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Ancient Places in America
| Article
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20637 |
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Section : |
LIFE
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| Issue
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10 / 1992 |
2,008 Words |
| Author
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Gregory Mcnamee
Gregory McNamee often travels in Mexico. He is the author of
The Return of Richard Nixon and six other books. |
The English writer Rose Macauley, in one of the lovely phrases that mark her work, deemed "the pleasure of ruins" one of the great rewards of travel. Few voyagers standing among the broken limestone of the Roman forum or gazing up at the monoliths of the Great Wall of China, I suspect, would dispute her remark. There is something, after all, in being alive in the midst of long-dead cultures, in sensing the majesty of time.
It takes a mound of money to attain the satisfaction such places afford, but Americans need not wander far to find equivalent pleasures. The Four Corners states that make up the heart of the American Southwest--Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Utah--abound in places where one can bask in the tangible presence of a bygone civilization known to us by the Navajo Indian word Anasazi, "the ancient ones."
Considerable mystery surrounds the origins of this great people, whose cities spread a millennium ago over an area that size of France. The Anasazi seem to be a blend of nomads who migrated northward from central Mexico at the time of Christ and the local population with whom they intermarried, descendants of the so-called Basket Maker peoples. By the twelfth century A.D. the Anasazi numbered of thousands and lived in thriving, beautifully constructed cities and cliff dwellings that today stands as silent monuments to both genius and folly.
In the late thirteenth century, the Anasazi world began to disintegrate. Archaeologists point to a number of possible reasons, of which two are most likely. First, invading Athapaskans, the ancestors of the modern Navajo and Apache peoples, drifted down from their Canadian homeland and waged war on the local inhabitants, who had been without enemies and were unprepared for conflict.
At about the same time, great drought hit the Southwest, lasting most of the fourteenth century. The drought affected the destinies of every culture group in the Southwest, with a resulting famine that killed thousands upon thousands of native people. It took an especially terrible toll on the Anasazi, who had been reckless with their use of the local resources, especially water and timber, and who, like most folks, seem to have been caught completely unawares by nature's wiles.
Whatever the cause of their downfall, the Ansazi abandoned their great cities a hundred years before the Spanish touched the shores of the Americans. They drifted eastward, with separate clans occasionally merging to form new tribes as
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