7
H Almost always, I can find lizards in places like this. Even in winter, on warm days, they come out and lie on sunny rocks. Some years, when our food is gone in late winter and early spring, I eat them—but there isn’t much meat on them.
7
I There is our home! When I’m hunting up here, I like to look down at our village. It is a good place to live. The sun shines under the cliff in winter, warming the whole village, but the cliff shades our houses in summer.
The fields along the canyon floor have good crops most years, and our storage bins are usually full at the end of summer.
Well, I must leave you now, for I have much to do before dark. Good hunting!
You have come out here trying to see the world from the Anasazi point of view, we hope, but as you return you may wish to consider a 20th century point of view.
The 800-year-old buildings across the canyon and 500 feet below are called Horse Collar Ruin. It is a village of several homes, two kivas (ceremonial and religious building used by men only), and numerous storage bins. It may have been home for about 30 people. The brush covered flats along the stream were probably farmed, producing corn, beans, and other storable crops. Many other food sources were used; native plants and animals were eaten and provided numerous necessary “side products.” Hides, bone, horn, feather, bark, wood, etc., were the raw materials for many tools, implements and supplies.
Anasazi villages were often located so as to be bathed in winter sunshine and shaded in summer. A somewhat more technological use of the sun’s energy provides most of the electricity used in the Monument today.
Horse Collar Ruin
