[Marxism] Anasazis

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

(Over the years, the Anasazi Indians have been cited as an example of 
how the indigenous peoples were just as miserable as the European 
colonizers. This was based on the discovery of some human bones near the 
hearth of some ruins dating back 700 years or so, a proof some 
anthropologists allege of cannibalism. So, you see, even if the Indians 
were driven into reservations, they too were capable of great cruelty. 
Today's NY Times has an interesting article pointing out that the 
Anasazi have been misrepresented.)


NY Times, April 8, 2008
Vanished: A Pueblo Mystery
By GEORGE JOHNSON

Perched on a lonesome bluff above the dusty San Pedro River, about 30 
miles east of Tucson, the ancient stone ruin archaeologists call the 
Davis Ranch Site doesn’t seem to fit in. Staring back from the opposite 
bank, the tumbled walls of Reeve Ruin are just as surprising.

Some 700 years ago, as part of a vast migration, a people called the 
Anasazi, driven by God knows what, wandered from the north to form 
settlements like these, stamping the land with their own unique style.

“Salado polychrome,” says a visiting archaeologist turning over a shard 
of broken pottery. Reddish on the outside and patterned black and white 
on the inside, it stands out from the plainer ware made by the Hohokam, 
whose territory the wanderers had come to occupy.

These Anasazi newcomers — archaeologists have traced them to the mesas 
and canyons around Kayenta, Ariz., not far from the Hopi reservation — 
were distinctive in other ways. They liked to build with stone (the 
Hohokam used sticks and mud), and their kivas, like those they left in 
their homeland, are unmistakable: rectangular instead of round, with a 
stone bench along the inside perimeter, a central hearth and a sipapu, 
or spirit hole, symbolizing the passage through which the first people 
emerged from mother earth.

“You could move this up to Hopi and not tell the difference,” said John 
A. Ware, the archaeologist leading the field trip, as he examined a 
Davis Ranch kiva. Finding it down here is a little like stumbling across 
a pagoda on the African veldt.

For five days in late February, Dr. Ware, the director of the Amerind 
Foundation, an archaeological research center in Dragoon, Ariz., was 
host to 15 colleagues as they confronted the most vexing and persistent 
question in Southwestern archaeology: Why, in the late 13th century, did 
thousands of Anasazi abandon Kayenta, Mesa Verde and the other 
magnificent settlements of the Colorado Plateau and move south into 
Arizona and New Mexico?

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.

“The late 1200s was a time of substantial social, political and 
religious ferment and experimentation,” said William D. Lipe, an 
archaeologist at Washington State University.

“You can’t have a situation where it just happens that hundreds of local 
communities for their own individual, particularistic reasons decide to 
either die or get up and move,” Dr. Lipe said. “There had to be 
something general going on.”

When scientists examine the varying width of tree rings, they indeed see 
a pernicious dry spell gripping the Southwest during the last quarter of 
the 13th century, around the height of the abandonment. But there had 
been severe droughts before.

“Over all conditions were pretty darn bad in the 1200s,” said Timothy A. 
Kohler of Washington State University. “But they were not maybe all that 
worse than they were in the 900s, and yet some people hung on then.”

Even in the worst of times, major waterways kept flowing. “The Provo 
River didn’t dry up,” said James Allison, an archaeologist at Brigham 
Young University. “The San Juan River didn’t dry up.”

“Climate probably explains a lot,” Dr. Allison said. “But there are 
places where people could have stayed and farmed and chose not to.”

Some inhabitants left the relatively lush climes of what is now southern 
Colorado for the bone dry Hopi mesas. “Climate makes the most sense for 
this big pattern change,” Dr. Lipe said. “But then you think, So they 
went to Hopi to escape this?”

Hopi was far from an anomaly. “The whole abandonment of the Four 
Corners, at least in Arizona, is people moving to where it’s even 
worse,” said Jeffrey Dean, an archaeologist at the University of 
Arizona’s Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research.

Some archaeologists have proposed that colder weather contributed to the 
downfall. Measurements of the thickness of pollen layers, accumulating 
over decades on the bottom of lakes and bogs, suggest that growing 
seasons were becoming shorter. But even when paired with drought, the 
combination may have been less than a decisive blow.

Soon after the abandonment, the drought lifted. “The tree-ring 
reconstructions show that at 1300 to 1340 it was exceedingly wet,” said 
Larry Benson, a paleoclimatologist with the Arid Regions Climate Project 
of the United States Geological Survey. “If they’d just hung in there . . .”

Though the rains returned, the people never did.

“Why didn’t they come back?” said Catherine M. Cameron, an archaeologist 
at the University of Colorado. “Why didn’t anyone come back to the 
northern San Juan? It was a fine place, and apparently by 1300 it was 
very fine.”

In the remains of Sand Canyon Pueblo, in the Mesa Verde region, Kristin 
A. Kuckelman of the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center in Cortez, Colo., 
sees the story of a tragic rise and fall. As crops withered, the 
inhabitants reverted from farming maize and domesticating turkeys to 
hunting and gathering. Defensive fortifications were erected to resist 
raiders.

The effort was futile. Villagers were scalped, dismembered, perhaps even 
eaten. Families were slain inside their dwellings, and the pueblo was 
burned and abandoned. Curiously, as was true throughout the region, the 
victors didn’t stay to occupy the conquered lands.

But violence was not always an obvious factor. Throwing a wrench into 
the theories were those curious wanderers from Kayenta. They thrived in 
their pueblos until about 1290 — some 15 years after the Great Drought 
began. And when they finally departed for the San Pedro Valley and other 
destinations, the evacuation was orderly.

“I don’t see any evidence of violence, cannibalism or even defensive 
posturing,” Dr. Dean said. “The abandonment seems to be different. You 
get lots of evidence that people intended to come back.”

At Kiet Siel, a cliff dwelling now part of Navajo National Monument in 
northeast Arizona, people sealed the openings of granaries with 
carefully fitted rock slabs, caulking the edges with a collar of clay. 
Finally the evacuees blocked the entranceway to the settlement with a 
large wooden beam.

“It’s pretty clear that these people weren’t freaking out or weren’t in 
a hurry when they left,” Dr. Dean said.

Ultimately the motivation for the abandonments may lie beyond fossils 
and artifacts, in the realm of ideology. Imagine trying to explain the 
19th-century Mormon migration to Utah with only tree rings and pollen 
counts.

By studying changes in ceremonial architecture and pottery styles, Donna 
Glowacki, an archaeologist at the University of Notre Dame, is charting 
the rise of what may have been a new puebloan religion. For more than a 
century, the established faith was distinguished by multistory “great 
houses,” with small interior kivas, and by much larger “great kivas” — 
round, mostly subterranean and covered with a sturdy roof. Originating 
at Chaco Canyon in northwest New Mexico, the formidable temples seem 
designed to limit access to all but a priestly few.

Though Chaco declined as a regional religious center during the early 
1100s, the same architecture spread to the Mesa Verde area. But by the 
mid 1200s, a different style was also taking hold, with plazas and kivas 
that were uncovered like amphitheaters — hints, perhaps, of a new 
openness. At some sites, serving bowls became larger and were frequently 
decorated with designs, as though intended for a ritual communion. If 
the pueblo people had left a written history perhaps we would read of 
the Anasazi equivalent of the Protestant reformation.

But the analogy can’t be pushed too far. The new architecture also 
included multiwalled edifices — some round, some D-shaped — that might 
have been chambers for secret rituals.

Though the dogma may be irrecoverable, Dr. Glowacki argues that it 
rapidly attracted adherents. A center of the movement, she said, was the 
McElmo Canyon area, west of Mesa Verde. Excavations indicate that the 
population burgeoned along with the new architecture. An influx of 
different pottery designs suggests immigrants from the west were moving 
in. Then around 1260, long before the drought, the residents began 
leaving the pueblo, perhaps spreading the new ideology.

Other archaeologists see evidence of an evangelical-like religion — the 
forerunner, perhaps, of the masked Kachina rituals, which still survive 
on the Hopi and Zuni reservations — appearing in the south and 
attracting the rebellious northerners. Salado polychrome pottery may 
have been emblematic of another, possibly overlapping cult.

In an effort to draw together the skein of causes and effects, Dr. 
Kohler and members of the Village Ecodynamics Project are collaborating 
with archaeologists at Crow Canyon on a computer simulation of 
population changes in southwest Colorado from 600 to around 1300. 
Juxtaposing data on rainfall, temperature, soil productivity, human 
metabolic needs and diet, gleaned from an analysis of trash heaps and 
human waste, the model suggests a sobering conclusion: As Anasazi 
society became more complex, it also became more fragile.

Corn was domesticated and then wild turkeys, an important protein 
source. With more to eat, the populations grew and aggregated into 
villages. Religious and political institutions sprung up.

When crops began dying and violence increased, the inhabitants clustered 
even closer. By the time the drought of 1275 hit, the Anasazi had become 
far more dependent on agriculture than during earlier droughts. And they 
had become more dependent on each other.

“You can’t easily peel off a lineage here and a lineage there and have 
them go their own way,” Dr. Kohler said. “These parts are no longer 
redundant. They’re part of an integrated whole.” Pull one thread and the 
whole culture unwinds.

Amid the swirl of competing explanations, one thing is clear: The pueblo 
people didn’t just dry up and blow away like so much parched corn. They 
restructured their societies, tried to adapt and when all else failed 
they moved on.

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