Pueblo - Indians

From Albuquerque we continued northwest. The destination was Mesa Verde National Park. On the way there is the Chaco Canyon. Between 850 and 1250, it was a center of Pueblo culture and represents an important part of America's cultural heritage. It is a part of the sacred land of the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico and the Hopi of Arizona. With large pueblos and various other structures, it was the focal point of a distinct manifestation of Anasazi culture for several centuries, which can be referred to as the Chaco Culture. However, we didn't visit it because the road there was in pretty bad condition and we didn't want to subject ourselves and our camper to that.

A little further north, on the border with Colorado, are the Aztec ruins. We stopped here and visited the museum, watched an informative film, and saw the ruins themselves. We quickly learned that the Aztecs, despite the name, have nothing to do with them. Rather, the Spanish researchers and explorers who came from Central America simply named many of these excavations that way. So they still have that name. The film was interesting in that a Hopi Indian woman had a say. She was mainly annoyed with the archaeologists who make things up or interpret things or even turn them into puzzles (Why did they settle exactly there and why did they just leave the site again?), which from her point of view, they are not. For the Hopi, there are no puzzles, everything is crystal clear. The spiritual way was and is just like that and always leads the people to other places when the time comes.

The third and probably most famous Pueblo settlement is Mesa Verde in the state of Colorado. The park protects around 4000 archaeological sites, especially the well-preserved cliff dwellings of pre-Columbian Ancestral Puebloan communities that were fully explored only at the end of the 19th century. The Mesa Verde region was inhabited between approximately 600 and 1300 AD. We settled in the campground right in the national park and observed rare birds and deer while sitting in the sun with our coffee in our camping chairs. The main attraction of Mesa Verde is the approximately 600 cliff dwellings. You can see them well from viewpoints. But we didn't get closer because this is only possible with guided tours and we both didn't value crawling through narrow caves or climbing up and down 10-meter high freestanding wooden ladders. The viewpoints were enough for us.