Canyon de Chelly: The Story of Its Ruins and People — Reading Companion

ogists began piecing together the information gleaned from Canyon de Chelly’s many ruins and burials. Their story survived because these people lived in a physical environment that posed a minimal threat to normally fragile remains.

Wherever the remains of ancient man occur in the open, building ruins and some objects of stone, bone, and pottery survive, but those of wood and fiber disappear completely. Most of what we know about peoples from the dim past thus comes from materials that have been buried and protected. For the archeologist there are few better sources of information than formal burials, which often contain extensive offerings, and situations like those at Canyon de Chelly and Canyon del Muerto, where sites served as dwelling places for long periods of time and the steady accumulation of refuse buried layers of cultural debris.

The extremely arid conditions in the caves of these canyons offered additional protection. The climate here is so dry that human burials are perfectly preserved as natural mummies or desiccated bodies (there being no attempt at artificial preservation by these people), and such fragile buried objects as baskets more than a thousand years old are in good condition.

The people who lived at Canyon de Chelly in prehistoric times are today called the Anasazi, a Navajo word meaning “old people.” These people were the ancestors of modern Pueblo Indians, and they lived in the vicinity of northern Arizona and New Mexico, southwestern Colorado, and southeastern Utah from about the beginning of the Christian era to the end of the 13th century. Over most of that period they lived in these canyons. Before they learned to build in the cliffs they located and constructed their houses much differently. But the canyons always sheltered them, and their homes, their dead, and their debris tell us how it was with these people from the beginning to the end of their time here.

Early man, a nomadic hunter of big-game animals, came to the Americas from Asia over the Bering Strait some time between 20,000 and 15,000 B.C. Thousands of years later, after the big animals had become extinct, larger bands of hunters and gatherers preyed on game animals of species still living today. Still later, groups began to settle in favorable areas and to grow maize (corn), which reached them from more complex cultures in what is now Mexico. From this time on, the spread and development of prehistoric Indian cultures in the northern Southwest can be traced in increasing detail.

No one knows exactly when the first people arrived in the Canyon de Chelly area. But a tree-ring date of A.D. 306 from the West Alcove at Mummy Cave and the accumulation of sweepings and ashes at this site suggest that people were living in Canyon del Muerto at about the beginning of the Christian era.

These early people were primarily farmers rather than nomadic hunters, although they still depended to some extent on game animals for food. They established their homes in the shelter of the many caves and alcoves in the canyon walls, and farmed the mesa tops and canyon bottoms. Dogs were their only domestic animal, and corn was their major crop and main source of food. Squashes (pumpkins) were grown in some quantity, and beans were introduced at an early time. Pinyon nuts and acorns, sunflower seeds, yucca and cactus fruit, and small seeds of other wild plants were gathered for food.

The early farmers were accomplished makers of baskets, and for this reason archeologists commonly call them Basketmakers. Instead of pottery they used baskets for many utilitarian purposes: carrying sacks, burden baskets, food containers, cooking pots, water carriers, storage containers, and even “coffins.” Sometimes plain, often decorated, they are the most impressive surviving artifact of the culture which produced them. More baskets made by these early people have been found in Canyon de Chelly caves than in any other locality.

The caves in Canyon de Chelly have produced no evidence of houses built by these early farmers. If these groups had shelters at all, they were little more than brush-and-pole windbreaks or lean-tos made of poles and skins propped against the sides of the rock shelters. The only architectural remains found so far are pits lined with stone slabs and located in deposits on the cave floors. These pits were used to store corn and wild plant foods.

Permanent dwellings apparently were not constructed until about A.D. 500. The first such houses of which we have knowledge were small and generally insubstantial circular or squarish pits, shallowly dug into the ground. They were walled and roofed with brush and dirt or mud-covered poles. Later the people often built their houses in deep excavations, and then the structures became essentially roofed pits.