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Anasazi Essay

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Anasazi

About 1400 years ago, long before any European exploration of the New World, a group of Indians living in the Four Corners region chose Mesa Verde for their home. For over 700 years their descendants lived and flourished here, eventually building elaborate stone cities in the sheltered recesses of the canyon walls. Then in the late 1200’s, within the span of one or two generations, they abandoned their homes and moved away.

Crossing an imaginary boundary into the region known as the American
Southwest, you enter a place as culturally different from the rest of the U.S. as
Asia or Egypt. For more than a millennium, various Indian cultures have lived, worked, worshipped, and died here, bestowing a distinctive …show more content…

Mesa Verde National Park, which occupies part of a large plateau rising high above the Montezuma and Mancos Valleys, preserves a spectacular remnant of their thousand year old culture. We call these people the Anasazi, from a Navajo word meaning “the ancient ones.” Ever since local cowboys discovered the cliff dwellings a century ago, archeologists have been trying to understand the life of these people. but despite decades of excavation, analysis, classification, and comparison our knowledge is still sketchy. We will never know the whole story of their existence, for they left no written records and much that was important in their lives has perished. yet for all their silence, these written records and much that was important in their lives has perished. Yet for all their silence, these ruins speak with a certain eloquence. They tell of a people adept at building, artistic, in their crafts, and skillful at wrestling a living from a difficult land. They are evidence of a society that over the centuries accumulated skills and traditions and passed them on from one generation to another. By classic times the Anasazi of
Mesa Verde were the heirs of a vigorous civilization, with accomplishments in community living and the arts that rank among the finest expressions of human culture in ancient America. Taking advantage of nature,

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