Ancient Tribes Didn't Vanish, They Just Moved
By Felicity Barringer
Rejecting two generations of academic dogma, archeologists now believe that prehistoric Indian tribes of the Southwest pursued an unusual pattern of episodic settlement until the arrival of the Spanish. They constructed dizzying cliff dwellings or huge settlements in the arid flatlands every few generations, then abandoned them as a snake might shed its skin. These conclusions, archeologists say, have wide ramifications for understanding how other civilizations evolved. The early communities of the Anasazi, and the lesser-known Hohokam and Mogollon Indians, waxed and waned in irregular rhythms as their members trekked across a precarious landscape of sagebrush, pinon trees, rocks and sand, stopping every few generations to build towns, irrigate fields and plant and harvest corn and squash before moving on. Archeologists have long been puzzled by this pattern of abandonment, so different from the lockstep evolutionary progression attributed to the great early civilizations of the Middle East and Europe: from hunting and foraging to farming, from farming to the construction of villages, and from the construction of villages to the rise of city-states and empires. But George J. Gumerman of the Center for Archeological Investigations at Southern Illinois University said, "We now have the data to show that this was a way cultures evolved before civilization, before the city-states." "What we're looking at," he went on, "are patterns in which people who had done dramatic building then reverted to simpler forms of existence and didn't have such a dramatic impact on the environment. We've got the data now to see these more ephemeral phases in prehistory." Paul Fish, an archeologist with the Arizona State Museum in Tucson, said the areas from southern Colorado and Utah to the Mexican border "were like lights going on and off." He spoke at an unusual conference of Southwestern archaeologists at the Santa Fe Institute this month. The conference, like one a year ago at the School of American Research in Santa Fe, was an attempt to look more deeply into the pulsating patterns of development and retrenchment in Southwestern cultures. But the format of the recent conference was a deviation from normal academic patterns. <> To stimulate experts to think differently about the conclusions they might draw from the burials, tools, pottery, dwellings and garbage they have unearthed, 18 archeologists and anthropologists were closeted for a week with physicists, computer scientists, a demographer, a molecular biologist and a businessman. The result, Mr. Gumerman said, was "to help set the agenda" for Southwestern archeology for the next few years. "This kind of thing helps us see things on a bigger scale," said Ben Nelson, an anthropologist at the State University of New York at Buffalo. "Every other conference I've been to is just populated with archeologists. There's been no programmatic attempt to put people from different disciplines together and force them to talk. This has been really spectacular." Southwestern archeologists, he added, "used to associate early occupations with subsistence survival strategy, then went along a continuum, with the other end being more complex farming and larger groups." But he said careful study of the evidence shows a different pattern: episodic settlement. The archeologists' conclusions, now working their way into graduate students' textbooks, have in part solved one of the central mysteries of Southwestern archeology: what happenned to the Anasazi (An-ah-SAH-zi)? The question has been posed by generations of scholars and laymen awed by the makers of the multi-storied cliff dwellings in Chaco Canyon in northwestern New Mexico and the complex system of roads that radiated out to other smaller Anasazi sites. The answer seems to be that they kept building communities and deserting them as long as the new European settlers allowed, but the names by which the Indians were known changed as the range of their wanderings decreased. Instead of "Anasazi," a word from the Athabascan language of the later-coming Navajo Indians which means "enemy old ones," the later generations were known by the names they still carry: Zuni, Hopi, Acoma. Answers Provoke Questions Similarly, the Hohokam (Ho-ho-KAHM) cultures of prehistoric Arizona, which built huge ceremonial "ball courts" reminiscent of the ancient cultures of central Mexico, and intricate irrigation systems that supported complex agriculture, eventually were known as the Pima, the name some of their descendants carry today. The resolution of these questions, however, has left a host of new ones still unanswered. In particular, archeologists and anthropologists want to know what factors influenced the episodic odyssey of the prehistoric Indians. Studies over the last decade have combined analysis of tree rings, which can determine annual rainfall, with analysis of water tables to see if the abandonments coincided with periods of drought. But thus far the studies have proved inconclusive. Although there is ample evidence for a great drought in northern New Mexico and Arizona in the late 13th century, a time when some of the major settlements were abandoned, Linda Cordell, an anthropologist at the California Academy of Sciences, points out that some sites were being constructed in the dry areas at the peak of the drought. Other explanations have also proved imperfect. For much of this century, scholars theorized that the Anasazi had moved into the cliff dwellings for defensive purposes and that these Pueblo people were constantly at war, either with each other or with Athabascan and Ute interlopers from the north. But Steve Lekson, an anthropologist with the Museum of New Mexico, said he believed there was not much evidence for "organized nastiness." In his view, the archeological sites have not turned up enough skeletons with arrowheads in their rib cages, axes in their skulls or other signs of violent battles and deaths to support a theory of abandonments in time of war. Few Clues From Skeletons A third possibility explored at the seminar was that disease became more prevalent the longer a community stayed in one place. Deborah Martin, a physical anthropologist at Hampshire College, said at the conference that there were sketchy signs of tuberculosis in some skeletons which long predated the arrival of the Spanish. Overall, Dr. Martin and Dr. Nelson said, the amount of skeletal material from any one site at any one time is seldom adequate to draw any general conclusions about disease and death. "The question is not 'Where did the Anasazi go?' " said Murray Gell-Mann, a physicist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena and an avid student of Southwestern prehistory. "The question is, why would many of these complex cultural phenomena disappear and others survive? It happened in 1150, in 1300, in 1425, and curiously enough, the last is the one we know least about." Chaco Canyon's cliff dwellings were abruptly abandoned in 1150, but the Mesa Verde settlements of the Anasazi on the plateaus of southern Colorado and Utah continued until 1300.Soon thereafter, however, there were only isolated, scattered settlements in this once-flourishing area, and new waves of construction had taken place along the Little Colorado River in northwestern Arizona and along the Rio Grande in northern New Mexico. Over the next century, however, these central areas of settlement shrank dramatically. Other widely settled areas, like the Casas Grandes culture in the northwestern corner of Mexico, had virtually disappeared by 1450. For the Santa Fe Institute, a six-year-old group of computer scientists, mathematicians and biologists who study complex systems, the questions raised by the new findings in Southwestern prehistory have parallels in fields as diverse as linguistics, biology and economics, raising common questions about why systems get more complex and why complex systems disintegrate. "What I hope for in a conference like this," said Dr. Gell-Mann, "is that it would have some effect on stimulating people to think about complex systems broadly, whether human systems or biological systems or computer models. Another more modest objective is to come out with some ideas of what the archeologists should study next."
