ABSTRACT
At roughly the same time as the Mississippian culture was rising to prominence, the Puebloans in the American Southwest were building a substantial cultural complex. The origin of those who became the “Puebloans” is still unconfirmed; they most likely originated in the Great Basin area to the north. Two thousand years ago they occupied the Four Corners region of the Southwest. Hunter-gatherers, they wove beautiful baskets and began to experiment with plant cultivation. By roughly 800 C.E., the first Pueblo communities were scattered across the region, and residents were fully engaged in subsistence farming and building pit houses and large circular structures that functioned as places of worship. For the next several hundred years, their population increased, more villages and larger towns appeared, and longdistance trade networks were developed with Mexico and regions to the north and east. By the mid-twelfth century, larger and more socioeconomically complex settlements existed in the American Southwest. Three distinct cultures were spread across the landscape: the Hohokam in southern Arizona and northern Mexico, the Mogollon in eastern Arizona and western New Mexico, and the culture long known as the Anasazi, in northern Arizona and New Mexico, and regions of Colorado and Nevada. It is the Anasazi culture that will be the focus of the following discussion (Figure 8.1). One of the great mysteries of ancient America is the complete abandonment of nearly all of the Puebloan settlements by 1400 C.E. Why the inhabitants left and where they went are enduring questions in Southwestern archaeology.
