Ancestral Puebloans

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The Ancestral Puebloans built structures that ranked as the largest buildings in North America until the late 19th century. They did it without metal tools, without wheeled carts, and without draft animals. At Chaco Canyon, in what is now northwestern New Mexico, workers quarried sandstone blocks and hauled timber from mountain ranges up to 70 miles away, on foot, to assemble 15 major complexes. Some of those structures had 700 rooms. That is not a minor achievement tucked into the margins of American history. It is a civilization by any measure.

  Who were these people? When did their culture begin, and why did they leave the places they had built so carefully? What does the word the world once used to name them actually mean, and why do their living descendants object to it? The answers to those questions reach back thousands of years, touch on matrilineal dynasties and astronomical alignments, and end not with a vanishing but with a migration that is still being traced.

• 2. A Name in Dispute

  ›

  Richard Wetherill, a rancher and trader, was the first Anglo-American to explore the cliff sites at Mesa Verde in 1888-1889. He used the Navajo word "Anasazi" to refer to the people who had built them, and he knew exactly what the word meant. In the Diné language, anaasází translates as "ancestors of our enemies", a term the Navajo used to describe their historical competition with Pueblo peoples.

  Alfred V. Kidder, whom archaeologist Linda S. Cordell called the acknowledged dean of Southwestern Archaeology, adopted the term for the formal 1927 Pecos Classification system. Kidder believed, mistakenly, that the word simply meant "old people." He preferred it because it was less cumbersome than more technical alternatives. That choice locked a Navajo exonym into decades of academic literature about a culture that had nothing to do with the Navajo.

  Navajo historian Wally Brown has argued that the word was never meant to describe all Ancestral Puebloans at all. In his account, "Anasazi" referred specifically to a group said to have lived in Chaco Canyon and conducted slave raids on their neighbors. Using the name for an entire civilization, Brown said, was an anthropological mistake from the start.

  Contemporary Pueblo peoples view the term as derogatory and have rejected it. The Hopi use the word Hisatsinom, meaning "ancient people," as their own designation. Modern descendants now prefer Ancestral Pueblo peoples, a term that places the connection to living communities at the center of the name, not the perspective of a rival group.

• 3. Land and Water

  ›

  The Ancestral Puebloan homeland centers on the Colorado Plateau, but extended from central New Mexico on the east to southern Nevada on the west. Evidence of their culture has been found reaching east onto the American Great Plains, near the Cimarron and Pecos Rivers and in the Galisteo Basin.

  The plateau itself sat at high elevations, ranging from 4,500 to 8,500 feet, with juniper, pinyon, and ponderosa pine woodlands at different heights. Wind and water had cut steep-walled canyons into the sandstone landscape and shaped natural overhangs where resistant rock layers sat above more easily eroded shale. The Ancestral Puebloans chose those overhangs deliberately, both for shelter and for defense.

  Water was the organizing challenge of their world. Summer rains were unreliable and sometimes violent. Winter snowfall varied, but the melt of that snow was the primary water source for the culture, feeding seeds in spring and filling the smaller tributaries that could be diverted for irrigation: the Chinle, Animas, Jemez, and Taos Rivers. Where sandstone overlay shale, snowmelt pooled into seeps and springs that the Ancestral Puebloans used directly.

  All areas of the homeland suffered periodic drought and erosion. The larger rivers were less useful than the smaller ones, because smaller streams could be controlled. Southwest farmers eventually developed check dams and terraces to capture what seasonal rainfall did arrive, a technique that became critical when the climate shifted against them.

• 4. Building in Stone

  ›

  Cliff dwellings became the dominant image associated with Ancestral Puebloan culture, but they represent a relatively late period, roughly the Pueblo II and Pueblo III eras from about 900 to 1350 CE. The first homes had more modest origins: the pit-house, a partially subterranean structure that formed the foundation of the Basketmaker periods.

  Mug House at Mesa Verde gives a precise picture of cliff-dwelling life. Around 100 people shared 94 small rooms and eight kivas, all built against each other and sharing many walls. Builders used every available space. The site is not unusual; it is typical.

  At Chaco Canyon, construction reached a different scale entirely. Great houses averaged more than 200 rooms each, with some reaching 700. Rooms had higher ceilings than earlier Ancestral Pueblo buildings, and large sections were planned and built in single stages rather than incrementally. Walls were constructed with a core-and-veneer technique: rubble filled the space between two parallel load-bearing walls of dressed sandstone blocks set in clay mortar, then covered with a layer of smaller sandstone pieces pressed into binding mud. The patterns in those surface stones were often distinctive.

  The Chacoan structures together required the wood of 200,000 conifer trees, hauled on foot from mountain ranges up to 70 miles away. Nine of the great house complexes each contained a Great Kiva, a ceremonial space up to 63 feet in diameter. Small kivas were built at a ratio of roughly one for every 29 rooms. T-shaped doorways and stone lintels marked every Chacoan kiva, a design detail that later appeared in cliff dwellings far from the canyon, which some archaeologists read as evidence that the Chaco elite system persisted even after the canyon was abandoned.

• 5. Roads and Celestial Order

  ›

  Through satellite images and ground investigations, archaeologists found eight main roads radiating from the great house sites at Chaco Canyon. Together they run for more than 180 miles and are more than 30 feet wide. The largest were built between 1000 and 1125 CE, the same period as many of the great houses, and include the Great North Road, the South Road, the Coyote Canyon Road, and the Chacra Face Road, among others.

  The roads were not simply worn paths. Builders excavated them down to a smooth, leveled bedrock surface, or cleared away vegetation and soil. Large ramps and stairways cut into cliff rock connected routes at the canyon's rim to sites below. Some tracts led to natural features: springs, lakes, mountain tops, and pinnacles. Simple structures like berms and walls were sometimes aligned alongside them.

  The Great North Road is the longest and best known of the system. It originates near Pueblo Bonito and Chetro Ketl, converges at Pueblo Alto, and extends north beyond the canyon's limits. Scholars have debated whether the roads served primarily an economic function, moving goods and timber, or a symbolic and ceremonial one. The presence of macaws, turquoise, and seashells at Pueblo Bonito, none of which belong to the local environment, confirms that long-distance trade ran through the canyon. Strontium isotope analysis of timber confirms the distant mountain origins of the wood.

  Beyond the roads, the Ancestral Puebloans held what the source describes as a distinct knowledge of celestial sciences. Evidence of archaeoastronomy at Chaco includes the Sun Dagger petroglyph at Fajada Butte. Many Chacoan buildings may have been aligned to track solar and lunar cycles. Those alignments required generations of sustained observation and centuries of coordinated construction to execute.

• 6. Art, Pottery, and Social Structure

  ›

  Room 33 in Pueblo Bonito is the richest burial ever excavated in the American Southwest. Archaeogenomic testing revealed that it served as a crypt for a single powerful lineage for approximately 330 years, with descent traced through the female line. At least in that great house, matrilineal succession was not incidental; it was structural.

  In the northern portion of the Ancestral Pueblo lands, from about 500 to 1300 CE, pottery carried black-painted designs on white or light gray backgrounds. The decoration used fine hatching, and the contrast between mineral-based paint and a chalky background produced the characteristic look. Plain gray ware, either smooth or textured, handled cooking and storage. More formal vessels were more richly adorned. Narrow-necked jars called ollas held liquids; certain tall cylinders were likely ceremonial.

  South of the Anasazi territory, in Mogollon settlements, pottery was hand-coiled, scraped, and polished, with red to brown coloring. In northern New Mexico, the local black-on-white tradition known as the Rio Grande white wares continued well after 1300 CE. By the 14th century, according to archaeologists Patricia Crown and Steadman Upham, the appearance of bright colors on Salado Polychromes may reflect religious or political alliances forming across the region.

  Rock art added another dimension to Ancestral Pueblo expression. Painted pictographs and carved petroglyphs covered canyon walls, placed where they would be protected from the sun but visible publicly. The so-called Holy Ghost panel in Horseshoe Canyon is considered one of the earliest uses of graphical perspective in the archaeological record, with the largest figure appearing to take on a three-dimensional representation.

• 7. Migration and Its Reasons

  ›

  After about 1130 CE, a 50-year drought hit Chaco Canyon, and the Chacoans abandoned it. That drought was part of a longer pattern: a 300-year period of aridity called the Great Drought struck North America after around 1130. The same climatic shift contributed to the collapse of the Tiwanaku civilization around Lake Titicaca in present-day Bolivia, and the contemporary Mississippian culture also collapsed during this period.

  The Ancestral Puebloans left their established homes across the 12th and 13th centuries. Archaeologist Timothy A. Kohler excavated large Pueblo I sites near Dolores, Colorado, and found that those settlements were established during periods of above-average rainfall. Sites in drier nearby areas were abandoned at the same time. The population had always been mobile in response to conditions, but the scale of departure in this period was different.

  Current scholarly consensus holds that two pressures combined: Numic-speaking peoples moving onto the Colorado Plateau, and climate change severe enough to cause agricultural failures. Jonathan Haas of the Field Museum in Chicago studied villages near Kayenta, Arizona, that relocated from canyon floors to high mesa tops in the late 13th century. Haas concluded that moving so far from water and arable land made sense only as a defensive measure.

  A 1997 excavation at Cowboy Wash near Dolores, Colorado, found the remains of at least 24 people showing evidence of violence, dismemberment, and cannibalism. In a 2010 paper, Potter and Chuipka interpreted evidence at the Sacred Ridge site near Durango, Colorado, as consistent with warfare tied to competition and ethnic cleansing. These findings are contested; alternatives proposed by other scholars include extreme famine, ritual practice, or attacks by outside groups.

  Pueblo oral history offers a different frame for the departure. Ancestors, in this account, had gained great spiritual power and used it in ways that altered nature beyond what was intended. Dismantling the kivas and sealing the doorways with rock and mortar was an act of making amends. Kiva walls at some sites show burn marks from fires set inside, which would have required removing the massive roof first.

• 8. Continuity and Descendants

  ›

  Most modern Pueblo peoples, whether Keresans, Hopi, or Tanoans, assert that the Ancestral Puebloans did not vanish. They migrated south to areas with more reliable rainfall and dependable streams, and they merged into the various Pueblo communities whose descendants still live in Arizona and New Mexico today. Early 20th-century anthropologists including Frank Hamilton Cushing, J. Walter Fewkes, and Alfred V. Kidder held the same position.

  DNA evidence has confirmed a specific link: the ancestors of the inhabitants of Picuris Pueblo once lived in Chaco Canyon. The San Ildefonso Pueblo people trace their lineage to both the Mesa Verde and the Bandelier areas. These are not general claims but precise genealogical connections supported by archaeology and genetics together.

  Three UNESCO World Heritage Sites in the United States are attributed to the Pueblos: Mesa Verde National Park, Chaco Culture National Historical Park, and Taos Pueblo. Taos Pueblo is not a ruin. It is a living community, and its inclusion on the same list as the abandoned canyon sites reflects something the oral tradition has always held to be true: the people and the places are part of the same continuous story.

  Historian James W. Loewen, in his 1999 book Lies Across America: What Our Historic Markers and Monuments Get Wrong, agreed with the Pueblo oral tradition on this point. No academic consensus has been reached, but the DNA findings from Picuris Pueblo give the oral accounts a firmer empirical footing than they had before.