Anasazi

Culture History

Humans have inhabited the northern Southwest since Paleo-Indian times(ca. 11,000–7,000 BC). At approximately 7,000 BC, a shift to a warmer, drier climate resulted in a change in lifeways to what archaeologists refer to as a “broad-spectrum pattern of resource use.” Essentially, populations no longer relied on large game animals such as mammoth as a primary means of subsistence; rather, the focus shifted to use of smaller game and an increased reliance on varied plant resources. This period of time is referred to as the “Archaic”; research has traced Ancestral Puebloan history to the Archaic peoples who occupied the northern region of the Southwest until 500 BC, when the distinctive Puebloan culture developed as people began to supplement hunting and gathering with maize horticulture.

Following the Archaic, visibly Ancestral Puebloan traits emerge in the northern Southwest during a time known as the “Basket Maker period.” Archaeologists have summarized changes in Puebloan culture using a chronological system termed the Pecos Classification. The Pecos Classification was developed by A. V. Kidder and others at the first annual Pecos Conference (1927) in an attempt to organize these cultural changes in the northern Southwest. Originally intended to represent a series of developmental stages rather than time periods, it is the most widely accepted terminology in referring to temporal changes in the Ancestral Pueblo region of the Southwest. Although archaeologists no longer see the Pecos sequence as a reconstruction of adaptive change throughout the Southwest, it is still used to provide a general framework for dates and broad events within and affecting the Ancestral Puebloan region for each of the major time periods