But about 1250, many of the people began constructing settlements high in the cliffs-settlements that offered defense and protection. And into their architecture they built sophisticated astronomical observatories.įor most of the long span of time the Anasazi occupied the region now known as the Four Corners, they lived in the open or in easily accessible sites within canyons. The people laid a 400-mile network of roads, some of them 30 feet wide, across deserts and canyons. The Anasazi built magnificent villages such as ChacoCanyon’s Pueblo Bonito, a tenth-century complex that was as many as five stories tall and contained about 800 rooms. This 30,000-square-mile landscape of sandstone canyons, buttes and mesas was populated by as many as 30,000 people. During the 10th and 11th centuries, ChacoCanyon, in western New Mexico, was the cultural center of the Anasazi homeland, an area roughly corresponding to the Four Corners region where Utah, Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico meet. Their descendants are today’s Pueblo Indians, such as the Hopi and the Zuni, who live in 20 communities along the Rio Grande, in New Mexico, and in northern Arizona. The airy settlement that we explored had been built by the Anasazi, a civilization that arose as early as 1500 B.C. At last, 600 feet above the canyon floor, we arrived at the ledge. Up we scrambled toward them, gasping and sweating, careful not to dislodge boulders the size of small cars that teetered on insecure perches. “See the dwellings?” With binoculars, we could just make out the facades of a row of mud-and-stone structures. “There,” he said, pointing toward a nearly invisible wrinkle of ledge just below the canyon rim. As we rounded a bend along the trail, Greg Child, an expert climber from Castle Valley, Utah, stopped and looked upward. More than seven centuries ago, however, the last inhabitants of the canyon had made quite a different decision about where to live. ![]() Still, the place had a cozy appeal: had we wanted to pitch camp, we could have selected a grassy bank beside the creek, with clear water running under the skin of ice, dead cottonwood branches for a fire, and-beneath the 800-foot-high rock walls-shelter from the wind. ![]() It was midwinter, and the stream that ran alongside us was frozen over, forming graceful terraces of milky ice. The four of us walked slowly down the deep, narrow canyon in southern Utah.
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