It's just a story, Kuckelman knows, and a partial one at that. And even if it's completely accurate -- and she's worked long enough in the region to know that no theory can be taken as fact -- many questions about the final migration remain. Why did every single village, every single vestige of society, drift away? If there were battles, why didn't the victors stay? What remnants of this fractured society were reborn as the migrants mixed with other cultures, rebuilding their world far to the south? Why didn't anybody ever come back?
Archaeology is fluid. One excavation flows to the next, each question that's answered leads to new, more challenging questions. The mystery of Mesa Verde's prehistoric depopulation will keep growing, expanding beyond the boundaries of the region, as scholars strive to understand how this episode fits into the history of the entire Southwest.
Crow Canyon Archaeological Center
Kristin Kuckelman may have uncovered part of the
Mesa Verde mystery at Goodman Point Pueblo.
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This evolving mystery is creating a new breed of archaeologist, people like Kuckelman who are willing to look past their own mesa tops and talk to scholars in other areas, to learn about the world of the ancestral Pueblo people beyond the Mesa Verde region. "Southwestern archaeology is kind of a dry science until you sit down with the archaeologists. Then they start moving beyond that," says Childs, who's writing a book about archaeologists and their ideas. "You see them start putting these stories together in their minds, stories they don't want to lose hold of. Archaeologists often have a very personal connection. Overall, they are a bunch of imaginative people getting together and arguing their ideas."
The Mesa Verde region's prehistoric wealth has been both a blessing and a curse; it's been far too easy for some archaeologists to get so caught up in their digs that they forget to search out new frontiers. "In a way, we are choking on our own data," says Steve Lekson, anthropology curator at the University of Colorado's Museum of Natural History. As he writes in his book The Chaco Meridian, "If Southwestern archaeologists don't ask big questions, we will slide back into feeble provincialism -- endlessly fine-tuning the record of a region where archaeology is easy."
Asking these big questions -- and seeking out big answers -- is critical, and not just as a capstone to a hundred-year-birthday celebration. Population levels spiraling out of control. Water battles fracturing communities. Devastating climate changes, and societies too entrenched in their ways to do anything about it. Wars spurred by dwindling natural resources. People willing to resort to horrific violence over a piece of land. Towns, cities, societies laid to waste by natural disasters. This is the picture Kuckelman paints of the past, but it's also a picture she sees in the newspapers every day. Seven hundred years from now, will archaeologists ponder the ruins of 21st-century cities, wondering what happened to their occupants?
Kuckelman crosses her arms and looks out the window of her office, gazing across the parched, inhospitable landscape. She chooses her words carefully.
"You cannot retreat to an ivory tower. What professional archaeologists need to keep in mind is that we are not just doing this for ourselves," she says. "I think it is particularly timely to be learning about a pretty large group of people, a society, that clearly made some pretty pivotal decisions about living in a particular landscape. We need to learn about how resources can be mismanaged and really cause devastating problems down the road. If you don't manage resources carefully and thoughtfully, you may be sowing the seeds of your own downfall."
