Between Mesa Verde National Park and Ute Mountain Ute Tribal Park and the Canyons of the Ancients and Chimney Rock national monuments, it's no secret the Four Corners is an archaeological treasure.
Just how much of a treasure was the subject of a lecture Thursday evening at Fort Lewis College by Mark Varien, executive vice president of Crow Canyon Institute, as part of the Professional Associates' Lifelong Learning Series.
"We work in one of the world's most rich archaeological areas, with the highest density of sites in North America," he said. "It's as rich as the Maya or the Inca, with communities that extend from 4,000 years ago to today because the Pueblo people are their descendants."
At Crow Canyon Archaeological Center, they work, he said, with the best dating technology in the world, the ability to reconstruct past climate date better than anywhere else and a sophisticated lab that influences archaeological practices around the world. The region averages 100 archaeological sites per square mile.
Varien pulled information from different fields ranging from linguistics and genetics to weaving and anthropology to track the current thinking in the field, including discoveries from Crow Canyon digs. He looked at lots of research, including some quite recent, that had not been published or peer-reviewed.
The shift from hunter-gatherers began after corn arrived about 4,000 years ago, traveling from Mexico into the Southwest United States.
In our area, there were two cultures in the years before 600 A.D., one in the Durango area and locations toward the east of the San Juan Basin, called the Eastern Basketmaker people, with another over in Southeast Utah, the western Basketmaker people. In the middle was an expanse of unsettled territory.
"We're still trying to figure why they weren't in that area," Varien said. "They were different peoples with different cultures, so maybe it was a buffer zone. At Cave 7 in Southeast Utah, there's rock art that tells of a huge battle in that time period where dozens and dozens of people died."
That settlement pattern started changing in the Basketmaker III time period, 600 to 750 A.D.
Using different techniques, archaeologists have been able to trace population patterns and compare them to climate conditions, including a drought from 1140 to 1180, demonstrating a correlation between the two.
The big questions have been why did the ancestral Puebloans leave? And where did they go when they left this area circa 1300 A.D., when the cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde were abandoned?
"It happens over such a vast area, there has to be more than one reason," Varien said. The story is more complex than just a drought.