Anasazi America: Seventeen Centuries on the Road from Center Place

1 The Rhythms of Civilization

his book reconstructs the rise and fall of the Chaco Anasazi of New Mexico.It is about how ancient farmers in the American Southwest gathered the knowledge and power to create the grandest regional social and political system in prehistoric North America during the tenth and eleventh centuries A.D., only to lose nearly all that they had created in the twelfth. Attheirheightinthelateeleventhcentury,theChacoAnasazidominated40,000 square miles of the scrubby,semiarid Four Corners region.1 This was an area nearly the size of Scotland—and considerably larger than any one European principality of thetime.Avastandpowerfulallianceconsistedof 10,000to20,000farminghamletsandnearly100spectaculardistricttowns ,called“greathouses”byarchaeologists, that integrated the surrounding farmsteads through economic and religious ties. Hundreds of miles of formal roadways interconnected the whole system.2 Chaco Canyon,now a national park and,like the great pyramids at Giza,aWorld Heritage Site, was both the heart and soul of this domain. It took these Anasazi farmers more than seven centuries to lay the agricultural , organizational, and technological groundwork for the creation of the classic Chacoan period,which lasted about 200 years—only to collapse spectacularly in a mere 40.3 Why did such a great society collapse? Who survived? Why? How did the survivors behave? What has that to do with modern Pueblo descendants of the Anasazi? What has it to do with the rest of us? chapter one The Rhythms of Civilization 7 t 8 / chapter o n e Past and Present When Chacoan society collapsed, different clans and families experienced different fates—each according to their wealth, their station, and the knowledge they possessed. Some stayed on in the great houses while others moved away, abandoning their farmsteads.Among each,some perished.In complex eleventhcentury Chacoan society, there were many differences among people, and those critical differences were grist for the mill of evolution during the collapse. Some were ground down and perished. Others, though not left whole, survived. Those who perished became the past. Those who survived left more descendants and became the present. If we can understand both, we will have retrieved a saga worthy of the telling.We will also know much about how the Anasazi once created a great but fragile society, and how catastrophe forced them to dramatically transform it into a far more modest but durable one. That transformation allowed them to survive and has brought their descendants face-to-face with our own modern version of a powerful society. Because non-Indian Americans dominate the social landscape that surrounds current Puebloan society in New Mexico, both of our “presents” have become intertwined. In some ways, Pueblo people and the rest of us are quite alike—we hope, dream, work, joke, make families, believe in a higher order, and expect to pass our societies on to our children and our children’s children. In other ways, though we live near one another, work in many of the same places, and often share communities, our differences are great. Just what are these differences? Are they destined to be more grist for the mill of evolution should another catastrophe befall us in our own time? Who would perish and become the “past” of an evolving saga? Who would survive and become the future—a new “present?” Now that much of the world, both traditional and industrial, is so deeply intertwined, Pueblo people are not the only ones who need to know the fundamentals of survival. We all do. In today’s world,an economic disturbance in one nation can within days cascade into direct financial consequences for others half the world away. A famine in one country can trigger a war in another. A plague in one faraway place can become a pandemic in weeks. And one small person with a very big bomb could end the entire human saga in mere hours. What have the Chaco Anasazi got to do with all this? Perhaps nothing. They are not responsible for us; they could not even have imagined us. And yet in another sense, their survival as Pueblo people means everything—for if we do the necessary detective work and listen carefully to their past, we can retrieve an important message for all surviving traditional societies, for the rest of us, and for all of twenty-first-century society to come. the rhythms of civilization / 9 Enter the Anasazi What is currently called the Four Corners region of the American Southwest was homeland to the ancient...