For the next few weeks, as part of the National Parks, Memorials and Monuments series, we explore the Four Corners region of the United States, (southeastern Utah, northeastern Arizona, northwestern New Mexico, and southwestern Colorado.) In the Four Corners, many cultural and historical sites exist today.
For a start, in the last post, we visited the Hubbell Trading Post, which is over a hundred years old and still open. There are sites we can visit first-hand* that are not just a hundred years old, but a thousand years old. Today’s video shows one of those sites, the National Park Service’s Hovenweep National Monument (1923,) and the associated collection of these people’s arts and crafts found at the Canyons of the Ancients Visitor Center (1988), a Bureau of Land Management (BLM) museum in Dolores, Colorado. You can drive to both areas in a day, but I suggest at least a few days, (and nights at the campground in Hovenweep,) to really experience the lives, culture, and architecture of the people we call the Ancients, or Ancestral Puebloans. Then, judge their mysteries.
I say “mysteries” of the Anasazi, (yet another name, though now controversial, for these people,) because what we know about them is more unknown than known. We see evidence of a mature, agrarian, and sophisticated culture in their architecture, beautifully-created and painted pottery, and tools. Still, why did so many settle in the Four Corners region — from all of the archeological sites, it really seems to be the center of their vast civilization — in the middle of a desert? Then, why did they “hit the highway” and “disappear” as a society — history lost trace of them in A.D. 1300? Was it because of drought, war, or something else?
We may never learn the answers. Let’s leave it up to each individual to judge and draw conclusions from what they learn and believe.
*Before visiting, please check with the NPS and BLM to see if they are open during the pandemic.