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Different Anasazi groups and settlements faced their demise at different times during the period between the drought of 1130 and roughly 1300 AD. Some villages and surrounding related, but distinct, cultures, including the Hohokam, Mogollon, Salado, and Sinagua, to the south, survived in moderate-sized to large, “apartment-city” settings to 1400 and even beyond.
Oraibi, the oldest documented Hopi village, has been occupied continuously since at least around 1100 AD, based on tree-ring studies. Acoma, built by closely-related Pueblo peoples in New Mexico, has buildings which have been dated back to at least 1150. (Workers in New Mexico have suggested that Acoma is actually a more ancient town than Oraibi, but most references site Oraibi as the older of the two.)
Oraibi and Acoma represent continuity, but neither was ever more than a modest-sized village during the Anasazi period. These towns were founded as very minor, backwater (a purely metaphorical description in the arid desert of northeastern Arizona) sites when the Anasazi were at their cultural and population-census apex. These remote, mesa-top towns were not mainline centers of culture, population, or religious ceremonies during their early centuries. With no written records, the early history of the towns, and their relation to the ancestral culture have been shrouded in myth.
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Follow scholar Kokopelli to the Suggested
Reading List
Return with Kokopelli to the hogan page, the
Table of Contents
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Black Mesa Highlighted in Sunlight on a Stormy Day
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Contents, including illustrations, copyright T. K. Reeves, 1997.
on 5 April, 1997.
