Discusses the Native Americans known as the Anasazi, who migrated to southwestern Colorado in the first century A.D.

Climb the arid slopes of Colorado to discover the cave dwellings of the ancestral Pueblo Indians. Why were the homes built in the cliffs? How were they used and why did the Pueblo move? Travel along with scientists to find out how their discoveries shed light on the mysteries surrounding this important historical site. Unlocking the secrets of the past is just an artifact away!

It is one of the great mysteries in the archaeology of the Americas: the depopulation of the northern Southwest in the late thirteenth-century AD. Considering the numbers of people affected, the distances moved, the permanence of the departures, the severity of the surrounding conditions, and the human suffering and culture change that accompanied them, the abrupt conclusion to the farming way of life in this region is one of the greatest disruptions in recorded history. Much new paleoenvironmental data, and a great deal of archaeological survey and excavation, permit the fifteen scientists represented here much greater precision in determining the timing of the depopulation, the number of people affected, and the ways in which northern Pueblo peoples coped—and failed to cope—with the rapidly changing environmental and demographic conditions they encountered throughout the 1200s. In addition, some of the scientists in this volume use models to provide insights into the processes behind the patterns they find, helping to narrow the range of plausible explanations. What emerges from these investigations is a highly pertinent story of conflict and disruption as a result of climate change, environmental degradation, social rigidity, and conflict. Taken as a whole, these contributions recognize this era as having witnessed a competition between differing social and economic organizations, in which selective migration was considerably hastened by severe climatic, environmental, and social upheaval. Moreover, the chapters show that it is at least as true that emigration led to the collapse of the northern Southwest as it is that collapse led to emigration.

This book is intended as an introduction to Southwestern Archaeology, for casual visitors. The book will guide you around a site in Sherlock Holmes fashion, giving you very real tools for understanding cliff dwellings. The Cliff Dwellings Speak also introduces readers to the descendants of the cliff dwellers -- the Pueblo people of the Southwest who still live there today. The book is highly illustrated with black and white photographs and engravings from rare antique books. Using copious illustrations, Field Guides in some chapters show the reader what to look for, and what it might mean. The Cliff Dwellings Speak is unique and is very different from any other book regarding understanding the Greater American Southwest (views of Native American, Anasazi, ruins at Mesa Verde, Colorado; landscape images of Colorado).