Traveling Cargopants

Mesa Verde (link, link)… What a cool place! The Ancestral Puebloan people (i.e. Native Americans) were living a nomadic lifestyle until around 550 A.D. when they decided to settle into this area. Their initial settlements were “pit houses”, built by digging a pit in the ground, then covering it with timber and other basic roofing materials. Farming replaced hunting and gathering as their main livelihood. They made lots of baskets, because who doesn’t need a basket?! They lived in this area over the next 700 years, gradually advancing their building techniques into multi-storied buildings, and eventually building homes in the side of cliff recesses. They had trade with people as far south as Mexico, and as far west as the Pacific Ocean.

There are over 600 cliff dwellings and 4,000 archeological sites in Mesa Verde, and only a small handful of them have actually been explored. There were likely thousands of people from related tribes scattered throughout the Mesa Verde area. Impressive as that number is,  it still doesn’t compare to the much larger civilization of Chaco Canyon (link, link) a little further south in New Mexico which was the cultural, scientific and spiritual hub of many of the tribes throughout the South West.

There’s a myth that around 1,300 A.D., these people just up and disappeared — as if they all put on black tennis shoes, drank Koolaid, and hopped a spaceship to the stars. As cool as that sounds, scientists have been able to find plenty of evidence that their way of life collapsed due to a number of environmental factors (and not from war either).

We know that the last quarter of the century was a time of drought and crop failures. Maybe after hundreds of years of intensive use the land and its resources — the soil, the forests and animals — were depleted. When these people left, they may have traveled south into New Mexico and Arizona, perhaps settling among their kin already there. Whatever happened, it seems likely that some Pueblo Indians today are descendants of the cliff dwellers of Mesa Verde. (From desertusa.com)

I was at MV for a couple days and learned a lot about the people and their culture by going on guided tours of cliff dwellings and perusing the museum. As I learned more about the place, I started getting this feeling of being mentally robbed by my US History class in high school. I can clearly remember the book in that class where maybe the first two pages or so were dedicated to describing how some group of mostly nomadic people were scattered throughout North America … and then Columbus came and brought plagues, and religious and social oppression, and gringos with an unquenchable lust for land and gold. As unfortunately happens far too often, history is written by the conquerors, and much of the greatness of their victims is lost and forgotten.

What’s in a name? Most people who have heard of people in this region know them by the name “Anasazi”. Anasazi is actually a Navajo word that translates to “ancient enemies”. Scientists have learned that the Navajo are not actually related to these people (even though they live in that region today), so chances are the Navajo were at war with the people who lived in Mesa Verde. In the late 1990’s, the Hopi and other Puebloan tribes petitioned for the National Park Service to officially change the name to “Ancestral Puebloans”, and now you will rarely find the word Anasazi printed on NPS materials. (reference, reference)

While driving to my next destination, I picked up a hitch hiker, a nice Navajo man, who was able educate me more about the history and dynamics of some of the tribes in the area.  I learned another interesting fact… the word “Navajo” is actually Spanish, and it means “horse thief”. Navajo refer to themselves in their native language as Diné, which is translated as “the People” in English (reference).

The park of Mesa Verde is easy to travel in. You can see pretty much everything in 2 days or less. There are paved roads everywhere, and plenty of bathrooms and drinking water — and even a couple of restaurants. And if you don’t feel like camping (for a fee of $20/night), there’s a hotel in the middle of the park, or plenty of accommodations in the nearby city of Cortez.

Tags: Anasazi, archeology, Mesa Verde, Navajo

This entry was posted by Hargobind on Wednesday, October 14th, 2009 at 4:21 pm and is filed under Journey. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.