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Native American Indians
The earliest records of the peopling of North America are
scanty, and it is difficult to characterize their culture beyond
calling it a hunting and gathering economy. The first settlers
seem to have crossed the Bering Strait region from Asia during the
expansion of the glacial
sheets of the Ice Age (or Pleistocene Epoch). As the great ice
sheets developed and expanded, they not only covered major land
areas in the Northern Hemisphere but also brought considerable areas
of the continental shelves above sea level. In the Arctic this
provided a tundra coastal plain across which man could move from
Asia to North America. The amount of the Earth's moisture
incorporated into the ice probably lowered the sea level hundreds of
feet. Asia and America were thus not separated again by the melting
of the glaciers and the consequent gradual rise of the sea until
about 9,000 or 10,000 years ago; likely sites of the earliest
migrants are now below sea level.
The Americas were the last major land mass, with the possible
exception of Australia, to be occupied by prehistoric man, who, in
order to spread over the vast area of the two continents, first had
to develop the cultural equipment to exist in the Arctic area. Once
this adjustment was made, he was able to move by way of ice-free,
open-land routes into the Mackenzie
Basin and down into climatically less rigorous and ecologically
richer and more accommodating central North America. In addition to
the Mackenzie route southward, at a later time the Yukon
River valley also offered an ice-free route, and still later
(8,000-10,000 years ago) the Liard
and Peace
river systems were available for intramontane travel. The
Pacific Coast slope was probably available for travel at about the
same time. Some migrations may also have occurred by way of the
Aleutian Islands, but this would have taken place at a considerably
later date.
Early cultures
The earliest well-defined cultures in the New World have been
placed by radiocarbon dating at about 10,000 to 8000 BC. At this
period, two distinct traditions in North America are known: the
Paleo-Indian big-game hunters of the West, the Great Plains, and
eastern North America; and the Desert culture peoples of the western
Basin-Range region.
Paleo-Indian hunting
cultures
In spite of regional differences in detail, there was a
remarkable similarity in the economic complex of the hunters. They
lived in a variety of environments, from mountain passes and valleys
in the west to the then better watered grasslands of the Plains and
the varied forest and parkland environment of the eastern woodlands.
The variety of their bone tools indicates that one of their major
food supplies came from animals, the hides of which provided
clothing. In the western Plains and the Southwest they hunted such
extinct North American animals as the camel, ground sloth, tapir,
mammoth, and horse.
In the Great Lakes area of the eastern woodlands they may
have hunted mastodon, but other commoner animals, such as the elk
and deer, presumably formed the bulk of their meat diet. Some of
their bone and wooden tools were probably used for working and
ornamentation. These early hunters had temporary shelters and moved
about as small bands in search of game. Their physical type is not
clearly known, but it was related to that of an eastern Asian Early
Stone Age population and is less Mongoloid than many groups of
American Indians of the historic period.
Archaeologically, the oldest remains of the Paleo-Indian
tradition are found on kill sites, where large Pleistocene mammals
were killed and butchered. The most distinctive artifact type of
this horizon is the
Clovis
Fluted projectile point (named after the site of first discovery,
near Clovis, New Mexico); this was a lance-shaped point of chipped
stone that had had one or more longitudinal flakes struck from the
base of each flat face. These points are accompanied by side
scrapers and, in one instance, by long cylindrical shafts of ivory.
They are most frequently associated with mammoth. A second
Paleo-Indian horizon, which seems in part to be contemporary with
the Clovis material and partially to postdate it, is the
Folsom
phase of the central High Plains (Folsom, New Mexico, being the site
of initial discovery). It is characterized by lance-shaped points of
more careful manufacture (including broader fluted surfaces) than
Clovis, associated with the remains of extinct Bison
antiquus. The Lindenmeier site, a Folsom campsite in
northeastern Colorado, has yielded a wide variety of end and side
scrapers, gravers, and miscellaneous bone artifacts. Clovis sites
have been dated at about 9000 BC and Folsom sites at about 500 to
1,000 years later.
The Desert culture
In the western United States, over a region extending from
Oregon to northern Mexico and from the Pacific coast to the eastern
foothills of the Rocky Mountains, there was a distinctive cultural
adaptation to the dry, relatively impoverished upland environment.
There, in the relative absence of large game resources, vegetation
was exploited to a great extent, with the development of grinding
tools and related equipment. The Cochise Desert
culture (named from Cochise County in southern Arizona, where it was
discovered) ran from about 8000 BC through several stages,
persisting down to the historic period in some areas.
The Desert culture people lived as small bands of wandering
seasonal food gatherers, collectors, and hunters. They ate a wide
variety of animal and plant foods and developed techniques for
small- seed
harvesting and processing; an essential feature of Desert
assemblages was the milling stone, for use in grinding wild seeds.
Their best known habitations were caves and rock shelters, and they
had twined basketry, nets, mats, cordage, fur cloaks, sandals,
wooden clubs, and digging sticks. They also had the spear thrower,
with darts of pointed hardwood or with points of flint and later of
obsidian. Their rough stone implements were shaped by percussion,
and consequently many of their choppers and scrapers had an Earlier
Stone Age appearance. Their projectile points, however, showed
excellent craftsmanship and followed continent-wide styles. The
domesticated dog,
another migrant from Asia, was known by about 4000 BC in the Desert
culture (though by this time the dog was also known elsewhere in
North America).
The far west
On the far west coast in California, the marked variety of
geographical situations encouraged the development of a number of
diverse regional complexes dependent upon intensive exploitation of
the local resources. None of these cultures was agricultural. In the
southern desert area the people subsisted upon plant seeds and small
game and used crude flint tools, grinding stones, and (later)
arrowheads. In the mountainous areas and in the better watered
central areas, larger game animals such as the elk and deer,
supplemented by acorns, fish, and birds, constituted the major items
in the food supply. By at least 2000 BC, in this central area, the
utilization of the local resources plus cultural intrusions from the
north resulted in full adaptation to the area. The coastal groups
from north to south depended upon the sea for their food supply,
some subsisting mainly on shellfish, some on sea mammals, others on
fish, and still others on a mixture of all three.
In the north Pacific part of the United States and in western
British Columbia, some of the early sites of the hunters have
yielded fluted blades, crude choppers, and cutting tools. Between
9000 and 7000 BC there were varied economic activities but with an
emphasis on hunting. By about 8000 BC there was a strong orientation
toward salmon fishing, particularly during the salmon runs, and the
peoples tended to emphasize the use of bone and antler tools. The burin,
a chisel-like bone working tool, has been found in such sites, along
with prepared cores and blades. During the postglacial warming
period that culminated between 3000 and 2000 BC, the inhabitants of
the drier areas without permanent streams took on more of the traits
of the Desert culture to the south, while others turned toward
riverine fishing and marsh resources or to food from the sea. In the
1st millennium BC, the so-called Marpole complex, a distinctive
ground slate complex, was known in the Fraser River area, with basic
resemblances to the northwest coast historic culture in maritime
emphasis, woodworking, large houses, and substantial villages. The
emphasis on ground slate and woodworking tools is like that in the
Eastern Woodlands Archaic and recalls similar emphasis in certain
northwestern Siberian cultures. In most of the areas of the
Northwest Coast, clear indications of the beginnings of the historic
cultures were not known until about AD
1300.
The Archaic cultures
The Eastern Archaic
With the retreat of the ice sheets in the north, beginning
about 10,000 years ago, the cool, moist climate
gradually became hot and dry in the Great Plains and Great Basin
regions, with consequent extinction or migration of Pleistocene
animal life. The High Plains were largely deserted by man for a
considerable period. In the eastern woodlands area, partly as a
result of the variety of forest environments, climatic differences,
and physiographic features, there developed a series of regional
readaptations to changed local food supplies. The change from the
primarily hunting economy of the early American hunters was gradual
and is clearly seen in the slowly evolving form of the projectile
point and other implement changes. The pattern of life became one of
mixed hunting and collecting, with some groups developing by 6000 BC
a taste for riverine and coastal living in order to exploit abundant
fish and mollusk resources to supplement such vegetational products
as acorns, seeds, berries, and tubers.
During the long Eastern Archaic, from 8000 to 1500 BC,
regional social and economic diversification was developed, and it
was during the Archaic that significant early linguistic
differentiation also probably occurred and during which varieties of
physical types developed.
The typical Archaic house was a small circular structure with
wooden posts for the wall and roof supports; the covering was
probably bark. Cooking was done in the open by boiling in containers
of wood, bark, or hides or by baking in pits or by roasting and
grilling. Lists of mammal, fish, and bird bones from Archaic sites
read like a listing of the early historic fauna. Game-gathering
devices, including nets, traps, and pitfalls, were used along with
the spear and dart thrower. Fishhooks, gorges, and net sinkers were
known, and in some areas fish weirs were built. River, lake, and
ocean mollusks were consumed, and probably a great many native
roots, berries, fruits, and tubers known in the early historic
period were incorporated into the diet during the Archaic. The
extensive lists of plant medicines recorded by the early colonists
were probably a part of the primitive Archaic
pharmacopoeia.
The large variety of chipped-flint projectiles, knives,
scrapers, perforators, drills, and adzes reflect regional styles and
changes during the long Archaic period. The late Archaic was
distinguished by the gradual development of ground and polished,
grooved stone axes, pestles, gouges, adzes, plummets, and forms
attached to the spear thrower. This was a reflection of a growing
versatility in the technology and economy. Trade and exchange are
also known from the distribution of native copper implements from
the Michigan-Wisconsin area to as far south as Louisiana and Florida
and the finds of southeastern marine shells as far north as the
upper Mississippi-Great Lakes area. An extensive system of trails
and water routes was probably in existence during the Late
Archaic.
The great boreal
forest zone of spruce, fir, and pine that now runs from New
England and the maritime provinces of Canada westward to the
Canadian plains and the Mackenzie Valley gradually acquired its
present distribution following the retreat and melting of the Arctic
ice cap. Its present distribution was reached by about 2500 BC. The
forest cover and climate had a limiting effect on the cultural
development and on the general pattern of hunting and fishing. These
efforts were supplemented by some use of plant material.
In the upper Great Lakes area there was an Old
Copper culture, which has special interest because copper
implements and weapons were made from the native copper of the Lake
Superior basin. This culture appeared about 3000 BC and lasted about
2,000 years. It was a northern expression of the Late Archaic. Its
tools and weapons, particularly in the adzes, gouges, and axes,
clearly indicate an adaptation to the forest environment. In the
area south of James Bay to the upper St. Lawrence about 2000 BC,
there was a regional variant called the Laurentian Boreal Archaic
and, in the extreme east, the Maritime Boreal Archaic. In this
eastern area, slate was shaped into points and knives of forms
similar to those of the copper implements to the west. Trade between
the eastern and western areas has been recognized, and this
evidence, along with general similarities of the culture, suggests
that water transportation by canoe was known at this time.
Along the southern border of the central and eastern boreal
forest zone between 1500 and 500 BC, there developed a distinctive
burial
complex, reflecting an increased attention to burial ceremonialism.
These burials, many including cremations, were often accompanied by
red ochre, caches of triangular blanks, fire-making kits of iron
pyrites and flint strikers, copper needles and awls, and polished
stone forms. The triangular points of this complex may have
represented the introduction of the bow and arrow from the
pre-Eskimo cultures east of Hudson Bay. The earliest Woodland
pottery appeared in the Great Lakes area about 1000 BC. It is
another of the culture traits derived from northeastern Asia and
across northern Alaska to northwestern Canada. The route by which it
reached the Great Lakes is not known.
The Plains Archaic
In the western Plains from about 8000 to 3000 BC the fluted
blade points were no longer made, and many styles or types were
produced that have been identified by such local names as Plainview,
Angostura, Milnesand, Agate Basin, and Scottsbluff. These minor
varieties of dart and spear point and their primarily hunting
culture may be included in the term Plano. The Plano complex or
culture type was a direct descendant from the fluted-blade early
American hunters. Their primary game animal was the bison, for the
larger animals of the preceding period had died out or were
exterminated.
The stone complex associated with the Plano hunters was
markedly similar from site to site over a considerable period of
time during which the climate became increasingly warmer and until
the major warm period was reached, about 3000 to 2000 BC. As the
climate moderated, peoples of the Late Plano complex moved north
into Saskatchewan and Alberta with the grazing game animals and, by
3000 BC, had reached the Arctic tundra zone in the Northwest
Territories of Canada at Grant and Dismal lakes and Great Bear
River. Important elements of this culture also moved east in the
Mississippi valley and western Great Lakes area. Many of the sites
of this culture type were kill sites with abundant bison bones that
accounted for the number of implements and tools associated with
hunting and leatherworking. In the tundra zone the major game animal
was the caribou. Choppers, pounders, and milling stones have been
found there.
Early
agriculturalists
Early southwestern
planters
Primitive agricultural
practices began in Mexico by 6000 to 4000 BC and by approximately
2000 BC were known on the northern fringe of the Middle American
culture area. Maize
was not the only crop plant, for gourds, squash, peppers, cotton,
and varieties of beans were also domesticated. Maize was grown in
the southwestern United States by 2000 to 1000 BC, but most of the
other domesticates did not arrive until just before and after AD 1.
The early introduction of maize in the Southwest had no marked
effect on cultural development, and the existence of pottery,
storage pits, and domestic houses with semi-subterranean floors and
lateral entryways was not known until about AD 1. These houses had
wood uprights for walls, central roof supports, radiating beams, and
wattle-and-daub plastered walls. The small settlements of the early
Puebloan, or Basket
Maker, people of the Four Corners area (namely northwestern New
Mexico, southwestern Colorado, southeastern Utah, and northeastern
Arizona) were among the first village agricultural societies in the
Southwest.
Ohio Valley cultures
In eastern North America one of the Early Woodland phases
preceding the introduction of maize agriculture is the Adena
culture, which occupied the middle Ohio River Valley by about
500 BC (Adena takes its name from an estate near Chillicothe, Ohio,
the site of a large burial mound). The Adena were hunters and
gatherers but apparently provided the stimulus that brought about
the spectacular Hopewell
culture in the Illinois and Ohio valleys. (Hopewell is similarly
named after a farmsite in Ohio). The success of the Hopewell
peoples, particularly from 100 BC to AD 200, seems to have been due
largely to their combining elements of the preceding Archaic
cultures with elements of Adena and other Early Woodland cultures,
and perhaps with some features of a local cultivating tradition,
since some corn and squash has been found. It is evident that the
Hopewell culture included a well-organized village-based society in
which surplus resources were used in the construction of elaborate
earthworks and were concentrated as wealth by a restricted group of
individuals. The most outstanding feature of Hopewell culture is a
burial complex that called for the deposition of concentrations of
wealth in tombs of one or several deceased individuals. The
interment procedure was elaborate and involved the construction of a
large log tomb, later burned and covered by an earth mound.
Artifacts found within these burial mounds indicate that the
Hopewell were able to obtain goods from widespread localities in
North America. Obsidian and grizzly bear teeth were apparently
derived from the Rocky Mountain region; copper from the northern
Great Lakes; and conch shells and other exotic objects from the
southeast and along the coast of the Gulf of
Mexico. Ohio, particularly, served as a distributing centre for
ceremonial goods and special products over a wide area in the
eastern United States. The ceramics of the Hopewell appear to be
based in two major traditions: one derived from an Ohio Valley
development which began about 1000 BC, stimulated
by the early fibre-tempered pottery of the Southeast, and the other
from a pottery with complex decorations, which probably developed
favourable areas of eastern North America, a "generalized Woodland"
culture paralleled the Hopewell in time, probably based more on
collecting than on cultivation for subsistence.
There is a clear evidence of cultural regression between AD
200 and 700 in the north central United States following the
Hopewell expansion and florescence. This is attributed to a number
of changes in their activities which are not well understood as yet.
Although there was concurrent change in the south, this did not take
the form of a lowering of the cultural
level.
Mississippi Valley and
peripheral woodlands
The last major cultural development in the eastern United
States is called
Mississippian
because its primary centre was in the valleys of the Mississippi
River and its major tributaries and in the
southeast.
This predominantly agricultural complex was a marked cultural
advance over earlier stages in the east. Its initial growth and
expansion was at approximately the same period (AD 700-1200) as that
of the southwestern Puebloan complex. The initial growth was along
the Mississippi between modern St. Louis and Vicksburg. It was
stimulated by the introduction of concepts, religious practices, and
improved agricultural procedures from northern Mexico, plus local
developments, which resulted in a sedentary societal organization.
By AD 1000, large villages were in existence with subsidiary
villages and farming communities nearby. Regional specialized
production in pottery, projectile points, house types, and other
utilitarian products reflected the tribal groupings of the period.
An outstanding feature of this culture type was the earthen
temple
mound, which served as a raised platform on which the major
community buildings were placed. These council
houses and temples served as the political and
ceremonial centres. The platform mounds were placed on the sides of
a central plaza that served as a ceremonial
centre for the tribal community during important recurrent functions
or during times of crisis. The more permanent buildings, both family
and community, were of wattle-and-daub construction, usually
rectangular in floor plan. In some areas large, circular charnel
houses received the remains of the dead, but burial was normally
made in large cemeteries or in the floors of
dwellings. The size of the ceremonial tribal centres varied from 10
to 100 acres (four to 40 hectares). Important household industries
involved the production of mats, baskets, clothing, and a variety of
vessel forms for specialized uses. Food surplus was kept in ground
storage pits and in storage cribs above the ground.
One of the more striking developments was the production of
ceremonial costumes and ornaments, for use in the religious
ceremonies that were conducted by an organized priesthood with a
well-established ritual. The religious symbolism spread throughout
centres of production of specialized ceremonial items are known.
Other innovations were walled fortifications with timber palisades
and bastions surrounding the village, which reflected an increase in
intergroup aggression and a tendency, continuing into the historic
period, toward the development of confederacies. The intergroup
conflicts apparently were primarily quests for prestige and revenge
instead of a means of territorial expansion or economic
control.
Along the eastern and northern periphery, some tribes, while
retaining the older Woodland complex, were somewhat influenced by
the Mississippian culture. The extent of this influence seems to
have depended on their nearness to the more advanced cultural
complex and on their ability to maintain an agricultural economy
along with hunting and gathering. There was a spread of Woodland
culture from about 200 BC to AD 200 into the eastern part of the
Plains from Oklahoma to North Dakota, with some sites, particularly
in eastern Kansas, clearly forming a part of the Hopewellian
complex. In the Plains there was evidence of corn and bean
cultivation during this period, and later there was cultivation of
gourds and squash, but between about AD 300-400 and 800 there was
little occupation of the western part of the Plains by agricultural
people because of the relative aridity.
After 800, however, Late Woodland populations had spread west
to the eastern slopes of the Rockies and were
in contact with eastward-moving
Puebloan
people. A favourable agricultural period was indicated by the marked
increase in village size and in population density for the next 400
years, during which hospitable areas along major streams were
occupied by various interrelated cultural groups collectively known
as the Plains Mississippian cultures. Part of this complex was
connected to the developing Mississippi complexes to the east by
diffusion and, to some degree, by a migration of such groups as the
Omaha and Ponca from the St. Louis area by about AD 1000.
Between AD 1500 and 1700 the High Plains from New Mexico to
Wyoming and in eastern Oklahoma, Kansas, and Nebraska were
pre-empted by horse-using, semi-agricultural peoples of the
plains--the Apache and Comanche. Prehistoric village
agriculturalists of a plains Mississippi tradition came into the
historic period as the Pawnee,
Arikara,
Mandan,
Hidatsa,
Crow,
and Wichita
Southwestern village
farmers
Anasazi, Mogollon, and Hohokam
cultures
The southwestern village farmers were distributed from
eastern Utah and southern Colorado through most of New Mexico and
Arizona. The effective agricultural area varied with fluctuations in
climate that profoundly affected the ability of the Indians to
occupy marginal regions. Although corn and some other agricultural
plants were introduced from Mexico between 2000 BC and AD 1, the
first village complexes, with five to 15 pit or surface houses,
ceremonial buildings, refuse pits, and pottery, did not appear until
shortly before AD 1 in southern Arizona and New Mexico. Two of the
major farming complexes began at this time: Mogollon
was located in the mountainous belt of west central New Mexico and
east central Arizona, while Hohokam
was located in the desert area of the Gila basin of southern
Arizona. The latter group depended upon irrigation for its crops,
whereas Mogollon depended upon rainfall and stream diversion over
floodplains. Mogollon became the pattern of agriculture that later
was developed in the Anasazi. or Puebloan culture, the third major
farming complex of the Southwest.
The geographical expansion, population growth, and striking
development of permanent villages with multiroom and multilevel
buildings came during the period from AD 700
to 1200, which coincided with a minor climatic period of favourable
distribution of rainfall for plant growth over the entire Southwest.
For the same climatic reasons, there was an expansion of population
and cultural movement from central and western Mexico
into northwestern Mexico. Trade and cultural stimuli then moved from
northwestern Mexico into the American Southwest at a time when the
climate in both areas was most favourable for
population and cultural growth. Indicating such cultural movement,
cast copper bells, parrots, ball courts, shell trumpets, and pottery
vessel shapes and designs have been found; they clearly reflect the
transmission of religious beliefs and ceremonies. These southern
influences were blended into local and regional complexes.
The Anasazi village agricultural complex had expanded by AD
900 to occupy northeastern Arizona, southwestern Colorado, and
northwestern New Mexico. By AD 1100, expansion had taken place into
the Virgin River valley of southeastern Nevada, north as far as the
Great Salt Lake and northwestern Colorado, to the east into
southeastern Colorado and to the Pecos and upper Canadian river
valleys of New Mexico. During this period there was probably a
development of priestly offices and of rituals and ceremonialism.
The increasing population concentration in large pueblos was
apparently organized into households according to lineage. Control
of the agricultural activities was presumably in the hands of clan
leaders, who were also the priests who officiated in the
rain-producing ceremonies. During this period some of the larger
village populations ranged from 300 to more than 1,000
people.
Primarily because of increasing aridity there was a marked
retraction of Anasazi culture between 1100 and 1300. As a result, a
concentration of the pueblos took place in northeastern Arizona,
along the Rio Grande and its immediate tributaries, and in the
present Zuni area of western New Mexico. The Anasazi groups
maintained their societies by sand-dune farming with floodwater and
some canal irrigation. The increased importance and elaboration of
religious rain-producing
ceremonies between 1300 and 1540 is deduced from paintings on walls
and from symbolic pottery decoration.
The Mogollon complex in its early phases, from 200 BC to AD
700, consisted of relatively small villages of pit houses grouped
near a large ceremonial structure. No organization of the village
structures into a pattern is apparent, however, and trash disposal
was random. Although the initial impetus for sedentary village life
appeared early in the Mogollon area, there was a period of apparent
cultural quiescence about AD 400 to 600. With the growth and spread
of the Anasazi complex in the period after 700, the main flow of
culture was from that area, and Mogollon villages from AD 900 to
1100 were a blend of local development strongly influenced from
Anasazi. During the climatic deterioration after AD 1200, much of
the Mogollon territory in southwestern New Mexico was
abandoned.
The Hohokam culture of southeastern Arizona was primarily
limited to main river valleys. Agriculture was made possible by
extensive irrigation
canals that required cooperation between villages. The people lived
in villages of scattered pit houses made of brush and mud that were
dispersed along the streams and canals. Their main settlements and
major culture growth took place also during the period AD 700-1200.
Following this for 200 years, there was a blend with Anasazi and
Mexican elements and a tendency toward the construction of more
compact settlements surrounded by compound walls with a few massive
multiroom and two-story buildings. There is relatively little
evidence of trade and influences from northwestern Mexico. Such
historic groups as the Pima
and Papago
are descended from the Hohokam people.
Pueblo culture
Best known of the prehistoric and historic southwestern
peoples are the Pueblo Indians proper, whose ancestors built great
cliff villages now seen in ruins and equally remarkable multiple
apartment houses of adobe and stone masonry. Some of the latter are
still occupied, and the Pueblo
Indian inhabitants speak languages and observe ceremonies that
are at least pre-Spanish in origin.
The beginnings of Pueblo culture, in the 1st millennium AD,
are obscure. The traditional type of aboveground, straight-line, or
crescent-shaped multiple house continued to be built, two rooms
wide; stone masonry, however, began to replace the earlier
pole-and-mud and adobe construction. Agriculture, including several
varieties of corn, may have been augmented at that time by the
cultivation of a native long-staple cotton. Pottery was not much
changed, but it included a greater variety of shapes and decoration.
Basketry was much less common. These early phases of Pueblo
culture are termed Developmental Pueblo.
The great Classic Pueblo period followed in about AD
1050-1300, a period most popularly associated with the term Pueblo.
It was the time of the great cliff
houses, such as Mesa
Verde, and the large apartment-like structures in Chaco Canyon
(Pueblo
Bonito) and elsewhere. An actual shrinking in area took place as
inhabitants of the outer fringes moved in to build the large
dwelling units. Also, because a number of outstanding structures
were built in quite inaccessible canyons and mesa walls, there is
the possibility that hostile strangers had reached the outlying
districts. The most notable advance over previous periods was in
architecture and pottery. Masonry walls were greatly thickened,
dressed stones being used in many localities to bear the greater
weight of massive structures. These community structures had from 20
to as many as 1,000 rooms and from one to four stories. Each of the
larger houses was in effect a single village. Windows and doors were
quite small, and usually no openings were made in the lowest rooms,
which were entered by ladder through the roof. Floors were terraced
or set back, and the terraces were much used as outdoor living
space. Roofs were constructed to carry great weights by laying heavy
beams covered with a mat of smaller poles and brush, then laying on
a coat of adobe six to eight inches thick. Some semi-subterranean
ceremonial chambers, known as kivas,
were enlarged to as much as 80 feet (25 metres)
in diameter. Craftsmanship in pottery reached a
high level, and specialization became so
pronounced in the different centres, as in Chaco canyon, Mesa Verde,
Kayenta, and a number of others, that the style of each can be
recognized easily. To the earlier black-on-white and
three or more colours applied more lavishly.
Cotton cloth, blankets, and bags were woven, and yucca fibre also
entered into various articles of clothing and such utility objects
as mats. Feather-cloth robes were worn in cold weather.
Abandonment of the cliff houses and large community buildings
marked the close of the great Pueblo period. In part this may have
resulted from incursion into the northern part of the territory by
nomadic Athabascans ( Navajo
and Apache)
and a prolonged drought that occurred in the late 13th century. It
is also possible that lack of central leadership led to internal
dissensions.
The next period (AD 1300-1700), called Regressive Pueblo, was
characterized by a general movement southward and eastward, and new
villages, some larger than those of Classic Pueblo, were built on
the Little Colorado, Puerco, Verde, San Francisco, Rio Grande,
Pecos, upper Gila, and Salt rivers. Pottery showed new developments;
geometric patterns were largely replaced by naturalistic
representations of birds, animals, insects, and the human figure;
glazing was frequently used. The modern Pueblo period is usually
dated from the beginning of permanent Spanish settlement at the
close of the 17th century. From 1540 on, when the Spaniards first
entered the Pueblo country, the number of Pueblo settlements
declined considerably, though much of the culture and many of the
skills in agriculture and crafts continued down to present
times.
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