50 Fun Facts About Ancestral Puebloans

The name Anasazi, which many Pueblo people reject, comes from which language, where it means 'enemy ancestors'?

Navajo is the source of Anaasází, a label the rancher Richard Wetherill picked up while exploring Mesa Verde. Today's Pueblo peoples prefer the term Ancestral Puebloans.

Traces in pottery at Pueblo Bonito show that Ancestral Puebloans imported which tropical delicacy from 1,200 miles away?

Cacao, the bean behind chocolate, was identified in 2009 on sherds from Pueblo Bonito. It grows only in the tropics, so every bean reached Chaco Canyon through long-distance trade with Mexico.

Which bird did Ancestral Puebloans at Mesa Verde domesticate, turning its feathers into warm blankets?

Turkey was the bird of choice: by the 13th century it had replaced deer as the main source of meat at many Mesa Verde sites. Its bones were shaped into awls and needles.

Rancher Richard Wetherill first saw Mesa Verde's Cliff Palace in 1888 while out searching for what?

Stray cattle led Wetherill and his brother-in-law Charlie Mason to the mesa top that December. The dwelling they spotted had been empty for almost 600 years.

Which civilisation did 19th-century settlers wrongly credit with an Ancestral Puebloan great house in New Mexico?

The Aztecs lived far away in central Mexico, but the mistake stuck. The site is still called Aztec Ruins National Monument, and the town beside it is Aztec, New Mexico.

Mesa Verde, the Colorado park famed for Ancestral Puebloan cliff dwellings, has a Spanish name meaning what?

Green table describes the juniper and piñon forests that cover the high ground. Geologists note that the landform tilts to the south, which makes it a cuesta and not a true mesa.

Which natural disaster hit the Four Corners in the late 1200s as Ancestral Puebloans left Mesa Verde for good?

A severe drought gripped the region from 1276 to 1299, ending some 700 years of farming on Mesa Verde. Archaeologists call those dry decades the Great Drought.

Astronomer A. E. Douglass first gave firm dates to Ancestral Puebloan ruins by studying what in their wooden beams?

Tree rings grow wide or narrow with each year's rainfall, so Douglass matched the patterns in ancient beams against dated timber. His unbroken record eventually reached back to the year 700.

Which humpbacked flute player, a fertility figure, appears in Ancestral Puebloan rock art across the American Southwest?

Kokopelli is said to chase away winter with his flute and bring on the spring. His hump may recall the sacks of goods that travelling traders carried on their backs.

Which US president approved the creation of Mesa Verde National Park to protect its Ancestral Puebloan cliff dwellings?

Theodore Roosevelt approved the park in 1906, the first one created to protect a place of cultural significance. Two women, Virginia McClurg and Lucy Peabody, led the long campaign for it, earning it the nickname the Women's Park.

Which state meets Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico at the Four Corners, the heart of the Ancestral Puebloan homeland?

Utah contributes its south-eastern corner to the homeland, which also took in north-eastern Arizona, north-western New Mexico and south-western Colorado.

What name is given to the round, often underground ceremonial rooms at Ancestral Puebloan sites such as Cliff Palace?

Kiva roofs at Cliff Palace rested on six upright stone pillars called pilasters. The site holds more than twenty of these rooms, most with a firepit and a vent to draw in fresh air.

Which crop joined beans and squash as the Three Sisters that fed Ancestral Puebloan farmers at Mesa Verde?

Corn changed everything: growing it turned the region's semi-nomadic hunter-gatherers into settled farmers long before the first stone pueblos rose.

Pueblo Bonito, the largest great house in Chaco Canyon, was laid out on a plan resembling which letter?

D-shaped plans were a Chacoan favourite, shared by neighbouring Chetro Ketl. Pueblo Bonito held about 800 rooms and rose four and five storeys high in places.

More than 15,000 beads and pendants of which gemstone accompanied two burials at Pueblo Bonito in Chaco Canyon?

Turquoise was worked into beads in workshops across Chaco Canyon, where about 200,000 pieces have been excavated. It served as grave goods and ceremonial offerings.

Which brightly coloured tropical birds, native to lands far to the south, were traded to Pueblo Bonito in Chaco Canyon?

Macaws are no part of the Four Corners environment, so finding them at Pueblo Bonito proves trade with distant regions. Seashells found at Chaco tell the same story.

Early Ancestral Puebloans wove their sandals from the tough fibres of which spiky-leaved desert plant?

Yucca fibres also went into blankets, combined with rabbit fur for warmth.

The earliest Ancestral Puebloans are named for their skill at which craft, practised long before pottery arrived?

Basket weaving gave the Basketmaker culture its name, thanks to the many baskets found at sites 2,000 to 3,000 years old. Fired pottery reached these people only later.

After leaving the Four Corners, many Ancestral Puebloans resettled along which river, still lined with pueblos today?

Rio Grande pueblos such as Cochiti and San Ildefonso have been lived in ever since. That is why their people say the Ancestral Puebloans never vanished but simply moved.

World Heritage Sites credited to the Pueblo peoples are Mesa Verde, Chaco Canyon and which still-inhabited adobe town?

Taos residents trace their oldest standing building to around the year 1000. More went up in the late 1200s and early 1300s, and families still live in the adobe blocks today.

Which New Mexico pueblo, known as Sky City for its mesa-top setting, has been lived in since at least the 1100s?

Acoma is one of the oldest continuously inhabited communities in the United States. Its own people place the founding of their mesa-top town in the 11th century.

Which Arizona people, whose town of Oraibi dates to around 1100, call the Ancestral Puebloans Hisatsinom?

Hopi speakers use Hisatsinom to mean 'ancient people'. Oraibi is one of the oldest continuously inhabited settlements in the United States.

Which leader sent runners with knotted cords to the pueblos to time the 1680 revolt against Spanish rule in New Mexico?

Popé told each pueblo to untie one knot every morning and to rise when the last was gone. The Spaniards stayed out of New Mexico for twelve years.

Spanish explorers named the Pueblo peoples after their style of dwelling, using a Spanish word with which meaning?

Village is the meaning of pueblo, a word the explorers applied first to the compact stone and adobe towns they found and then to the people living in them.

Before stone pueblos, early Ancestral Puebloans lived for centuries in which homes made of brush, logs and earth?

Pithouses were dug into the ground, so the soil around them kept out the winter cold. At Mesa Verde they were later given over mainly to community ceremonies.

Hundreds of images pecked into Newspaper Rock by Ancestral Puebloans and earlier peoples are known by which term?

Petroglyphs are cut into a rock surface, whereas pictographs are painted on. Newspaper Rock carries over 650 designs, the oldest about 2,000 years old, and Ute and Navajo carvers added more in later centuries.

Ancestral Puebloan buildings from Chaco Canyon to Mesa Verde are known for doorways built in which distinctive shape?

T-shaped doorways and windows were a favourite motif from Chaco Canyon's great houses to Mesa Verde's cliff dwellings. Some archaeologists read the shared shape as a sign of Chaco's lasting influence.

A dagger of light crossed the centre of the larger spiral at Chaco Canyon's Sun Dagger site on which annual date?

Summer solstice was the day the dagger cut through the spiral's centre, an effect first recorded by artist Anna Sofaer. It ended when visitors' footsteps caused one of the three stone slabs to shift.

A cliff painting near Peñasco Blanco in Chaco Canyon may record the sighting of which sky event in July 1054?

A supernova appeared that month, bright enough for Chinese astronomers to record it in daylight. Its scattered debris is what telescopes now show as the Crab Nebula.

Which Mesa Verde cliff dwelling do visitors reach by a 32-foot ladder before crawling through a narrow tunnel?

Balcony House held 38 rooms and probably sheltered up to 30 people on its high ledge. Rangers call the visit the most adventurous cliff dwelling tour in the park.

Mesa Verde artifacts that Gustaf Nordenskiöld shipped to Europe in 1891 ended up in a national museum in which capital?

Helsinki's National Museum of Finland holds them because a Finnish collector bought the haul. Nordenskiöld, a Swede of Finnish descent, was the first to study the cliff dwellings scientifically.

Pot hunters looting ruins such as Chaco Canyon prompted which 1906 law that lets presidents create national monuments?

Antiquities Act powers have been used more than a hundred times since. Before it passed, a congressman toured the Southwest with anthropologist Edgar Lee Hewett to see the damage first-hand.

Which monument of Ancestral Puebloan stone towers has a Paiute and Ute name meaning 'deserted valley'?

Hovenweep's builders raised towers up to three storeys high and guarded their springs and seeps with stonework. Pioneer photographer William Henry Jackson adopted the name in the 1870s.

Ancestral Puebloan ruins share which Arizona national monument with Spider Rock, a towering sandstone spire?

Canyon de Chelly is one of the longest continuously inhabited landscapes in North America, and families still live inside the park today.

At which New Mexico monument did Ancestral Puebloans carve cave rooms called cavates into cliffs of soft volcanic tuff?

Bandelier is named for Adolph Bandelier, the Swiss-born archaeologist who called its cliff dwellings the grandest thing he ever saw. The tuff fell as ash from the Valles Caldera volcano.

Which neighbours of the Ancestral Puebloans dug a vast canal network where Phoenix, Arizona, now stands?

Hohokam canals around Phoenix formed the most complex irrigation network in the Western Hemisphere before European contact.

Before the bow and arrow arrived around AD 500, Ancestral Puebloan hunters hurled darts with which spear-throwing tool?

Atlatl technology had served hunters in the Americas since the Archaic period. The switch to bows between about AD 500 and 750 made hunting much easier.

From about 500 to 1300, northern Ancestral Puebloan potters favoured painted designs in which colour scheme?

Black-on-white vessels were kept for formal use, while everyday cooking pots were left plain gray. Further south, Mogollon potters preferred polished reds and browns.

Which event in January 1941 destroyed part of Pueblo Bonito's rear wall and a number of its rooms?

A rockfall toppled Threatening Rock, a section of canyon wall that loomed behind the great house. As the name shows, the danger had been no secret.

Which small floor hole in Ancestral Puebloan ceremonial rooms is said to mark where the first ancestors emerged?

Sipapu holes sit between the firepit and the wall in most of Cliff Palace's ceremonial rooms. They stand for the opening through which the first people entered the present world.

Ancestral Puebloan cooks ground their kernels on which flat stone slab, worked with a handheld stone called a mano?

Metate grinding uses a back-and-forth horizontal stroke, unlike the up-and-down crushing of a mortar and pestle.

From a Chacoan great house at Chimney Rock in Colorado, what appears between twin rock spires every 18.6 years?

The Moon rises between the spires only during a lunar standstill. The great house was first built in 1076 during one such event and finished in 1093 during the next.

The standard timeline of Ancestral Puebloan periods is named for which New Mexico site of a 1927 conference?

Pecos gave its name to the Pecos Classification, agreed at a gathering organised by archaeologist Alfred V. Kidder. Its original eight stages came with no dates attached.

Which well-preserved Ancestral Puebloan cliff dwelling in Arizona's Tsegi Canyon has a name meaning 'broken pottery'?

Keet Seel had a building boom between 1272 and 1275, yet construction stopped completely by 1286. Experts rate it among the best preserved large ruins in the American Southwest.

Which Pueblo people of western New Mexico speak a language isolate, unrelated to any other Native American tongue?

Zuni has no known relationship to any other Native American language. A Spanish friar once claimed the Zuni town of Hawikuh was one of the fabled Seven Cities of Cibola.

Which Colorado monument of Ancestral Puebloan ruins has the densest concentration of archaeological sites in the US?

Canyons of the Ancients has more than 8,000 documented sites, from villages and kivas to cliff dwellings, and more than 30,000 are thought to exist.

Which famous aviator took aerial photographs of Chaco Canyon in 1929 that revealed a possible ancient farm plot?

Charles Lindbergh flew over the ruins two years after his solo Atlantic flight. A magnetometer later found a rectangular feature beside Chetro Ketl matching what his pictures showed.

Ancestral Puebloans hauled timber for Chaco Canyon's great houses from which mountains, more than 50 miles to the west?

Chuska forests were a main source for the roughly 200,000 conifer trunks that the Chacoan buildings required, most of them carried in on foot.

Which fibre crop did Ancestral Puebloans weave into cloth for garments during the Pueblo eras?

Cotton cloth was among the finds when Cliff Palace was excavated in the early 1900s, alongside sandals, pots and textiles made from feathers.

Which organisation began an archaeological study of Chaco Canyon in 1920 and appointed Neil Judd to lead it?

National Geographic Society money also paid for the expeditions that gathered ancient beams across the Southwest, the samples that finally gave the ruins firm dates.