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The Anasazi Collapse
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The Anasazi Indians
By: Deandrae Smith
Anasazi" is a Navajo word that, depending on pronunciation, can mean "enemy ancestors" or "ancient people who are not us." The Anasazi existed around two thousand years ago and are thought to be the ancestors of modern Indian tribes like the Hopi, the Zuni and the Rio Grande Puebloan Indian tribes of the Southwest.
Geographic Region
The heart of the Anasazi region lay across the southern Colorado Plateau and the upper Rio Grande drainage. It spanned northeastern Arizona, northwestern New Mexico, southeastern Utah and southwestern Colorado—a land of forested mountain ranges, stream-dissected mesas, arid grasslands and occasional river bottoms. They settled into three distinct population centers which were Chaco Canyon, Mesa Verde, and Kayenta and eventually spread out across the entire plateau.
Food
At this time they were semi-permanent hunter-gatherers and began cultivating squash and corn and hunted for game with spears in the first millennium. They gathered wild plants such as amaranth, pinyon nuts, Indian rice grass, sunflower seeds and tansy mustard seeds.
Tradition
The Anasazi are very well known for their beautiful and fragile forms of pottery. Many pieces have been uncovered and restored over the years.
Shelters
As the Anasazi settled more and more into a farming lifestyle, they built permanent pithouse dwellings. Pithouses could take any shape but they were basically four strong upright posts crossed with ceiling joists and overlaid with a lattice of brush or grass matting. Quite often they would put a sod like covering over the top for extra insulation and protection from the elements.
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When a cycle of drought began, Anasazi civilization was at its height. Communities were densely populated. Even with good rains, the Anasazi were using their land to its limits. Without rain, it was impossible to grow enough food to support the population. Widespread famine occurred. People left the area in large numbers to join other pueblo peoples to the south and east, abandoning the Chaco Canyon pueblos and, later, the smaller communities that surrounded them. Anasazi civilization began a long period of migration and decline after these years of drought and famine. By the 1300s, it had all but died out in Chaco Canyon.