"UNTIL very recently, the most perplexing mystery of Southwestern archeology -- what caused the collapse of the ancient empire of the Anasazi -- seemed all but solved. Careful scrutiny of tree-ring records seemed to establish that in the late 1200's a prolonged dry spell called the Great Drought drove these people, the ancestors of today's pueblo Indians, to abandon their magnificent stone villages at Mesa Verde and elsewhere on the Colorado Plateau, never to return again.
"But in the last few years, Southwestern archeology has been shaken with a quiet revolution. Textbooks are being rewritten as the common wisdom, taught to generations of students, is overturned. "Nobody is talking about great droughts anymore," said Dr. Linda Cordell, a professor of anthropology at the University of Colorado in Boulder and director of the natural history museum there. "The mystery of the Anasazi is an open book again."
"Groundbreaking climatological studies have convinced many archeologists that the "so-called Great Drought," as detractors now call it, simply was not bad enough to be the deciding factor in the sudden evacuation, in which tens of thousands of Anasazi... moved to the Hopi mesas in northeastern Arizona, to the Zuni lands in western New Mexico and to dozens of adobe villages in the watershed of the Rio Grande.
"'There are just too many little discrepancies,' said Dr. Eric Blinman of the Office of Archeological Studies of the Museum of New Mexico in Santa Fe. Recent studies have shown, for example, that the evacuation actually began before the dry spell set in. Even more telling is evidence that the Anasazi had weathered many severe droughts in the past. Why did the one in the late 13th century cause an entire population to abandon the settlements they had worked so hard to build?
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