[Illustration: Badger House Community Trail]
_TRAILHEAD_
_To Long House_
_Basketmaker Pithouses_
_Pueblo Village_
Mini-Train Pickup
_Badger House_
Mini-Train Pickup
_Two Raven House_
Mini-Train Pickup
_To Kodak & Long House Overlooks_
(_Trail is accessible to the handicapped_)
About Your Visit...
Welcome to Badger House Community. This group of ruins covers nearly
seven acres. Your walk through this area is a journey through 600 years
of prehistory....
About The Past...
Archeologists learn about past human behavior mostly through studying
technology. As archeologists uncover settlements of different ages, as
here on Wetherill Mesa, they can compare patterns in architecture,
tools, and village layout and note how these changed through time. From
these things, archeologists can infer how societies organized to carry
out the tasks of life and how they reorganized when necessary to meet
life’s challenges.
In their interpretations of the past, archeologists do not always agree
with one another. There is no reason why they should. The evidence is
always incomplete and often difficult to understand....
[Illustration: {Pot}]
About The People...
Archeologists call the prehistoric Indians of the Mesa Verde “Anasazi.”
Anasazi peoples once lived over a vast area of the northern Southwest,
from the Four Corners to southern Nevada. The Anasazi were descended
from nomadic hunting and gathering peoples who occupied the Southwest
several thousand years before the time of Christ. Food plants,
originally domesticated in Mexico, spread to the Southwest through
trade. People were then able to produce food as well as collect it.
Although the Anasazi raised crops of corn, beans, and squash, such foods
probably made up only about half their diet. The people still relied on
the hunting and gathering skills passed down from their ancestors. The
Pueblo Indians of Arizona and New Mexico are the descendants of the
Anasazi. Despite four centuries of contact—and sometimes conflict—with
European culture, today’s Pueblos carry on much of the way of life the
Anasazi developed over the centuries. The Anasazi heritage lives on.
[Illustration: {Axe}]
Living in the Ground:
Modified Basketmaker Pithouse (AD 650)
By the late 500s, the Anasazi had settled on various parts of the Mesa
Verde. The people lived in pithouses clustered in villages. These also
included groups of small above-ground storage rooms built of jacal
(mud-plastered posts).
• STOP #1
Pithouses were structures with their floors and lower walls below ground
surface. Large posts set into holes in the floor supported a flat roof
and sloping sidewalls of poles, juniper bark, sage, and plaster. The
sidewalls rested on the low bench around the inside of the pit, where
impressions of the poles can still be seen.
Pithouse floor plans of this period resembled a figure-eight. The large
room was the living and sleeping area. It was equipped with a firepit or
hearth, usually located near the center.
One or both of the holes located behind the hearth was probably a
sipapu, an important spiritual symbol still found in this position in
modern Pueblo ceremonial rooms. Pueblo tales relate that the ancestors
originated in the spirit world beneath the earth. Aided by spirits and
culture heroes, the ancestors climbed through an opening linking the
world below with this one and settled on the lands the gods had prepared
for them. The sipapu symbolized this event and the place of emergence.
Its presence in the pithouse suggests that the family conducted some
religious ceremonies at home.
[Illustration: Early Anasazi peoples lived in semi-subterranean
homes called “pithouses.”
The reconstruction (top) is based on the position of support post
holes and other features on the floor plan (bottom).]
Near the far wall of the house, archeologists found a large pit
containing stones piled on a bed of sand. This was probably a heating
pit. In the evening, stones would be heated in the hearth, then placed
on the sand. They would radiate heat for several hours, warming the air
near the floor where the people slept.
This small room is called an antechamber. It probably was used as a
storage area and also as a passageway to and from the outside. At some
point, this room was converted into another living area and equipped
with a firepit, sipapu and antechamber of its own. The pithouse became a
“duplex” housing two families, an unusual arrangement.
[Illustration: Turkey Vulture]
[Illustration: Common Raven]
• STOP #2
This dense pinyon-juniper forest indicates deep, well-watered soil. Some
of the best farm land on the Mesa Verde was to be found here around
Badger House Community. Today the Mesa Verde looks much as it did when
the Anasazi arrived. The birds and mammals you may see during your
walk—mule deer, ravens, turkey vultures, jays—would have been familiar
to the prehistoric people. The conspicuous hills you will see in several
places along the trail are anthills. Modern Pueblo potters sometimes
collect the small pebbles from these nests to grind up and use as
temper, the material added to pottery clay to prevent the vessels from
cracking as they dry.
[Illustration: Steller’s Jay]
[Illustration: Mountain Chickadee]
_Developmental Pueblo Village_
Beginning about 750, Anasazi living arrangements changed rapidly. The
jacal storage rooms built near the pithouses grew into rooms of
three-room apartments. The Anasazi probably used these as summer homes,
then retreated into the better insulated pithouses with the coming of
cold weather.
[Illustration: Plan of three-room apartments, AD 750.]
• STOP #3
The Anasazi occupied this site continuously for over 300 years.
Archeologists know of several other room-blocks and a few pithouses in
this area. This room-block was the last to be built.
The pattern seen here—a long arc of single-room houses—appeared after
800. Note the sunken floors.
[Illustration: Plan of early Pueblo, after AD 800.]
These houses were built over shallow trenches. The walls were
constructed using an interesting mixture of materials and techniques.
Most were built of adobe, sometimes with stone slabs set upright along
the base. Some were built of rough stones set in thick layers of
mortar—the beginnings of true masonry, which the Anasazi would refine in
the centuries to come.
• STOP #4
Fire destroyed this entire block, and claimed a life. In one of these
rooms, archeologists found the skeleton of an adult sprawled across the
floor. An adobe wall had toppled onto the body, and it appeared that
this person was overcome by flames before this hapless victim could
escape the flames.
[Illustration: {Sandal}]
• STOP #5
This large underground room was a great kiva or ceremonial chamber.
Here, perhaps, people from this community and others nearby gathered for
rituals marking events important in the lives of all, such as planting
and harvest.
In this kiva, you will recognize a familiar combination of pithouse
features: central hearth, bench, and postholes. Through time, the
pithouse was devoted more and more to religious activities.
The history of this kiva can be read in the stratigraphy, or layers of
colored soil, preserved in the earth opposite this stop. When the pit
was dug, the soil was piled around the rim. At some point, fire
destroyed part of the kiva roof. The rest was taken apart, the beams
probably used elsewhere, and the kiva abandoned. Gradually the soil
washed back over the rim and into the ruined structure. After a few feet
of dirt had accumulated, people built fires in this area, leaving the
dark charcoal stains. Finally the people filled the rest of the kiva
with earth and trash and built houses on the fill.
[Illustration: {Decorative pattern}]