We spent the last couple of days visiting 4 Anasazi sites, north to south, being Mesa Verde, Aztec, Salmon Ruins and Chaco Canyon. Chaco is perhaps the most archaeologically important. It is also perhaps the earliest of the built pueblos.
We visited it last a 70 mile round trip detour on dirt roads to get there and then beautiful metalled roads inside the site because it is a National Park. The $80 National Park Pass which covers Beloved in a car with up to 4 occupants was earning its keep.
The ancestral puebloans should not be seen as sequential or entirely separate cultures but as groups of related peoples trading and holding some common religious and cultural ideals which vary between each other and over time. They flourished between c800CE and 1200CE. Archaeologists see the as the ancestors of the current puebloan peoples who moved south following some change in climate of conditions in c1300 CE. The Hopi people talk of their journey south from where they came out of the earth stopping at Mesa Verde and Chaco but tribes reject the evolutionary explanation and believe they came out of the earth as they are. That is how the Zuni explain their language which is a puzzle to scholars as it is not related to the other native american language much like Basque in Europe.
The Anasazi grew corn, beans and squash by irrigation, domesticated dogs and turkeys, made woven baskets from yucca which they probably used to carry water by coating with pitch pine like modern apaches, but had no draught animals and no wheels. They traded with the pacific Coast and Mexico and knowledge of pottery spread slowly north from Mexico from about 450 CE.
In Chaco they built houses of stone using narrow faced stones.
The walls seem to be about 18" thick and it was not possible to see from the ruins we saw whether they were double stone with a rubble infill or faced drystone with cross stones. The tops of the ruins seem
to have been topped of with mortar to prevent further deterioration.
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