A mystery almost solved: what happened to the Anasazi

In 1976 I moved from Chicago to Colorado in 1976, and I still remember the feeling of wonder, that a landscape so different from the flat Midwest was in the same country. I started learning to backpack almost immediately, hiking at altitude among trees and rivers, breathing the dry, crisp air, wondering at the temperature extremes between night and day. Within a couple of years, I had branched out to a different landscape: the red rock formations of western Colorado and Utah, archeology-rich Northern New Mexico, and the cliff dwellings of the Four Corners region, home to Mesa Verde National Park. Here I am in two pictures from the late 70s on a trip to Utah. The first includes my dog, Sophie. The second shows something of the human/landscape scale that fascinated me.



On a later trip to Mesa Verde, I was fascinated by the structures that were home to the Pueblo people for 700 years. There were about 25,000 of them in the area in the mid-1200s, and then suddenly they were gone. Called the Anasazi (Navajo term for "ancient foreigners"), they disappeared; by the 1280s, no one remained. The prevailing speculation was that a drought period had forced people to move. But where? How to know centuries later? I confess I rather liked the mystery. It was part of what still seemed exotic to me--a world so different from what I had known.

Today, I find that I like the solution even better than the mystery. Recently going through back issues of one of my favorite magazines, High Country News, I found an article by Krista Langlois, which explained how much of that mystery has finally been solved.  (Click here to read the full story.) The reasons were rooted not only in science, but in the stories of indigenous people today, specifically  origin stories of Native Americans speaking the Tewa language in Northern New Mexico.

The science was not surprising, given the data-crunching powers of modern computing. In 2001 a multi-disciplinary team of scientists formed the Village Ecodynamics Project. For the next 13 years, they analyzed population history at thousands of sites in the Southwest. The next step was  analyzing soil data and estimating natural resources and agricultural yields. Next came a computer simulation of human and environmental history, a kind of "Sim City for the ancient Southwest," Langlois calls it. They ran it 500 times, tweaking the data each time, and finally patterns emerged.  The patterns cast doubt on the dominant drought theory, as the Anasazi were already gone by the time the drought hit full force. Still, mystery remained.

Another line of inquiry turned to the social fabric of this ancient world. One project researcher, archeologist Scott Ortman, developed a theory that inequality was at work. Between 900 and 1200 the population tripled. Yet each family was still farming its own plot of land, living around a family-sized kiva. Over time those plots of land got smaller, creating a community of haves and have nots. There is evidence of violence and sudden departures. Perhaps this is not surprising either. As I read, I thought of many places in rural Europe in the 19th century, when mass emigration ensued for the same reason.

What did surprise me, however, was learning that Ortman's work is also rooted in listening to the oral histories of Tewa people, stories that told them that they were descended from the Anasazi. Instead of dismissing them as myth, Ortman started looking for clues connecting them to their ancestors at Mesa Verde. He found them. DNA analysis was involved, but more interesting to me was the linguistic connection: a word for a kind of roof found in ceremonial kivas, a work for pottery derived from older words for woven objects typical of Mesa Verde pottery; and other words and stories.

As Langlois explains, Ortman speculates that as Mesa Verde's people realized their world was unraveling, bringing changes in the food supply, overcrowding, and violence, they decided to migrate to the Northern Rio Grande, a place they knew about from traders. Oral stories say it took them "12 steps" to travel from their ancestral home to their new one; this could refer to the 12 days it may have taken them to walk the 250 miles between the two sites.

Ortman's research suggests that while the Anasazi moved to various places across the Southwest, the six Tewa-speaking tribes are the "most direct cultural descendants." Here's a map of their probable journeys:


Still, the mystery hasn't been completely solved and may never be with so many centuries separating us from that culture, but the complexity of the solution is much greater than the simple explanation I once accepted. And it's satisfying. Knowing some of the pathways these communities took builds a bridge to our time: the very common story of migration, of seeing a new place for the first time and making a life there. It's also a bridge in the sense that equality and inequality played a role for the ancients as well as for moderns. Droughts are cyclical, Langlois points out, yet the descendants of the Anasazi in the Tewa Basin did not flee. She writes, "The societies and traditions that developed were so strong they persisted through waves of colonization and through industrial development and the large-scale mining of the earth....Puebloans in the Northern Rio Grande structured their communities around a central plaza where work was shared, ...rituals held, and the harvest was inequitably distributed."

Happy to let go of the simplistic explanation I once casually accepted decades ago , I look forward to another visit to the Four Corners region some day, this time with a deeper perspective.

Lives in Ruins: my introduction to archaeology

Archaeology is a science that never really appealed to me that much. Every time I saw pictures of toiling students sifting through rubble under a hot sun for bits of bone or pottery, I turned the page. So much toil for such scant reward. This is a review of a book that changed my thinking. It has a title that should belong to the genre of romance novel: Lives in Ruins. Instead it's a wonderful piece of participatory journalism by an author who is responsible for my digging one dusty toe into the field of archaeology this year. Lives in Ruins, by Marilyn Johnson, has a subtitle: Archaeologists and the Seductive Lure of Human Rubble (Harper, 2014). Johnson's repeated forays into this diverse intrigued me even though I never had much interest in it before.

It's a tribute to Johnson's writing that she made me take more than a second look. And probably it's her book that encouraged me to say yes to an invitation to become a site steward in Park County, Colorado. Working with a partner, site stewards volunteer to visit places in the county where remains of early human habitation or migration have been found. The idea is to document any change or damage--human or natural--to that site. Volunteers agree to visit 2--4 times a year, carefully looking at the land and taking photos. I'll have more to write after I get started this summer. So far I have a modest weekend of training behind me and a practice visit coming up next week when I return to Florissant for awhile.

This photo was taken during our training session last month. Diane Parisi (second from left), a field coordinator with the site steward program in New Mexico, explains an aspect of a stone fragment.

Will I find a "seductive lure" in the whole thing, as Johnson did during her years of research and participation in this field? That remains to be seen, but after reading her book, I could see how others have found a kind of seduction in the dust or watery depths of the past.

Johnson takes us around the world with her as she joins digs or visits projects in the Caribbean, the Mediterranean, South America and the US East Coast. She interviews archaeologists, attends conferences and reflects on what she is experiencing. She has that rare gift of enjoying her subjects’ eccentricities while never mocking them, as well as giving the reader an understanding of issues in the field of archaeology today.

Some key insights: Archeology is a field where jobs are scarce, deadlines often dictated by developers ready to excavate, and devoted practitioners face less financial security than fledgling artists. Much work depends on volunteers. Many sites are not protected, and as Johnson writes, “The tension between keeping a site secret so it won’t get looted and publicizing it so it can be preserved and appreciated is a constant in archaeology.” Furthermore, archaeology is much more than a retrieval process. Even when a team is ready to dig or resurrect (as in the case of Revolutionary War ships still sunk in the harbor of Newport, Rhode Island), other essentials may not have been funded, such as a place to store and preserve artifacts and a team to do the work. Twenty-plus years after sensors first located the fleet in Newport harbor, those essentials were still not available.

Although archaeologists may be hired by owners or developers, their first responsibility is to the site and its resources. If a proposed project may cause harm, they have to “mitigate”—record and rescue what they can. For example, when surprised archaeologists discovered an 18th century wooden ship in a Manhattan landfill in 2010, they had to scramble to protect the giant timbers, which began to disintegrate the moment they were exposed to oxygen.

Two of the most fascinating chapters deal with forensic archeology and the protection of humankind’s cultural heritage during war. Forensics deals with buried bodies, and Johnson takes us through efforts in Fishkill, New York, to protect the Fishkill Depot, the graveyard of America’s first veterans—soldiers who died during The Revolutionary War.  Protection and development of the site is still not assured.  My favorite interview in the book is with Laurie Rush, an archaeologist with the U.S. Department of Defense. (That was news to me--that the D.O.D hires archaeologists.) Rush’s job is to make sure that past military mistakes are not repeated. A prime example: in 2003 US troops, assigned to protect Babylon, put their base on top of the ruins and bulldozed ancient temples into helicopter pads. Rush, the cultural resources manager at Fort Drum, has supervised much and built excellent relationships with Native American tribes, Johnson reports. She has also designed one of more creative teaching projects I’ve encountered: a deck of Iraqi and Afghan Heritage playing cards, teaching soldiers what they need to know as they play poker or solitaire.

Marilyn Johnson wrote two other fascinating books, both about people documenting the past in one way or another. One is about librarians and the other about obituary writers: This Book Is Overdue! How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All (Harper Perennial, 2011); and The Dead Beat: Lost Souls, Lucky Stiffs, and the Perverse Pleasures of Obituaries (Harper Perennial, 2007) You can find out more about her and her work at on her website.

While I enjoyed Johnson's stories immensely, I also need to keep in mind this quote from her in a Daily Beast interview. "We’re conditioned by narrative to expect some resolution, whether it’s answers to our questions or solutions to a mystery. We expect a neat wrap-up to the story, but in fact there are many things we don’t understand and might never understand."

At our site steward training, we got a list of the top ten things archaeologists never find. Tops on that list were buried treasure, mummies, and secret tunnels. We all laughed. No expectations there! For those things, rent an Indiana Jones movie.

Still, we hope to find something. Yet, prehistoric people have been gone so long and so much of what they used has been lost. Will I find any identifiable rubble at all as a site steward? Perhaps not, but at the very least, I hope to learn to see and recognize more than I can today.