks.
These days, more respect and attention is being paid to living Southwestern
natives and their oral clan histories, which have been
passed on from one generation to the next for millennia. Now, native stories of tremendous
migrations, accounts of natural events and recollections of times when ancestors lived in
specific places in the Southwest are correlated with historical and astronomical records,
rock art, pieces of pottery, carbon-14 dating and tree-ring dating to determine with a high degree of
certainty which clans built and occupied major sites, when particular sites were built and
abandoned, why the inhabitants moved and where the builders' descendants live now.
What kind of physical information about the Anasazi do we have? Well, there is the pottery
and pot fragments that we've found. Archaeologists can identify and date distinctive
styles of pottery, the people who made it, and the evolution over time of form, style and
design. Thus, pots and potsherds found at a site can
help scientists determine who inhabited the site and the general time period during which
it was occupied. Then, there are the distinctive designs that identify individual clans
and their symbolic language in the form of pictographs
describing things like celestial phenomena, Earthly events and physical and spiritual
beings. Many Southwestern pictographs are painted or inscribed on pottery. Perhaps the
most dramatic are petroglyphs carved on boulders and
in the stone walls of canyons and buildings.
A more modern technique of dating arises out of the fact that tree growth and tree ring
width vary each year with precipitation. Now, by examination of annual growth rings in the
trunks of trees and correlating the overlapping histories of hundreds of thousands of cut
timbers with written, oral and other physical records, scientists have recorded climatic
cycles for nearly 9,000 years. Dendroclimatologists, as these scientists are called, can
accurately date events as far back as 6700 B.C. They can examine the rings of beams in
ancient Southwestern buildings and determine the exact year in which the tree was cut and
used in construction. The oldest timbers help to establish the end of a period of
occupation of a site.
Oral histories describing individual clans' travels and stops at specific sites, their
accounts of eclipses, comets and other celestial events, and recollections of droughts and
other major natural events are correlated with pictographs, petroglyphs, clan
"signature" symbols, potsherds, tree-ring
dating and historical records of astronomical and Earth events to further refine our
understanding of this "prehistoric" period. In fact, in this more enlightened
era, as we've learned to trust the oral histories, the whole idea of
"prehistory" is being challenged.
|