Oasisamerican Cultures: The Anasazi

The Anasazi culture is one of three major traditions/cultures identified in the southwestern area of the United States, mainly the "Four Corners" area also identified as where Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, and Colorado meet. The Anasazi are not a tribe nor did anyone call themselves by that name. Archaeologists apply this name to the people who farmed the “Four Corners” before 1300 CE. A culture is identified through its artifacts, architecture, crafts, and symbols used during a certain time period.

Chaco Culture: clay bowl and turquoise pendant
National Parks Service via Wikimedia

Anasazi is Navajo for “the ancient ones”. Before the start of the first pueblo period, the Anasazi were considered “basket makers” because of predominant artifacts found in sites.

A pueblo period is defined as the shift from a time when people made light baskets and nomadic movements, to heavier pottery used to keep food from spoiling and people who settled and did not move frequently.

Beginning around 700 CE (First Pueblo Period), they were considered Pueblo People because they began producing pottery. Much of the earlier pottery had simple designs and decorations such as lines, dots, zigzags, but then overtime (and maybe some influence from the Mogollon and Hohokam) designs become denser and more precise with bold geometric patterns in black-on-white and representations of birds, lizards, or humans.

Why is pottery important to archaeologists?

Pottery contains clues about the people who made it. Styles and designs change through time, and vary across regions. Pottery can be sorted or "typed" into categories based on grouped traits such as color, texture, decoration and vessel shape. Archaeologists often name a ceramic type after the place where the pottery of that style was first identified--for example, Mancos Black-on-Gray (from Mancos, Colorado) or Tin Cup Polychrome (from Tin Cup Mesa, Utah). Archaeologists then follow the principle that most pottery made in one place and time tends to be fairly uniform in decoration given that ceramic fragments ("sherds") can somewhat show when a household or village was occupied. Since certain designs are unique to specific geographic areas and periods, studying and classifying designs can help reconstruct social interactions, communication, and trade relationships between regions. It would be valuable to know if certain designs "belonged" to a family, clan, or village; or how free a potter was to invent or borrow designs.

Pit Houses

Early Anasazi architecture was made up of family unit pit houses which were shallow and roofed over with wood and mud. Later pit houses were dug deeper with only the entrance visible on the surface. Above ground storage rooms were built strictly for storage of food, but eventually they became living/sleeping/working rooms. Pit houses then transformed into what archaeologists refer to as Kivas, a square underground room for religious ritual. Inside a kiva, a deflector wall is in front of the entrance to regulate the entering draft, and most of the time a hearth pit is at the center. Between the regulator wall and the hearth pit is a small hole in the floor called a sipapu, which symbolizes the “hole through which the Anasazi believed humanity originally emerged from the underworld.” Another type of kiva is a “great kiva”, exactly the same as a regular kiva only larger to host community events and rituals.

Kivas at Chaco Canyon, New Mexico
National Parks Service via Wikimedia

Cave Dwellings

Between 1200 and 1300 CE, many large and small pueblos were built into shallow caves known today as "cliff dwellings.” Cave dwellings offer several environmental advantages such as shelter for the buildings from rain and snow, usually have a good solar orientation (shade in the summer, sun in the winter), a spring is often found at the back of these caves, and do not occupy scarce agricultural land. An example of cave dwellings are the Mesa Verde villages. At first they were compact apartment complexes located on top of the mesa. But by 1150 almost all Mesa Verde villages had moved to more defensible shelters in the sides of the mesa's cliffs. Large natural rock overhangs provided enough space to construct towns such as Cliff Palace, which contains more than 200 rooms and 23 kivas. Access to the cliff dwellings was difficult and easily protected. The large proportion of kivas to rooms at Cliff Palace indicates that the town was probably a ceremonial center for many of the other smaller villages of Mesa Verde.

Cliff Palace at Mesa Verde
Lorax via Wikimedia (CC)

Chaco Canyon

Anasazi sites are found throughout Chaco Canyon National Monument, New Mexico. Chaco towns were connected to each other by a web of roads and were thriving places from 950 to 1300 CE. The roads connected to sites such as Aztec Ruins near Aztec, New Mexico, and the Salmon site near Bloomfield, New Mexico. More than 125 sites and 250 miles of have been found and mapped in this prehistoric network of roads. The most impressive towns in Chaco Canyon were large, D-shaped communities such as Pueblo Bonito, Chetro Ketl, Hungo Pavi, Una Vida, Pueblo del Arroyo, and Pueblo Alto, many of them containing great kivas for large community ceremonies. Archaeologists believe Chaco Canyon was both a ceremonial center and a center of trade, and both food and luxury goods.

Digital reconstruction of Pueblo Bonito
NASA via Wikimedia

Decline and Separation

Eventually the territories of the Anasazi and all the other Southwest traditions decreased drastically and total population began to decline. Sites on the fringes of the territories were abandoned first, followed by those closer to the traditions' centers. One of the possibilities of the decline is a disastrous drought that was recorded in tree rings from the years 1276-99, and then possibly followed by invasion. Within decades, the constant invasion of possibly the Navajo and Apache were joined by the Spaniards, and the Indian villages of the Southwest came under both native and foreign domination by the 17th century. Even after several hundred years of occupation and struggle, the descendants of the major Southwest traditions persist today as vigorous communities.

About the Author

I'm Jose Pierre and I like learning about all aspects of culture, both ancient and modern. I enjoy learning how they communicated, expressed themselves, and their technology.