Click the icon to hear a Woodpipe (172K)
Click the icon to hear a Woodpipe (172K)
About 1400 years ago, long before any European exploration of the New World, a group of Indians living in the Four Corners region chose Mesa Verde for their home. For over 700 years their descendants lived and flourished here, eventually building elaborate stone cities in the sheltered recesses of the canyon walls. Then in the late 1200s, within the span of one or two generations, they abandoned their homes and moved away.
Mesa Verde National Park
Ever since local cowboys discovered the cliff dwellings a century ago, archeologists have been trying to understand the life of these people. But despite decades of excavation, analysis, classification, and comparison our knowledge is still sketchy. We will never know the whole story of their existence, for they left no written records and much that was important in their lives has perished. Yet for all their silence, these ruins speak with a certain eloquence. They tell of a people adept at building, artistic in their crafts, and skillful at wresting a living from a difficult land. They are evidence of a society that over the centuries accumulated skills and traditions and passed them on from one generation to another.
By classic times (A.D. 1100 to 1300),the Anasazi of Mesa Verde were the heirs of a vigorous civilization, with accomplishments in community living and the arts that rank among the finest expressions of human culture in ancient America.
Much of the daily routine took place in the open courtyards in front of the rooms. The women fashioned pottery there, while the men made various tools--knives, axes, awls, scrapers--out of stone and bone. The fires built in summer were mainly for cooking. In winter when the alcove rooms were damp and uncomfortable, fires probably burned throughout the village. Smoke-blackened walls and ceilings are reminders of the biting cold these people lived with for half of every year.
Clothing closely followed the seasons. In summer, adults wore simple loincloths and sandals. In winter they dressed in hides and skins and wrapped themselves against the cold in blankets made of turkey feathers and robes of rabbit fur.
Getting food was a ceaseless struggle, even in the best of years. Farming was the main business of the people, but they supplemented their crops of corn beans and squash by gathering wild plants and hunting deer, rabbits, squirrels, and other game. Their domestic animals were dogs and turkeys.
Fortunately for us, the Anasazi tossed their trash close by. Scraps of food, broken pottery and tools, anything unwanted went down the slope in front of their houses. Much of what we know about daily life here comes from these garbage heaps.
