The World's Most Beautiful Places
A view of cloudy Provo Peak close to sunset, from Squaw Peak Road which travels along the southern Wasatch foothills above Utah Valley. The cities of Springville, Provo, and Orem lie to the east, below the Wasatch Mountain Range.
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.
Pictured is a Sandstone Staircase in an abandoned modern cliff dwelling in southern Utah. Rumor has it that a man wanting to live an off grid lifestyle constructed the home in the side of a sandstone cliff along the Colorado River near the town of Moab. Unfortunately the quality of the sandstone was not the greatest, and it became clear the structure would eventually crumble, Evidence of this is clear, given his many attempts to stabilize the roof with iron rods and plates. It is also suggested that the structure was illegal from the beginning, and was condemned by BLM (Bureau of Land Management), the Federal agency managing the land upon which the structure was built.