THE SECOND MILLENIA
AD 1000 -- AD 2000


The Story of the Anasazi: 1245
A Civilization Lost

     The Anasazi Civilization -- named for the Navajo word meaning "ancient ones" -- took root about AD 100 in what is now known as the Four Corners area of the Southwestern United States. Its remnants survive to this day.

     Initially a culture of basket weavers, hunter-gatherers, and simple farmers, by the years 1050--1200 they had developed sophisticated agriculture, fine pottery and adobe dwellings, some of the multistory and others containing hundreds of rooms.

     In the mid to late 1200's, thousands of Anasazi abandoned their great villages, at least partly because of a lack of rain for crops. Their religon and culture changed drastically. Some moved to new settlements in The White Mountains of Arizona and the Rio Grande watershed of northern New Mexico.

     How might an Anasazi of old react if she could see the abandoned cliff dwellings today, empty and haunting, at Mesa Verde National Park? She might say something like this:

     Granddaughter, these wondrous high dwellings before you, lifeless now, and empty now, were filled with our people when I was your age. As many as the corn kernels in a great pot -- that's how many we were. And as many as the days from one summer to the next -- that's how many summers our fires lit these walls. From my grandmother and the elders before her comes this story of our people.

     Long before the ancestors built this pueblo, for too many summers to count, our ancestors lived on this land. At first they knew only basket making and the raising of maize and pumpkins. Many lived in caves. Yet Mother Earth was generous with her fruit and and game, and our people thrived.

     The Spirits shared their secrets -- how to build dwellings of mud, then of adobe, and masonry; how to raise many crops, even cotton and yucca for clothing; how to catch water with dams for the fields; how to shape pottery of great beauty. Our people walked close to the Spirits, and built these kivas you see as special places for the men to gather with the spirits and keep their favor.

     My grandmother remembered a time of harmony and full harvests, when an elder might live to see her granddaughter's babies. But the spirits, she told me, tricked us, for this would not last. Our many harvests slowly tired the soil and wore it away, and the spirits no longer heard our pleas for rain. Our people's great numbers, once a sign of our strength, became our curse when the harvests failed. As a girl I remember winter after winter of hunger. The North Winds took their own harvest as newborns and elders perished. Few mothers lived to see a grandchild. Northern tribes made war on us, and our own people fought among themselves.

     Much of the game had fled, and so, finally did all of us from this pueblo before you, seeking better lands to the south and east. My mother and father and I set out with a small party for the great river where you were born. The journey brought me great sadness as the land of our ancestors became small and vanished behind us. Every night in my dreams I returned to our pueblo, only to awaken each day in an unfamiliar land in the mountains, where the wind tormented us.

     Our walk lasted for three moons. As I helped build the walls of our new dwelling, I closed my heart in stone. My mother rarely spoke, and the voices of others had become hard. Father said the Spirits had left us, and so it was that the men no longer gathered to call them, as in the kivas of home. Some took up the Kachina beliefs of neighbor tribes, or followed another path. We made the new pueblo and a new life on the great river, but we would never be the same.