Anasazi is one of the most important early cultures in North America and left a legacy for many of the tribes of the Southwest, including the Pueblo Indians of today. The Anasazi developed a widespread culture with roads, commerce, trade, and a number of industries.
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 more permanent water sources and that they migrated eastward before settling in the canyons of the San Juan drainage basic, where by 1 A.D. they established their culture and progressed in their new homeland (Mails 71).
The earliest known Anasazi are called the Basketmakers because of the great number of finely woven baskets found by archaeologists in their burials. Some of the functions of the baskets would be taken over in later eras by pottery. The Bas...