The Rise and Fall
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oon, the rising waters of Lake Nighthorse will swallow Sacred Ridge.The desert knoll will be hidden beneath the new reservoir, which will fill the rugged Ridges Basin in southwestern Colorado with as much as 160 feet of water. But Sacred Ridge won’t be forgotten. Years from now, archaeologists will still be poring over the mountain of data collected at one of the region’s earliest villages, trying to understand how it formed some 1,300 years ago, what enabled it to flourish for a half-century, and why it came to such an abrupt and bloody end. “Ridges Basin has given us a pretty unprecedented look at people moving into a new landscape and organizing themselves into an early village,” says Jim Potter of SWCA Environmental Consultants in Broomfield, Colorado, who led a four-year project that investigated 74 sites in and around Ridges. “It also raises some interesting questions about why they left and never came back.” In particular, the massive project—which included analyzing more than 15,000 human bone fragments—has
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provided unusual insight into the early Pueblo I period in the northern Southwest, which lasted from about a.d. 750 to 825.That’s when once scattered families began to join forces and build more densely populated communities anchored by identifiable villages, setting the stage for the growth of even bigger settlements. The evidence uncovered in Ridges Basin shows that creating more complex communities was far from a smooth process. Although researchers estimate that just a few hundred people shared the 2.5-mile-long valley during its heyday, they appear to have been divided among at least three culturallydistinct groups that coexisted uneasily. There is ample evidence of violence, and the tensions ultimately climaxed in a gruesome massacre of at least 33 men, women, and children at a village that overlooked the valley from atop Sacred Ridge. “It was an extraordinarily violent event that is not typical of anything else we’ve seen in the prehistoric record in the Southwest,” says Ann Stodder, a bioarchaeologist at the Field Museum in Chicago, Illinois, who analyzed the remains found
summer • 2011
