Q. Is it possible to estimate the life span of the people of Castle Rock and the surrounding areas?
Q. Why did the Puebloans live in cliff houses instead of tepees? Was it war or something? I have heard many answers, but what is the real answer? What is your theory?
Q. What kinds of stuff do you find?
Q. Did the Anasazi have any type of spoken language?
Q. What did the Anasazi use to build their homes and ladders?
Q. How big (and deep) were kivas?
Q. What are archaeologists at Crow Canyon studying?
Q. How did they Anasazi make their pottery? What did they use to paint their pottery, and how did they choose their designs?

Q. Is it possible to estimate the life span of the people of Castle Rock and the surrounding areas?
A. The term “life span” can be confusing since people use it to mean two different things. It can mean how long a person lived, or it can be an estimate of a group's average age at death. For past societies, both types of information are determined from the human skeletal remains found during archaeological excavations. For example, the oldest person who died at Castle Rock Pueblo is thought to have been about 50 years old, although in the general Mesa Verde region the average age at death is estimated to have been 35 years old. This factors in a really high infant death rate; a child who survived five years had a good chance of reaching his or her forties or fifties. The oldest remains I've analyzed (from another site) were from a woman who died when she was in her sixties. However, a woman's life span, on average, was shorter because of childbirth deaths. The ancestral Pueblo average age at death might seem low, but it was pretty typical for groups all over the world until the discovery of antibiotics helped lower the infant death rate. Life span, in the sense of the duration of life, is also pretty consistent among humans, with people frequently living until their eighties. Disease, malnutrition, and warfare make the average age at death vary from group to group.

Bioarchaeologists (biologist + archaeologist) estimate an individual's age using several techniques. Since every person's skeleton varies somewhat in how it develops, we can only estimate age. We estimate a child's age by tooth eruption, the length of the long bones, and from certain things having to do with skeletal development. For example, the ends of the bones have knobby parts called epiphyses (e-piff-e-seas). The knuckles are some of the hand's epiphyses. The epiphyses form and fuse to their bone shafts at fairly specific times. For instance, the distal epiphysis (knee) of the femur (upper leg) forms at an early age, but doesn't fuse until the late teens. Adult age estimates are based on age-related changes in the pelvis or the ends of the ribs, how much the sutures in the skull have fused together, and even how worn the teeth are. The books that explain how to estimate adults' ages are pretty technical, but you might be able to find a biology book that shows how kids' skeletons develop. As for when teeth come in, look in your own mouth, or those of your friends-but not when they're eating!

This question was answered by Cindy Bradley, Physical Anthropologist.   • Top of page

Q. Why did the Puebloans live in cliff houses instead of tepees? Was it war or something? I have heard many answers, but what is the real answer? What is your theory?
A. The ancestral Puebloans (the Anasazi) lived in pueblos instead of tepees because these structures fit their lifestyle. As you probably know, Puebloan people (both past and present) were farmers. Farmers stay in one place to plant, cultivate, and harvest their crops (in this case, corn, beans, and squash). A pueblo was a permanent village made out of sandstone rocks. It could survive the cold winters and hot summers of the Southwest. And I think they are pretty comfortable places to live.

I think that tepees were neat houses, too, but they were very different from pueblos. Tepees were designed to be easily moved. The people who used them were mostly hunters and gatherers. They needed to be able to move from place to place to follow the herds of animals and to find seasonal plants. A pueblo would not make sense for these people. So they developed a warm, comfortable structure that fit a traveling lifestyle.

Archaeologists still don't know for sure why the ancient Puebloans moved from villages on top of the mesas to cliff dwellings within the canyons. Some think that they were worried about being attacked. There was a severe drought at that time, and people might have been fighting over food and water.

Sometimes people prepare for violence, even if they do not fight all the time. The United States has a large army and lots of weapons. We are not at war right now, but we worry about the possibility of war and try to be prepared for it. Maybe this was true for the ancient Puebloans, too.

This question was answered by Sara Kelly, Archaeology Educator.   • Top of page

Q. What kinds of stuff do you find?
A. The kinds of artifacts that I find in ancestral Pueblo sites include grayware pottery used for cooking and storing food, decorated (Black-on-white) pottery used for serving, chipped-stone tools, grinding stones, and tools such as awls, needles, and spatulas, made from animal bones. Most of the artifacts that archaeologists find are bits of ancient trash left behind by ordinary people. Sometimes we find whole pots, arrowheads, or other complete tools. These are beautiful objects and they are enjoyable to find, but finding the artifact is not the objective or the end in itself. I immediately start to wonder why someone left this perfectly good tool behind when they moved. Did they move too far away to come back and get it? Were they planning to return but never had the chance? How did this whole tool or vessel get in this spot where I found it?

This question was answered by Ricky Lightfoot, Archaeologist.   • Top of page

Q. Did the Anasazi have any type of spoken language?
A. Yes! Although the Anasazi (ancestral Puebloans is another name for them) did not have a written language, they most certainly did have a spoken language. Any group of people need to be able to communicate, and the Anasazi were no different.

We do know that they spoke to each other, but we cannot be sure what their language sounded like. Our best clues come from the languages of the modern Puebloan people who live in Arizona and New Mexico. You might be suprised to learn that six different languages (Tewa, Tiwa, Towa, Keres, Hopi, and Zuni) are spoken in modern Pueblo villages and that these languages come from four different language families. An example of a language family is the “Romance” family which includes Spanish, Italian, and French. These languages are descended from Latin, the language of the ancient Romans.

Because so many different languages are spoken in the modern Pueblos, and because there are no written records of ancient Puebloan languages, archaeologists do not know which ancestral languages were spoken in which ancient villages in the Southwest.

This question was answered by Scott Ortman, Material CultureSpecialist. Scott has a special interest in anthropological linguistics.   • Top of page

Q. What did the Anasazi use to build their homes and ladders?
A. The ancestral Puebloans (another name for the Anasazi) used a number of different materials to build their homes. Early Pueblo Indian homes were built partly underground. Archaeologists call these pithouses. The walls were earthen (made of dirt). Large logs, usually made out of juniper trees, and smaller sticks formed the frame of the house. The house frame was covered with adobe, a mixture of dirt, ashes, and water. When dried, the adobe served as a protective covering against the sun, wind, and rain. The family probably had to repair their adobe roof regularly to keep it in good shape.

The later ancestral Puebloans built aboveground rooms from sandstone rocks covered with adobe. They chipped the sandstone into rectangular shaped blocks and used adobe mortar to cement the blocks in place and cover the stone walls. They built the ceilings out of large and small wooden beams. These buildings had rows of connected rooms and sometimes were two or more stories high. They looked a lot like our apartment buildings. These buildings we call pueblos. Another type of house was the kiva. These round buildings were most often built underground. Kiva walls were made of stone, dirt, and adobe. Ceilings were made out of wood and covered with a layer of earth.

Ladders were very important for reaching the rooftops of pueblos and for entering the underground pithouses or kivas. Ladders were generally made out of sturdy wood, such as oak or juniper. Because the ancestral Puebloans had no nails, they had to tie the rungs of the ladders to the posts or wedge them between two upright posts.

As you can imagine, building a house like the ancestral Puebloans had to do was a lot of work! You can look at drawings of more ancient house types on our Web site in Pueblo Indian History.   • Top of page

Q. How big (and deep) were kivas?
A. Like all houses, kivas varied in size from family to family. Most were about 12 feet across and 9 feet deep. A class that I was teaching recently was able to comfortably fit 16 people into a kiva of that size that we visited at Mesa Verde National Park. Some kivas were built especially for an entire village to go to for special gatherings. These can be as big as 50 feet across and 12 feet deep!   • Top of page

Q. What are archaeologists at Crow Canyon studying?
A, Crow Canyon archaeologists are studying the ruins of American Indian settlements in southwestern Colorado that were occupied between A.D. 1050 and 1300. These settlements were built and used by Indians whose modern descendants include the Hopi, the Zuni, the Acoma, and other tribes who live in the pueblos of Arizona and New Mexico today. These ancestral Pueblo Indians lived in southwestern Colorado until around A.D. 1280, when they migrated south into Arizona and New Mexico. Crow Canyon archaeologists are interested in learning more about these ancestral Pueblo communities by studying the collapsed ruins of their villages and farms:

• How were their communities organized?
• Why were their homes sometimes dispersed across the landscape in small farm settlements and at other times aggregated into large villages?
• Why was there such an abrupt and large-scale migration out of the region just before A.D. 1300?
• Why did no one return?

We use scientific methods to collect and evaluate data and answer scientifically posed questions. The places we choose to excavate, how we excavate, and what we collect are all influenced by what questions we are asking and what we hope to learn.

This question was answered by Ricky Lightfoot, Archaeologist.   • Top of page

Q. How did they Anasazi make their pottery? What did they use to paint their pottery, and how did they choose their designs?
Pottery was produced by a method called coiling and scraping. A clay "snake" is coiled around in a spiral, forming the base to a vessel (a bowl, for instance). Additional "snakes" or coils are added on, creating the basic shape of the vessel. Then the coils are scraped together, erasing all signs of the individual coils. The ancestral Puebloans probably used shaped pieces of wood or gourds as "scrapers" to do this work. Smooth stones were used to "polish" the surfaces of bowls.

Ancestral Puebloan pottery is called Black-on-White. The white is from the color of the clay. The black paint used for the designs was made from boiled plants (like beeweed or tansy mustard) or from crushed rock with iron in it (such as hematite). Paint brushes were made from the fibers of the yucca plant.

Today you can see many examples of our own culture's use of designs. For instance, most of our clothing has some design, pattern, logo, or motto on them. These elements may be important to the wearer or may not mean anything at all. This also holds true for decorations on our tools, dishes, houses, cars, etc. The ancient Pueblo people were no different. They too used designs in their daily life. These designs may have had specific meaning to them or may have just been decoration. Unfortunately, we can't ask them where they got the inspiration for their designs. Modern day Pueblo people have helped archaeologists in explaining some ancient images. Because of their ties with the ancient Pueblo people, modern Pueblo people can give unique interpretations to past designs.   • Top of page

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