Why did the Ancestral Pueblo people leave Four Corners?
Scientists once thought the answer lay in impersonal factors like the onset of a great drought or a little ice age. But as evidence accumulates, those explanations have come to seem too pat — and slavishly deterministic. Like people today, the Anasazi (or Ancient Puebloans, as they are increasingly called) were presumably complex beings with the ability to make decisions, good and bad, about how to react to a changing environment. They were not pawns but players in the game.
Looking beyond climate change, some archaeologists are studying the effects of warfare and the increasing complexity of Anasazi society. They are looking deeper into ancient artifacts and finding hints of an ideological struggle, clues to what was going through the Anasazi mind.
Read more about from The New York Times.
An excellent book on the subject is The House of Rain by Craig Childs. My wife got it for me as a present, and I just finished reading it.
Childs isn’t really an archeologist. He is an enthusiast who talks to a lot of archeologists, and the book is about a project where he simply hiked from Chaco Canyon, up to Mesa Verde, over to Utah, and down through Arizona, with a bit of poking around in northern Mexico tacked on. Covering the terrain on foot gave him a different understanding of the Anaszi than one would get driving from place to place.
Highly recommended.
I too have read Criag Childs’s House of Rain: Tracking a Vanished Civilization Across the American Southwest
. It’s good.
Hey that sounds like my kind of story. I just put a hold on it at my local library. All six copies are checked out.
Thanks for the tip Eric in Santa Fe and NewMexiKen.
We are players in the climate change game. They were simply recipients of changes beyond their control.
Sure people made choices, but making a choice under ratcheting climate pressure distorts those choices.