Anasazi


 * **Disappearing Act - The Anasazi, Part 1**
 * By Toni Lee Robinson ** ||  || [[image:http://www.edhelperclipart.com/clipart/edhelp1.gif width="142" height="50"]] ||

 1 //Caption: Photograph of petroglyphs taken at Chaco Culture National Historical Park.//

 2 The MTP jolted to a stop. I was really groggy. The farther you leap through time, the more jumbled your brain cells get. That tends to make your stomach edgy as well. I felt like my lunch was about to head for the hills.

 3 This trip was the farthest back we'd ever tried to go. If things had worked right, we were now somewhere around 1100 A.D. We hoped to meet some people living at that time in the southwestern U.S. No one knows their real name. The Navaho had called them "Anasazi." The name meant "ancient enemy."

 4 These early people are a mystery. No one in the rest of the world had a clue they'd existed until 1849. That's when the first white men saw the remains of their cities. The dwellings were found in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico. By that time, the ruins were 700 years old.

 5 Still, the buildings were marvels. One of them was five stories tall. Inside were hundreds of rooms. Who could have built these wonders? When the white men came through, there were tribes of native people in the area. The Hopi and Zuni were pueblo dwellers. Their structures were humble compared to the ancient cities.

 6 The Aztecs of Mexico were an advanced people. Could they have wandered this far north? It turned out that the strange city had been built before the Aztec culture arose. The buildings remained a riddle. Some thought the site was proof that the Romans had visited the New World.

 7 Later, other sites were found. One was perched on the cliffs of Mesa Verde, Colorado. From this site, experts uncovered a few more clues about the people who had built the cities. But the questions just grew more puzzling. Who were these intriguing people? Where had they gone?

<span class="vlib4_rcompfont"> <span style="font-family: arial,helvetica;">8 We now know that the Anasazi were several different groups. They started out as wanderers. Hundreds of years before we even started counting years, these nomads roamed the deserts of the U.S. They hunted for their food. They made baskets to store seeds and other food they gathered.

<span class="vlib4_rcompfont"> <span style="font-family: arial,helvetica;">9 Little by little, the people stopped moving about. They became pueblo dwellers and farmers. They grew corn for food. Natural problems like floods and dry spells made life tough. The people hung on. Centuries passed. The Anasazi cultures flourished.

<span class="vlib4_rcompfont"> <span style="font-family: arial,helvetica;">10 These early people had some ties to those who would later become the Aztecs. Their art had the same flair. They had trinkets like copper bells that came from trade with the more southern peoples. But these first Americans had a culture all their own. By 1100 A.D., the Anasazi groups were strong and stable. It was then that they built their wonderful cities.

<span class="vlib4_rcompfont"> <span style="font-family: arial,helvetica;">11 The buildings at Chaco Canyon were more than dwellings. They were a giant science project. They were designed around the sun, moon, stars, and seasons. Years of backbreaking work went into their construction. The biggest buildings, the //great kivas//, were built so that north/south walls followed the path of the sun from winter to summer. East/west walls were built to line up with the sun through each daily cycle.

<span class="vlib4_rcompfont"> <span style="font-family: arial,helvetica;">12 Shapes and symbols were carved in rocks around the city. Swirling spiral //petroglyphs// were carefully placed. At certain times of the day or year, daggers of sunlight or moonlight stabbed through their centers. It was clear the rock pictures were made to include the sun and moon.

<span class="vlib4_rcompfont"> <span style="font-family: arial,helvetica;">13 It was staggering to think of the knowledge and planning it had taken. It was as if a master designer had built the pueblo city. It was like a cosmic crown in which the sun, moon, and stars sparkled like jewels. Yet, by the end of the 1300s, the people had left their great cities.

<span class="vlib4_rcompfont"> <span style="font-family: arial,helvetica;">14 "It's a mystery!" Mr. Sniggle declared. "Why would a people desert their cities at the apex of their culture?"

<span class="vlib4_rcompfont"> <span style="font-family: arial,helvetica;">15 Rocky was puzzled. "Apex??" he said. "What does an African goat have to do with it?" I looked at him blankly.

<span class="vlib4_rcompfont"> <span style="font-family: arial,helvetica;">16 Prunella snorted. "You're thinking of an //ibex//," she said. "Apex means top, like the highest point. Mr. S. means the Anasazi left at the peak of their culture."

<span class="vlib4_rcompfont"> <span style="font-family: arial,helvetica;">17 "Well, it makes more sense when you leave out the goat!" Rocky said. "I don't see why it's such a big mystery. The people may have been killed in a war. Or maybe one of those diseases wiped out everybody at one time."

<span class="vlib4_rcompfont"> <span style="font-family: arial,helvetica;">18 Mr. Sniggle shook his head. "The experts checked that all out," he said. "There was no evidence of attack. There were no mass graves like you'd find with a major sickness. It looks like the people just decided to leave."

<span class="vlib4_rcompfont"> <span style="font-family: arial,helvetica;">19 The story of the Anasazi reminded me of our trek back to 1587. We'd gone to check out the Lost Colony of Roanoke. No one could figure out where those people had gone, either. It seemed to me that these so-called experts were pretty careless. They'd lost two different groups of people before the U.S. even became a country!

<span class="vlib4_rcompfont"> <span style="font-family: arial,helvetica;">20 We weren't experts. We were just part of Mr. Sniggle's Weird History class. But we were dying to know the rest of the story. We'd talked Mr. S. into letting us fire up the MTP. The trip would take us back nearly a thousand years.

<span class="vlib4_rcompfont"> <span style="font-family: arial,helvetica;">21 Time had been our enemy in earlier trips. Just as we got to the interesting stuff, it seemed like our belt buzzers would go off. The MTP was calling us back. We had to go or risk being left a pile of rubble back in some wrinkle in time. The arid Southwest, though, was ideal for time travel. In those conditions, Mr. Sniggle said, the time warp would be more stable. That meant our molecules would stay together longer.

<span class="vlib4_rcompfont"> <span style="font-family: arial,helvetica;">22 Cool! This time, we'd be able to stay longer and see more. As we crammed into the capsule, I was pumped. Look out, experts! We were off to solve the riddle of the Anasazi! It sounded like a piece of cake.

<span class="vlib4_rcompfont"> <span style="font-family: arial,helvetica;">23 Things looked a little less rosy as we landed. I hated coming out of transport mode. This time seemed worse than usual. Along with the whir of the capsule, I kept hearing an annoying clanking sound. Likely just odd bits of my brain banging around, I thought. I hoped they'd sort themselves out sooner or later. Meanwhile I had a headache that would have floored an ox.

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