A.D. 1250- Arizona's Five Lost Tribes

Sometime during the century between A.D. 1150 and 1250, a prehistoric Sinagua artist painted a remarkable and unusual pic-tograph on a sandstone alcove a few miles from the modern Arizona town of Sedona. In this ancient tableau, a man is drawing a bow and aiming his arrow not at a deer, an elk, or a bighorn sheep, but at another man.

A prehistoric political cartoon that accurately depicts the tensions of early life in Arizona? Or another controversial artifact that just roils the already muddy waters of Southwestern archaeology?

Maybe neither. In three years of hunting, this is the first rock art I have found that hints at a violent clash of cultures in the prehis-toric Southwest. If combat was common, like hunting, why wasn't it commonly drawn?

I was first lured into Southwestern prehistory by the enigma of its closing chapter, which I felt certain involved warfare. Eventually this led to a new Arizona Highways book, A.D. 1250, an exploration of the life, art, architecture, and death of the five major prehistoric Southwestern cultures.

The title of the book pivots on the fulcrum of what must have been a tumultuous century in the Southwest. In the Sonoran Desert, the Hohokam are abandoning their primitive pithouses for adobe condo-miniums enclosed by compound walls, an architectural hint of a new social order. On the Colorado Plateau, the Sinagua are mysteriously dying off or scattering, while the Anasazi are building breathtaking pueblos in canyon walls. The population has exploded: 20,000 to 50,000 people are living in the Hohokam heartland where Phoenix sprawls today. Nearly everywhere in the Southwest, the arts of architecture, pot-tery, textiles, and jewelry have reached their expressive peak. Religious rituals are more complex and vital than ever, perhaps because people feel increasingly dependent on the benevolence of the spirits who manage the environment. Nearly everywhere that environment is stressed. By A.D. 1250, the upward population curve is about to over-take civilization's knowledge of how to wrestle a living from the land.

What happened over the next two centuries stresses modern ar-chaeologists, who find themselves trying to assemble a jigsaw puzzle with too many ambiguous pieces. By 1450 the Anasazi, Hohokam, Salado, Mogollon, and Sinagua no longer exist as distinct peoples. The Colorado Plateau is nearly vacant, its refugees mostly resettled in the Rio Grande Valley of New Mexico. In the deserts of Arizona and northern Mexico, the population has shriveled, the once-impressive canal net-works are filled with dust, and where civilization's vestiges Continued from page 5 survive, people eke out marginal subsis-tences.

A. D. 1250 SOUTHWESTERN PREHISTORIC INDIAN CULTURES PEAKED IN THE 13TH CENTURY . . . THEN SOMETHING STRANGE HAPPENED

Archaeologists call this the “abandon-ment” and struggle to explain it. Museum exhibits typically shroud it in mystery: “Nobody really knows why . . .”. Many books fog it in hazy cliches: “Worn cultural patterns . . .”. But the abandonment is not such a shadowy enigma. If you examine all that was happen-ing at the time and apply both archaeological science and common sense, a distinct pic-ture takes shape.

The arid Sonoran Desert would seem to us an inhospitable environment for a people without cold drinks, municipal water tanks, or trucks to ferry food from more moderate climates. Exactly the opposite was true. The Sonoran Desert was the most favorable of all the homelands for early Southwestern people. It gave them the longest growing season, the most reliable rivers, and the greatest abundance of edible natural plants: an astonishing 425 different species.

But by A.D. 1250 the Hohokam, who had flourished in the desert for a millennium, were in trouble. Malnourishment had become common. The women developed osteoporosis as soon as they reached childbearing age and had it for the rest of their short lives; unborn children were literally mining the minerals from their mothers' bodies. The average adult died at age 37.

The Hohokam were so successful that there were now too many of them for the land to support. And food wasn't the only problem. Consider firewood, always a reluctant resource in the desert: it wouldn't take too many centuries for 50,000 Phoenix-area Hohokam to strip the land of usable fuel. And there was the caprice of Nature: floods in 1358 and 1380-82, which possibly destroyed not only seasons of crops but major segments of the canal system. Already malnourished, the people could not find the calories to finance the labor for rebuilding the canals, and the great Hohokam civilization collapsed. The demise of the Colorado Plateau cultures wasn't very different: too many people too vulnerable to environmental disaster. A drought parched the plateau from 1276 to 1299, and tree-ring dating of beams in numerous Anasazi pueblos shows that the people fled during this time of little rain and never returned.

An excess of population, a shortage of resources - this is where archaeology rightly should begin to ask: wasn't there warfare - and didn't the fighting become a major factor in the abandonment?

“Look around the world, in all of human history and wherever you look, someone's killing someone,” said Arizona State University archaeologist Christy Turner, a leading investigator of Anasazi warfare. “Why would you look at the Colorado Plateau and expect to see nothing but peaceful people growing beans and dancing?” Among the earliest signs of less-than-peaceful people is evidence of a massacre in northeastern Arizona's Canyon del Muerto. Around A.D. 300, “someone” heaped a pile of corpses in a cave, their skulls smashed with stones. The victims included babies, children, and old women. Imbedded in the ribs of one skeleton was part of the shaft and the head of an arrow. The victims did not have bows and arrows in A.D. 300. The killing was the work of invaders.

From later times, generally between 900 and 1400, Turner and others have documented hundreds of mass burials, dismembered skeletons, and other hints of violent deaths.

A village near present-day Gallina, New Mexico, yielded dozens of skeletons with arrows and axes in them. The great pueblo of Paquimé in northern Chihuahua came to a dramatic end around 1400 when a mystery army killed several hundred men, women, and children and then walked away from the carnage. They appeared not to have looted the pueblo, and they left no clues to their motive.

Ever since the late 1800s, archaeologists have pondered the architecture of the late pre-historic Southwest, debating whether it was designed for defense. In 1893 the pioneer Swedish archaeologist Gustaf Nordenskiold theorized that “nothing short of the ever-imminent attacks of a hostile people can have driven the cliff-dwellers to these impregnable mountain fastnesses.” Many modern archaeologists are dubious. Assuming the “mountain fastnesses” were designed for defense reflects a European castle-and-siege concept of war-fare, they say. In fact the cliff dwellers would have been alarmingly vulnerable to siege, given their modest storage capacity for food, water, and firewood.

(PRECEDING PANEL, PAGES 6 AND 7) Betatakin, one of three major cliff dwellings within Navajo National Monument, challenged its Anasazi builders with a sloping floor. To make it level, and to provide a walkway at the edge of the village, the builders dug a footing groove in the sandstone, constructed a retaining wall, and filled in the low areas. LES MANEVITZ

Another curious fact seems to argue against widespread warfare. After 1050, people of different cultures appeared to mingle and even merge without apparent conflict. Casa Malpais, near modern Springerville, was occupied from 1250 to 1400, apparently by both Anasazi and Mogollon. The pueblo walls are distinctly Anasazi, the square kiva is indisputably Mogollon, and the built-in stone bench in the kiva is, perplexingly, Anasazi. How - and why did they get along?

Arizona State Museum archaeologist Charles Adams has developed a fascinating theory. The kachina cult, he believes, which is central to Hopi, Zuni, and other Pueblo religions today, began to develop on the Colorado Plateau in the early 1300s as a glue to cement relationships among disparate peoples living together.

Kachinas are ancestor-spirits who serve as messengers between Pueblo people and their gods, and who also bring life-giving rain to the crops. The earliest known images of kachinas appear in the upper Little Colorado River valley of Arizona on pottery that has been radiocarbon-dated to about 1350. By the 1400s, kachinas had roamed as far as the Rio Grande valley of New Mexico. Dramatic kiva murals depicting kachinas have been found in 15th-century Hopi villages in Arizona and in pueblos north of Albuquerque. The emergence and apparent spread of the cult, Adams said, proved that “the first choice for the leadership was not conflict, but the avoidance of conflict.” But the growth of prehistoric pueblos throughout the Southwest presented other problems. Disease may have invaded these cities precisely because they were cities. Given prehistoric sanitation and crowded living conditions, they would have been susceptible to epidemics. At Wupatki Pueblo 30 miles north of Flagstaff, Turner investigated 31 bodies discovered in a mass burial in one room. In this case, he said, there was no evidence of violence; disease was the only possible explanation.

And the more sophisticated the settle-ments, ironically, the poorer their responses would have been to crises such as epidemic or drought. The governments had become bigger and more centralized - they had to in order to engineer public works such as the great Hohokam canals and so they had more of an investment in the status quo.

Small clusters of a few families could easily roam or migrate, seeking fresh resources. Cities would have waited and perished.

I have come to suspect that there was prehistoric warfare or conflictin the Southwest, but that it was more occasional than chronic, and hardly like the largescale mayhem that Europeans would later introduce to the descendants of the Anasazi, Hohokam, and others. It probably played a role in the abandonment, but it wasn't, by itself, responsible for the epic unraveling of a whole panoply of prehistoric cultures.

There was a web of causes of the abandonment, intricately woven. Everywhere the web was pressed, a new stress would endanger all the strands. Too many people, too little (or too much) rain, war, disease, unresponsive systems of government. None of this is unusual in human history, which is why the word “mystery” should be divorced from the abandonment.

Some Navajos believe that their predecessors in the region, the Anasazi, vanished because “they began to do and learn things beyond the knowledge that was set for them.” Not too different is the prophetic line Lawrence Clark Powell wrote about our modern Southwest in his 1976 bicentennial history of Arizona. Our most pressing problem, he concluded, “is that of a rising flood of people into a land naturally unsuited to large numbers of people.” In A.D. 1250, at the peak of their success and ambition, the prehistoric Southwesterners may have thought they were solving that problem. They would not be the last people to cherish that belief.

Editor's Note: A.D. 1250: Ancient Peoples of the Southwest, Lawrence W. Cheek's most recent book for Arizona Highways, tells the fascinating story of the rise and fall of the prehistoric cultures of the Southwest and offers a cogent explanation of the peoples' “disappearance.” It also examines the spectacular ruins and artifacts they left behind. A removable map-guide to the best-preserved of the ruins accompanies the full-color 176-page 10by 13-inch hardcover book. Available after September 15, 1994, the book with map costs $49.95 plus shipping and handling. The map-guide is available separately for $3.95 plus shipping and handling. To order, call toll-free 1 (800) 543-5432. In the Phoenix area, call 258-1000.