Leaving Mesa Verde: Peril and Change in the Thirteenth-Century Southwest

Foreword

Foreword When asked about the fabled disappearance of the Ancestral Pueblo people from the Southwest’s Four Corners region, Tewa anthropologist Alfonso Ortiz famously quipped, “The Anasazi didn’t disappear, they’re running bingo parlors in the Rio Grande Valley.” Now, of course, the bingo parlors have morphed into casinos, but Ortiz’s point remains the same. Alas, the mystery of Ancestral Pueblo disappearance was resolved many years ago by archaeologists, whose findings coincided with what the modern Pueblo people had been saying all along: that the countless pithouse and masonry ruins of the northern Southwest were the “footprints ” of their ancestors. But if we know who the people were who built Cliff Palace and other Ancestral Pueblo sites in the central Mesa Verde region, the questions of why they abandoned their ancestral homes on the Colorado Plateau at the close of the thirteenth century and precisely where they went when they left have been debated for years, and a consensus has been slow to emerge. Early explanations of Apachean invaders driving the Pueblos from their homes in the cliffs were challenged and laid to rest long ago, although warfare among Ancestral Pueblo peoples is now generally conceded and its effects carefully weighed against other factors , such as disease, habitat loss, drought, and crop failure. If Ortiz was right that Pueblo ancestors moved from the northern San Juan region of Colorado to the northern Rio Grande Valley of New Mexico in the early 1300s, we certainly don’t see clear evidence of these migrants in the architectural forms and material culture of late prehistoric Rio Grande archaeology. In contrast, unambiguous evidence of Pueblo immigrants from the Kayenta region of northeastern Arizona is preserved in dozens (perhaps hundreds) of archaeological sites from central and southeastern Arizona. Why should immigrants from the western Plateau construct such obvious “site unit intrusions” while those from the eastern Plateau remain virtually invisible? As recently as ten years ago, archaeologists were convinced that environmental conditions in the northern Southwest were never so severe that people would have been forced to migrate in order to survive. Research focused instead on various social factors that may have encouraged people to leave rather than continue to adapt in place. Recent research paints a more dire abandonment scenario, one in which famine , intense warfare, and social and political collapse may have figured in the final decision to leave and never return. These conclusions are supported by recent paleoclimatic studies that have recovered incontrovertible evidence of drought and changes in low-frequency weather patterns in the 1100–1200s that may have made it impossible for people to continue to farm many portions of the high, dry Colorado Plateau. All these facts may converge to help explain why there is so little direct evidence of Mesa Verde migrants in the Rio Grande Valley. Perhaps Mesa Verde populations declined so precipitously during the 1200s that there were few people left at the end of the century to pack up and move. These and many other questions about the thirteenth-century depopulation of the northern Southwest were addressed in an advanced seminar at the Amerind Foundation in Dragoon, Arizona, in February 2008. The results of that seminar are assembled and synthesized in this groundbreaking volume. Organized and chaired by Tim Kohler of Washington State University (WSU) and the Santa Fe Institute, Mark Varien of the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center, and Aaron Wright of the Center for Desert Archaeology and WSU, the symposium brought together 14 scholars from across the country whose recent research in the northern San Juan region of southwestern Colorado and southeastern Utah bears directly on questions of depopulation, migration, paleoclimate change, and Pueblo social and ritual organization. In my judgment, this volume summarizes the results of some of the most sophisticated multidisciplinary research ever conducted in archaeology. Thanks in part to the extensive dendrochronological and climatological record assembled for the central Mesa Verde region, researchers are now able to date the archaeology and model the climate and environment of the northern Southwest with unparalleled precision, and more than a hundred years of intensive research in the northern San Juan region has created a prehistoric database that is perhaps unmatched anywhere else in the world. On behalf of the board and staff of the Amerind Foundation, I’d like to thank the organizers and authors of this volume for their inspiration and hard work in bringing these important research results to an interested public. viii John A. Ware This volume brings us...