'The investigating officer comes in and tells me the accident wasn't that bad. But I'm seeing the destruction all around me.'
"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?
"'The Great Drought may have been the last straw,' said Dr. John Ware, another archeologist at the Museum of New Mexico. 'But in and of itself, it just wasn't enough.'
"As they sift the evidence, archeologists are finding surprising new elements that may have conspired with drier weather to bring about the calamitous fall. Belying the popular image of the Anasazi as a peaceable kingdom of farmers and potters, some of the new research puts the blame for the collapse on a bloody internecine war. Other researchers are trying to combine archeological evidence with anthropological studies of the modern pueblo Indians to make the case that the Anasazi were roiled by a religious crisis as divisive as European medieval heresies. In some scenarios, the Anasazi were pulled farther south en masse by an attractive new religion.
