Mark Montgomery / Courtesy Crow Canyon Archaeological Center
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I
t had seemed like a good idea at the time. In the spring of a.d. 1250, you and your new spouse decided to move away from the hamlet where you were raised, in what is now southwestern Colorado. Your village, perched atop the rugged Mesa Verde plateau, was experiencing a baby boom and getting crowded. The best dwellings and croplands were already taken. But you’d heard there were perfectly good places to start your own family to the north, in the Montezuma Valley. Nervous but excited, you packed up and said goodbye. Now, decades later, you wondered if you’d made the right choice. At first, things had gone well. Yes, the small spring-fed valley you’d settled in was far from the center of
things, but the rains came, your corn and turkeys thrived, and the children arrived like clockwork, and then had kids of their own.Then, almost imperceptibly, things got tougher. Your corn didn’t do so well some years, but you survived by trading with communities that enjoyed better weather.As the harvests became even less predictable, however, those communities began to turn their backs on you. There were rumors of growing discord and violence. Your increasingly desperate neighbors start to talk: better to move again than risk starving here. Things aren’t so bad a few weeks journey to the south, they’ve heard, on some high ground near a big river. They are ready to go; do you and your kids want to come too?
summer • 2015
