A photograph of an Anasazi dwelling embedded in a large boulder at Hovenweep National Monument in southeastern Utah. Hovenweep National Monument is a grouping of several different disconnected park units protecting ruins of six different Anasazi Indian villages. This dwelling was located near the park’s visitor center.
The Anasazi (also known under the wider descriptor Ancestral Puebloans), were a culture of Native Americans that inhabited the Four Corners region of Utah, Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico from about 1 A.D. to 1300 A.D. However, depending on where you draw the line on what seperates the Anasazi from earlier groups that inhabited the region, the start date may go back as far as 1500 B.C. The Anasazi are known best for their development of a mostly sedentary people rather than past tribes of migrating hunters and gathers. They engaged significantly in agriculture, growing beans, squash and corn, and developed monumental architecture to house their families, provide a defense against hostile neighbors, and to protect their food supply from rodents and other animals.
The Anasazi are believed by many to be related to the modern Puebloan tribes, the Hopi, Keres, Towa and Zuni, as well as their contemporaries in the southwest the Mollogon and Hohokam
Suggested Reading:
- House of Rain: Tracking a Vanished Civilization Across the American Southwest – Craig Childs
- The Lost World of the Old Ones: Discoveries in the Ancient Southwest – David Roberts
- Non-Technical Canyon Hiking Guide to the Colorado Plateau – Mike Kelsey
- Grand Gulch, Cedar Mesa Plateau Maps – National Geographic Trails Illustrated Maps
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Top Ancient Archaeological Sites in the United States
Top Pictograph/Petroglyph Sites in Utah