Anasazi Indians

The Anasazi people of New Mexico's Chaco Canyon had a sophisticated trade structure with other tribes before their civilization was felled by a 50-year drought in the 12th century, according to researchers from the University of Arizona. The Anasazi used more than 200,000 trees for roof beams and door lintels in their enormous masonry pueblos.

The most compelling evidence yet that some Native Americans practiced cannibalism has been discovered by researchers studying a small Anasazi settlement in southwestern Colorado that was mysteriously abandoned about AD 1150.

It has been called one of the great prehistoric anthropological puzzles: What caused the Anasazi people--who over centuries had developed one of the most sophisticated civilizations in North America--to abandon their beautiful stone cities? What event transpired in the mid-12th century that caused families to walk away, seemingly in great haste, leaving behind food cooking over fires and sandals hanging on pegs? Here, in a stark desert landscape presided over by brooding red mesas, some clues lie buried within a nest of hundreds of rooms, strewn among the remnants of distinctive Cibola pottery and exquisite jewelry fashioned from turquoise and jet.

In the late 1800s and early 1900s, archeologists and plunderers excavated mummies of dozens of ancient Anasazi Indians buried in caves and rock shelters in southeast Utah and other Four Corners states.

The cliffs are the color of a sandstone rainbow. White, beige, light orange and, at the bottom, deep red. They wind through Sand Canyon like a snake.

In her first novel, "She Who Remembers," Linda Lay Shuler rekindled lost civilizations of the pre-Columbian southwest to tell a tale of romance and mystical adventure and to ponder what legacy 11th-Century Viking explorers might have left behind.

The discovery of a large cache of early Indian artifacts in a storage locker in northwestern New Mexico has delighted archeological experts who say the find is rare because the Anasazi items are in exceptional condition.

Christopher Kuzawa, a Colorado University undergraduate student on a $750 summer research grant, thought he had stumbled onto something special last July when he found a handful of gray clay pot sherds that had washed down from a 600-foot cliff to the banks of the Dolores River.