For archaeologists, term 'Anasazi' becoming an artifact

Jim Erickson, Rocky Mountain News

Published May 6, 2006 at midnight

Text size

More Local News

TOWAOC - During a wide- ranging, three-day symposium celebrating Mesa Verde National Park's centennial, one word with deep-rooted ties to the park and to the history of Southwestern archaeology was rarely uttered: Anasazi.

More than 30 research talks were presented during the meeting, and none of the titles included Anasazi, a word some American Indians find offensive.

During the past decade, the word has been phased out of the park's museum exhibits, its brochures and its interpretive signs.

Some even claim that books containing the word rarely make it onto the shelves of the park's visitor center.

Today's preferred term - at least among National Park Service employees - to describe the prehistoric pueblo-building farmers of the Four Corners region is Ancestral Puebloan.

To many Southwestern archaeologists, the switch has resulted in a sort of professional schizophrenia.

They continue to use Anasazi when writing scholarly articles or when speaking with other researchers. But when addressing the general public or a group of American Indians, they revert to Ancestral Puebloans.

Some scientists say the switch to Ancestral Puebloan is nothing more than meddling political correctness by the federal government.

Others say the change is a simple and appropriate way to show respect to American Indian descendents of the prehistoric peoples.

"It's verboten down here," University of Colorado archaeologist Steve Lekson said of the word Anasazi.

Lekson spoke at Friday's final symposium session about the links between current U.S. immigration protests and the long- held belief that the ancestral homeland of the Aztecs included the American Southwest.

Addressing an audience of about 100 people, mostly archaeologists, he used the word Anasazi repeatedly - one of the few who did during the three days.

"It's a hot word, and it's not a happy word for pueblo people. And I have no interest in insulting them," Lekson said. "But when talking about archaeology to archaeologists, I use that word."

The word Anasazi was first applied to the Mesa Verde cliff dwellings by rancher Richard Wetherill in 1888 to refer to the prehistoric inhabitants of the area.

In the 1930s, pioneering Southwestern archaeologist Alfred Kidder adopted the name, and it stuc - until the early to mid- 1990s, that is, when modern-day tribes, led by the Hopis and other puebloan peoples, objected to the word as insulting.

Anasazi is said to be a Navajo word that means "enemy ancestors."

The tribes first expressed their concerns during meetings with Mesa Verde officials that began in 1993, said Linda Towle, the park's chief of research and cultural resources.

"The Hopi tribe advised the Park Service to stop using the word Anasazi because it's a Navajo tribe word, not a Hopi word," said Leigh Kuwanwisiwma, director of the Hopi cultural preservation office. The Hopi and the Navajo have long-standing disagreements over tribal borders and other issues.

Joel Brisbin, a Mesa Verde archaeologist, said he includes the word Anasazi in his National Park Service technical reports "to be obnoxious, because I know the editors will take it out to be politically correct."

Brisbin, a Park Service employee, said books containing the word Anasazi don't make it onto the shelves in the park's visitor center, a charge that Towle denies.

"There is really good stuff that people want to sell, and the park won't sell it any more because it says Anasazi," Brisbin said. "Archaeologists have used that term forever, and there's no disrespect whatsoever intended."

"We are not censoring," Towle responded. "We haven't thrown books out because of language."

Longtime Mesa Verde archaeologist and University of Colorado professor emeritus David Breternitz insists that Anasazi is not, in fact, a Navajo word. He claims it's a word that Wetherill or another Anglo made up to designate the people who lived in the Four Corners area from A.D. 600 to 1300.

"It sounds like a Navajo word but it's not," Breternitz said. "It's a made-up Anglo word."

Subscribe to the Rocky Mountain News