Between Mesa Verde National Park and Ute Mountain Ute Tribal Park and the Canyons of the Ancients and Chimney Rock national monuments, it’s no secret the Four Corners is an archaeological treasure trove.
Just how much of a treasure was the subject of a lecture Thursday evening at Fort Lewis College by Mark Varien, executive vice president of Crow Canyon Institute, as part of the Professional Associates’ Lifelong Learning Series.
“We work in one of the world’s most rich archaeological areas, with the highest density of sites in North America,” he said. “It’s as rich as the Maya or the Inca, with communities that extend from 4,000 years ago to today because the Pueblo people are their descendants.”
At Crow Canyon Archaeological Center, they work, he said, with the best dating technology in the world, the ability to reconstruct past climate date better than anywhere else and a sophisticated lab that influences archaeological practices around the world. The region averages 100 archaeological sites per square mile.
Varien pulled information from different fields ranging from linguistics and genetics to weaving and anthropology to track the current thinking in the field, including discoveries from Crow Canyon digs. He looked at lots of research, including some quite recent, that had not been published or peer-reviewed.
The shift from hunter-gatherers began after corn arrived about 4,000 years ago, traveling from Mexico into the Southwest United States.
“They started it with wild seeds from a small cob compared to what we know today,” Varien said. “People domesticated corn, and corn domesticated people at the same time. It transformed their society.”
In our area, there were two cultures in the years before 600 A.D., one in the Durango area and locations toward the east of the San Juan Basin, called the Eastern Basketmaker people, with another over in Southeast Utah, the western Basketmaker people. In the middle was an expanse of unsettled territory.
“We’re still trying to figure why they weren’t in that area,” Varien said. “They were different peoples with different cultures, so maybe it was a buffer zone. At Cave 7 in Southeast Utah, there’s rock art that tells of a huge battle in that time period where dozens and dozens of people died.”
That settlement pattern started changing in the Basketmaker III time period, 600 to 750 A.D.
“Maybe it was only when they created cultural institutions that brought them together that, that area began being settled,” he said, pointing to the great kiva found at the Dillard site, the only great kiva from the period found in Southwest Colorado thus far. Crow Canyon has been working at the site for the past three summer seasons, and site was the subject of a “Time Team America” show on PBS last fall.
Using different techniques, archaeologists have been able to trace population patterns and compare them to climate conditions, including a severe drought from 1140 to 1180, demonstrating a correlation between the two.
The big questions have been why did the ancestral Puebloans leave? And where did they go when they left this area circa 1300 A.D., when the cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde were abandoned?
“It happens over such a vast area, there has to be more than one reason,” Varien said. The story is more complex than just a drought.
There’s direct evidence of conflict in the region, too.
A former colleague of Varien’s, Scott Ortman, has done extensive research trying to answer the question of where they went, which is recounted in his book Winds from the North: Tewa Origins and Historical Anthropology.
“Most archaeologists specialize, but Scott has looked at it from different angles, the physical, cultural, archaeological and linguistic,” Varien said.
Ortman found multiple ways modern Pueblo peoples in New Mexico and Arizona are related to the ancestral Puebloans, including facial characteristics, language terms and patterns and oral history.
“There are many parts of their culture that they didn’t take with them,” Varien said. “They weren’t just leaving to find a new place to farm. They reinvented their cultural system in their new home in a way that has allowed them to flourish to this day.”
abutler@durangoherald.com