voting with your feet ... Aztec Ruins

Aztec Ruins National Monument

A National Monument on the side of the road , a main commuter road in an Xurb of a small town at that .... with no campgrounds , no views to speak of ..... doesn't get a lot of respect . Want more ????.... how bout the fact that Aztec is the term used, mistakenly,  over 100 years ago . There were no Aztecs in North America !

 This place rocked !! The rangers, the terroir ( smoke that one ) , the continuing process of learning that you could really feel going on .... made it special .

Putting Mesa Verde and Aztec Ruins into a story line that fits with Navajo National Monument ( Betatakin ) ,  Chaco Canyon ( up next ) , and the hundreds of other "ancestral puebolan" ruins , has been puzzling archeologists for more than a century .

The best I could come up with is from Stephen Lekson , a free spirited archeologist who believes the Anasazi center of gravity shifted north from Chaco Canyon to Aztec Ruins . Chaco was never a very powerful capital ... compared with Tenochtitlan, Moscow, or say , Tallahassee. Aztec was even weaker . But both Chaco and Aztec were capitals  . Chaco ended about 1125 , and rose again about 2 marathons north at Aztec where major construction began around 1110.

view from plaza

one of the smaller kiva

beam construction ... when we learned tree ring dating we had the time period

2 different construction styles represent the shift in influence

many rooms were just ceremonial in nature ... this was not

the " Great Kiva"

reconstructed .... but an amazing thing to enter

 Aztec started strong but faded fast . Pax Chaco prevailed through most of the 12th century ..... settlements continued to be open and dispersed - people had nothing to fear . But a 50 year drought showed that at least 2 generations of leaders , the Great House residents , failed in their jobs . Dissent and unrest stirred the countryside . There are unmistakable signs of repression and a landscape of peace being marred by almost unspeakable violence . Perhaps this what drove the pueblo builders of Mesa Verde to build in the cliffs