They say that their ancestors assimilated into other tribes in more habitable areas and passed down stories and traditions from the Chaco Canyon settlement and elsewhere over the generations. “Whether people are bringing in maize to feed 2,300 residents, or if several thousand visitors are bringing in their own maize to eat, they’re not obtaining it from Chaco Canyon,” Benson said.Īnd it’s certainly possible that supply lines collapsed because the Great Drought also resulted in the decline of other great Native American civilizations, such as the Mississippian culture.Īnd so, the Anasazi abandoned the site and the population scattered in different directions, which is why Puebloan people today object to conclusions that the Anasazi disappeared off the face of the planet. The Anasazi people either imported most of their food until supply chains collapsed or the settlement merely served a temporary purpose such as for religious pilgrimages or a shelter during times of conflict.ĭuring those times, people may have simply brought their own supplies to survive until they left. In short, there would have been a lot of hungry mouths in Chaco Canyon.īenson and his team have reached two possible conclusions about the settlement. They calculated that supplying the 185,000 pounds of protein needed by 2,300 people would have quickly cleared all small mammals from the area. The researchers also went one step further, assessing whether past Chaco residents could have supplemented this nutritional shortfall with wild game like deer and rabbits. Even if they farmed all of the surrounding side valleys-a monumental feat-they would still have only produced enough corn to feed just over 1,000 people. The team calculated that Chacoans could have, at most, farmed just 100 acres of the Chaco Canyon floor. The Anasazi even failed to plant enough acreage to feed the entire population. “If you’re lucky enough to have a spring flow that wets the ground ahead of planting, about three-quarters of the time, you’d get a summer flow that destroys your crops,” Benson said. Indeed, and even when enough rain fell, flash flooding would wipe out the crop.
“You can’t do any dryland farming there,” Benson said. Together with Ohio State University archaeologist Deanna Grimstead, Benson studied data on rainfall in the region along with flash flooding and discovered that even if the Anasazi tried to grow enough maize to feed everyone, their efforts would fail miserably. “You have this place in the middle of the San Juan Basin, which is not very habitable,” Benson said. Retired geochemist and paleoclimatologist Larry Benson, who is also the curator of the Colorado University Museum of Natural History, sought to find out if land in such conditions could sustain enough agriculture to feed the population.
#The hohokam and anasazi achievements series
Unfortunately, as we are experiencing today, the climate can have a drastic effect on civilization.Ī series of droughts struck the Chaco Canyon region over the course of 300 years beginning in 1130, around the same time the Ancient Puebloan civilization began to decline. When the settlement was first built, the climate was suitable for farming and trade routes extending up to 100 miles were established. It turns out that question has multiple answers, but the prevailing answer is climate change, which resulted in not enough food to sustain the population. A post shared by Tim Bradley on at 1:55am PDT
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