Anasazi tribe

The Anasazi culture was the social order of the people who occupied the Four Corners area of the American southwest during the area between approximately 200 B.C. and 1300 A.D.. These people were designated the Anasazi by archaeologist Alfred V. Kidder in 1936, a word taken from the Navajo language. it is taken to mean "the old ones" or "the ancient ones" and is clearly not the term these people used for themselves. A more recent interpretation of the word is that it means "enemy ancestors," a reasonable point of view given the cultural aversion of the Navajo to places where deaths have occurred. The Anasazi left behind huge and imposing multi-roomed structures that must have seemed like ghost towns to the Navajo who came to the area in the sixteenth century (Matlock 1).

The progenitors of the Anasazi were a Uzo-Aztecan people who hunted, gathered, and made baskets as a principal craft. It is not known where these people lived before they moved into the San Juan drainage basin. Many artifacts of these early people are identical with those found in Nevada caves and dating from 2000 B.C. It is logical then to conclude that these people were driven from Nevada by the need for better living conditions and mo

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d from the large central villages in Chaco Canyon to the north, south, and west to connect with other large villages and population centers. At the same time, the Anasazi undertook the construction of special villages or units within these communities, the so-called Chaco outliers. They contained distinctive Chaco architecture and may have been inhabited by Chaco people. They are found in the northern San Juan, the Chuska, and the Zuni areas. These roads and the outliers are thought to have been for trading purposes and perhaps for ceremonial and political reasons. They represent a more elaborate system of geographic expansion of the Chaco people (Matlock 36). The Anasazi culture first of all represented the longest-lived Southwestern farming tradition. The pueblos made increasingly specialized use of space, especially for storage, food preparation, and for kivas, semi-subterranean rooms used in community rituals. In regions such as Chaco Canyon, the Anasazi built roads and extensive irrigation systems and developed widespread trading links, though many aspects of the life of the Anasazi remain uncertain: We do not understand why basically self-sufficient farming communities chose to congregate at such close quarters for
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Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)

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