Emma Orloski
Period 8

Chapter 1/ Activity 1

1. The Anasazi were the ancestors of the modern Pueblo People. Archaeologists have said they were the people who farmed the Four Corners. The Anasazi civilization was located in the Four Corners region of the Colorado Plateau, Southern Utah, Northern Arizona, and Northwest New Mexico. They later shifted the population to the Rio Grande Valley and the Mongollon rim.

2. Traditionally they had a matrilineal government, but many modern Pueblos were organized into clans and governed by clan elders. Other research shows that communities were formed with small villagers surrounding them.

3. No one knows what language they spoke. The culture was widespread in that time and location, so it is more than likely that different languages were spoken at different times.

4. They wove textiles from cotton, and they wove their clothing from looms. They made blankets, shirts, robes, aprons, kilts, breechcloths, socks, and belts using various vegetal fibers, animal hair, and human hair. They also made thick roves using split feathers or fur strips wrapped around a yucca fiber core. Matted fiber from juniper bark was used for diapers and menstrual pads, and for insulating sandal-clad feet during cold weather. They wore sandals, moccasins, and some snowshoes. Animal could have possibly provided material for some clothing. Necklaces, earrings, bracelets, arm bands, hair combs, and pins were made from wood, bone, shell, coral, and stone beads made of turquoise.

5. Pueblo religion is still based on maintaining harmony with the natural world. Puebloans probably help public and private ceremonies intended to benefit the community. Different parts of society may have been responsible for different events, each one important to the spiritual and material of the community. Important religious concepts and events were associated with seasonal tasks like farming and hunting. Animal figures could have pecked or painted images on rock walls that may have been connected to prayers or magical rituals for successful hunting. Kachinas are ancestor spirits who bring rain, and who appear as masked dancers in Pueblo villages during the summer. Pueblo priests bring rain through ceremony and prayer. Ancestral Puebloans pecked or painted a variety of images on the sandstone cliffs. Some spirals signify the suns movement, or the passage of time. Sunlight strikes a spiral differently at the spring and autumn equinoxes, and the winter and summer solstices. There spirals served as a part of a ritual calendar. Spirals are symbols of a group’s migration from one place to another. Animal figures may have played roles in rituals or prayers for successful hunting. Some symbols represent family and clan, which can appear in Puebloan pottery.

6. The Anasazi Heritage Center is a museum of the Ancestral Puebloan Culture and other Native cultures in the Four Corners region. It is also the starting point for visits to Canyons of the Ancients National Monument. Anasazi Heritage Center displays the culture and history of the Ancestral Pueblo people, and the methods that modern archaeologists use to reveal the past.

7. They farmed mesa tops, plains, and canyon bottoms. The early Anasazi were hunters and gatherers. The basketmakers relied on dry farming. They cared for the plants throughout the spring and summer. They rarely used river irrigation but did manage to capture river runoff.

8. They used a variety of tools made from different materials including flaked stone tools, ground stone tools, stone drills, hammers, atlatls, bow and arrows, shaft straightener, throwing sticks, snared and nets, scrapers, knives, wooden drills, metates, awls, rope, twine, thread, and drop spindles.

9. The Ancestral Puebloan farmers were relatively successful in the Four Corners. By AD 1300 they had left the entire region. Long-term climate changes that reduced crop yield may have been among the reasons that they Ancestral Puebloans finally moved away from their former homeland. Tree-ring records and other indicators show that persistent drought and/or shortened frost-free season affected this region during several prehistoric periods. Other factors responsible for this exodus may have been deforestation or other kinds of environmental degradation and political conflicts related to these problems. Families began leaving the Dolores area to pursue agriculture and community life at lower elevations nearby. In southwestern Colorado, some settlement areas persisted for centuries but with internal changes such as a trend toward concentration into larger, fewer villages. While the Four Corner settlements declined, more southerly areas began to grow and develop. The Rio Grande pueblos and the pueblos of Acoma, Laguna, and Zuni grew in numbers after AD 1300, perhaps including people from this region.

Activity 2

1. According to archaeological finds, the city of Cahokia was inhabited from A.D. 700 to 1400 however the civilization thrived during A.D. 1050 to 1200. Located a few miles west of Collinsville, Illinois was the central section of this civilization.

2. At it’s peak, the city covered nearly six square miles and 10,000 to 20,000 people lived here. The civilization only lasted from A.D. 700 to 1400. For a living, the people build mounds used as gathering places or they were burial sites for, it is supposed, leaders of the clan.

3. Some geographical conditions that were an advantage for the Mississippian civilization is the fact that it was located along the rivers in the Mississippi River Valley which gave them multiple resources. Because of their location by the rivers, the citizens took advantage of the high fertile soil. An added benefit was the availability of fish from the rivers which was another source of food rather than a constant corn diet.

4. The Woodland cultures were characterized by the raising of corn(maize), beans, and squash, the fashioning of particular styles of pottery, and the building of burial mounds. Archaeologists know that their belief system was becoming more complicated and their social structure more elaborate by using the things they discover such as artifacts and drawing conclusions about the civilization.

5. The major technological advancement during this period was the widespread use of pottery. However, the increasing use of agriculture and the development of the Eastern Agricultural Complex also meant that the nomadic nature of many of the groups was supplanted by permanently occupied villages.

6. There were substantial differences between Mississippian sites and their Woodland predecessors such as burial mounds became far less significant, agriculture intensified considerably with the introduction of better strains of maize-which resulted in a far more sedentary lifestyle, new vessel forms arose along with new types of decoration, and shell tempering became the norm. These things all imply Mesoamerican influence which indicated that the transitions between time periods was not direct, but absorbed gradually over time.

7. The Cahokia civilization depended upon corn(maize). This is reasonable seeing as it’s the easiest and most reliable crop.