The result was amazing. Many Indians who formerly had followed the forest trails year after year now began to live settled lives. With dependable supplies of food coming from each harvest it was no longer necessary to move about. Permanent habitations soon appeared and villages and towns developed. The population increased and people began to concentrate in the best farming areas. With all this came new inventions which led the people always to higher stages of development.
When the white man finally arrived in 1492, there were fifteen or twenty million Indians in North and South America. Some still lived by hunting, some by fishing, others by gathering the seeds, roots and other plant products offered by nature. But millions of the Indians were highly developed agricultural people. The Pueblo Indians of the Southwest, the Indians of the New England states whom our first colonists met, the Mayas and Aztecs of Mexico, the Incas of South America, and many others had made surprising progress in a comparatively short time.
Credit for this progress goes to the amazing plant, corn, the American Indian’s greatest single contribution to modern man.
10
ARCHEOLOGY OF THE MESA VERDE
A little while ago we spent a year with the people of Cliff Palace and we saw them at the peak of their development as far as the Mesa Verde was concerned. They were successful farmers, their arts and crafts were highly developed and their religious and social customs were rigid and complex. Obviously the people could not have achieved such a high cultural level in a short time: surely there must have been a long period of development in order for them to reach the stage we saw at Cliff Palace.
Actually this development extended over many centuries and we shall now take a little time to consider the events of that long period. This is the dry part of the story. When we saw the people in Cliff Palace they were warm, living beings, experiencing all the emotions any people may have. But now there will be no flesh on the bones and we shall deal only with the dead, rather dry facts archeologists dig out of the earth. So we shall not tarry too long.
About 2000 years ago farming Indians moved into the Mesa Verde region. The exact date is still unknown but it appears they were well established in some parts of the area by the beginning of the Christian Era. Even at that early date they were farmers and their progress is easy to follow. In the preceding chapter, covering the early history of the American Indian, we were dealing with elusive hunters. We saw not a single Indian; only dim, mysterious shapes sifting through a forest of question marks. But now we are dealing with farmers and we shall have solid substance on which to build our story.
The trail of farmers is easier to follow. They have a dependable food supply and live in one spot for generations. They build villages and cities, and best of all, excellent garbage piles. Nothing delights the archeologist as much as a big pile of trash for every piece is a paragraph in the story of a people. If he can find the things people have used, worn out and discarded the archeologist can reconstruct their lives to an amazing degree. Hunters seldom pile up their trash but farmers are more obliging. Living for generations in a village they carry it outside and dump it in one nice big pile. And in those successive layers of trash is the story of the people. The archeologist revels in it. Except for the professional garbage collector he is probably the only person in the world who is thankful for trash.
Excavation of ruins and trash piles has revealed that the Mesa Verde region was occupied by farming Indians from about the beginning of the Christian Era, possibly somewhat earlier, until almost 1300 A.D. For convenience this long occupation has been divided into four archeological periods. Actually there were no abrupt breaks between these periods. Once the farming Indians settled in the area they developed steadily and there was constant progress until the climax was reached.
Dividing the occupation into periods makes it much easier, however, to follow the progress of the people. Various archeologists have used different names for the periods but we shall use a system that was developed by Dr. Frank H. H. Roberts, of the Smithsonian Institution. Dates for the various periods vary somewhat in different parts of the Pueblo area but those used here serve well for the Mesa Verde itself.