The Vanished Cliff-Dwellers: Why the Ancestral Puebloans Abandoned Their Stone Cities
In the high desert country of the American Southwest, tucked into the sheltering hollows of great sandstone cliffs, stand some of the most breathtaking ruins in all of North America. They are entire towns built into the rock — multistoried dwellings of mortared stone, hundreds of rooms deep, with towers and ceremonial chambers, clinging to the walls of the canyons beneath overhanging cliffs. The people who built them, the Ancestral Puebloans, once called the Anasazi, raised a sophisticated civilization across this land over many centuries, mastering the desert, tracking the movements of the sun and stars, and constructing works of astonishing scale and beauty. And then, toward the end of the thirteenth century, within the span of a generation or two, they left. They abandoned the great cliff cities, walked away from the homes their ancestors had built over hundreds of years, and moved on, leaving the stone towns empty beneath the cliffs. Why they went, and why so suddenly and so compl...