The stage was now set for the great flowering of the Pueblo people; the way of life which had taken rough shape from A. D. 450 to 1050 now reached culmination in the Great Pueblo period. For about 200 years, or until around A. D. 1250, fortune smiled on the farming towns of the Four Corners country. The population grew and spread, and the handicraft arts reached a stage of impressive proficiency. The centers of this classic period which are today best known lie in three different States: Mesa Verde (in Mesa Verde National Park, Colo.), Chaco Canyon (in Chaco Canyon National Monument, N. Mex.), and the vicinity of Betatakin and Keet Seel (in Navajo National Monument, Ariz.) These three areas, all now under the jurisdiction of the National Park Service, contain the great cliff dwellings and communal houses which mark the highest development of prehistoric Indian attainments in the northern Southwest.
It is beyond the scope of this handbook to present an adequate description of the Great Pueblo towns and their inhabitants. Although almost contemporaneous, the three largest centers differed greatly in development, so that the total story becomes most complex. In general it may be said that the skills of farming and production of foodstuffs became highly efficient, allowing the people more leisure in which to experiment with and improve their arts and crafts and their ceremonial rituals. Much elaboration and refinement of the potter’s craft, for example, is traceable to these years; some of the world’s finest ceramic art, ancient or modern, comes from Chaco Canyon and the Mesa Verde. Again, in the field of jewelry-making and personal adornment, the craftsman of the 1100’s produced shell- and turquoise-inlay work which would have earned the admiration of Cellini. Finally, a multiplicity of kivas is to be found in all the great houses of the period, as well as a number of Great Kivas embodying various elaborate altar features. This expenditure of effort to crowd the towns with ceremonial rooms would seem to indicate something of a preoccupation with religion. The numerous discoveries of carved stone fetishes and other ceremonial objects serve to bear out a concept of elaborate ritual and unending dedication to the service of their gods.
DROUGHT AND MIGRATIONS.
It seems, however, that the gods were fickle. Some two centuries of growth and prosperity were all that were to be allowed the farmers of the Great Pueblo centers. In the last quarter of the 13th century, a period of drought came to the high plateaus of the Pueblo people. From the evidence of the tree rings of the time, the majority of the years between A. D. 1276 and 1299 were so deficient in rainfall that the Indian corn crops could not have matured. Although this drought was not actually continuous, and varied between regions, there was undoubtedly much starvation, and a decimation of the inhabitants of the great towns, perhaps from enemy raids as well as hunger. There were undoubtedly numerous migrations from the drought-stricken areas into places with reliable streams.
These troubled times in the western centers and emigrations therefrom were responsible in large part for the settling of the Pajarito Plateau and the canyons of what is now Bandelier National Monument. The streams of the Jemez Mountains continued to flow during the dry time, apparently, for large-scale colonization of well-watered canyons such as Frijoles appears to date from the end of the 13th century. The drift of the emigrants from the western areas is impossible to trace in detail, continuing as it did for several generations and originating from many sources. The Bandelier region may have been something of a melting pot, assimilating migrants from various distant places. A study of the pottery types produced in the early days of residence here affords the best clue to possible origins. Among these types are found precise copies of decoration styles from a number of the western centers, indicating that the women potters carried on their respective traditional decorations upon arrival in their new homes. One particular kind of black-on-white pottery can hardly be distinguished even by microscopic examination from a similar ware made in the Mesa Verde country.
LATE PUEBLO PERIOD.
The upsurge of population and the main construction activity in Bandelier began after A. D. 1300. Large towns grew up and down the Rio Grande drainage, and their people achieved in most respects as high a standard of living as their forebears had known in the Great Pueblo centers of 200 years earlier. Very possibly the Rio Grande pueblos might have gone ahead to a new peak of cultural development if they had not been interrupted and demoralized by the coming of the Spanish. In 1598, some 400 farmers and soldiers led by Don Juan de Onate, the first permanent Spanish settlers, came from Mexico, and with the entry of these land-seekers the ascendancy of the Pueblos was finished.
Life of the Early People at Bandelier
The typical male inhabitant of Frijoles Canyon in the early 1300’s, then, was a newcomer to the area. He was a man of Mongoloid cast of countenance, about 5 feet 4 or 5 inches in height, with medium red-brown skin and black hair. His wife measured 5 feet or perhaps a little less, and was inclined to a stout build. A few children and a dog or two completed the family circle. These newcomers had arrived in their chosen valley with only such belongings as they could carry on their backs, and were immediately faced with the problems of wresting a livelihood from a somewhat grudging environment. In the pattern of all mankind before and since, this Indian migrant’s first requirements were food, water, shelter, and clothing for himself and his family.