The Anasazi
The People of the Mountains, Mesas and Grasslands

Like their cultural kin – the Mogollon and the Hohokam – in the deserts to the south, the earliest Anasazi peoples felt the currents of revolutionary change during the first half of the first millennium. Perhaps in a response to Mesoamerican influences from Mexico, they began to turn away from the nomadism of the ancient hunting and gathering life, the seasonal rounds calibrated to the movement of game and the ripening of wild plants, the material impoverishment imposed by the limitations of the burdens they could carry on their backs. They began living in small hamlets. They broke the land and took up agriculture. Over time, they acquired more possessions, stored food, made pottery, adopted the bow and arrow, domesticated dogs and turkeys. They still hunted and gathered, not as their only avenues for acquiring food, but as a complement to cultivated corn, beans, squash and other crops.

In the first half of their history, the Anasazi distinguished themselves primarily through the artistry of their basketry, which they crafted from the fibers of plants. In the second half, they left their mark on a much grander scale, through the construction of perhaps the most stunning prehistoric communities in the United States. The Anasazi would prove be resourceful, adaptable and, ultimately, the most enduring of the Pueblo cultural traditions.

The Anasazi 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.

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