For most of the long span of time the Anasazi occupied the region now known as the Four Corners, they lived in the open or in easily accessible sites within canyons. Unlike earlier structures and villages atop mesas, this was a regional 13th-century trend of gathering the growing populations into close, defensible quarters. As I stared up at this woodwork masterpiece, I toyed with the fancy that the Anasazi had built it just because: art for arts sake. Get the latest History stories in your inbox? Faint lines and hatching patterns were incised into the plaster, creating two-tone designs. Factors discussed include global or regional climate change, prolonged drought, environmental degradation such as cyclical periods of topsoil erosion or deforestation, hostility from new arrivals, religious or cultural change, and influence from Mesoamerican cultures. Their descendants are todays Pueblo Indians, such as the Hopi and the Zuni, who live in 20 communities along the Rio Grande, in New Mexico, and in northern Arizona. The outer walls of the dwellings were plastered with a smooth coat of mud, and the upper facades painted creamy white. If one village was under attack, it could send signals to its allies on the other mesas. THE TEXT ON THIS PAGE IS NOT PUBLIC DOMAIN AND HAS NOT BEEN SHARED VIA A CC LICENCE. Architecture - Manitou Cliff Dwellings ; The Anasazi were ancestral Native American Indians. Historian James W. Loewen agrees with this oral tradition in his book, Lies Across America: What Our Historic Markers and Monuments Get Wrong (1999). LeBlanc, Steven A. The Byzantine Empire had a strong military that helped keep the empire going, even if it couldn't maintain all its territory. [citation needed], This evidence suggests that the religious structures were abandoned deliberately over time. While the amount of winter snowfall varied greatly, the Ancestral Puebloans depended on the snow for most of their water. Innovations such as pottery, food storage, and agriculture enabled this rapid growth. The wheels come off.. User: each one of the following words ends in est. Builders maximized space use and no area was off-limits. Your Privacy Rights At an Anasazi site in southwestern Colorado called CowboyWash, excavators found three pit housessemi-subterranean dwellingswhose floors were littered with the disarticulated skeletons of seven victims. Environmental stress may have caused changes in social structure, leading to conflict and warfare.