Anasazi Painted Handprints Pictographs – Comb Ridge, Utah
The Anasazi were a people known to have inhabited the four corners region of Utah, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico, from approximately 100 AD, until 1600 AD. Known academically as the Ancestral Puebloans, they went through a number of phases of development, going through a variety phases from the Basketmaker II-III stages, up through the Pueblo I-IV phases. Each phase is marked by increasing technological sophistication in their development, both in food production, and housing. The Basketmaker culture was known primarily as semi-nomadic hunter-gatherers, that ultimately evolved into a society situated in well established cliff dwelling agricultural communities that grew crops of corn, beans, and squash in the canyons of the Colorado Plateau in the American Southwest.
The Ancestral Puebloans were among four major pre-Colombian native cultural traditions to exist in the southwest. The others include the Mogollon, Hohokam, and Patayan.
The most prominent archaeological examples of the Anasazi culture, can be found today at Mesa Verde NP (Colorado), Hovenweep NM (Utah), Chaco Canyon NHP (New Mexico), Canyon De Chelly NM (Arizona), Canyons of the Ancients NM (Colorado), Bandelier NM (New Mexico), Navajo NM (Arizona), and Bears Ears NM (Utah).
A number of theories exist as to what happened to the Anasazi, but one thing that seems certain is that they didn’t really disappear, but instead migrated to other areas of the southwest, and evolved into the puebloan cultures found today in Arizona and New Mexico. Including the Acoma, Zuni and Hopi.
There is also a strong indication that they shared a connection with the Fremont Indians that inhabited much of Utah outside of the four corners area, during the same time period.