Title: Trail Guide: Badger House Community - Mesa Verde Museum Association
Author: Anonymous
Language: English
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                              BADGER HOUSE
                               Community
                             _Trail Guide_


_25¢
donation if you take book home._

                                                                BARNHART

    [Illustration: Badger House Community Trail]

  _TRAILHEAD_
      _To Long House_
    _Basketmaker Pithouses_
    _Pueblo Village_
      Mini-Train Pickup
    _Badger House_
      Mini-Train Pickup
    _Two Raven House_
      Mini-Train Pickup
      _To Kodak & Long House Overlooks_
  (_Trail is accessible to the handicapped_)



                          About Your Visit...


Welcome to Badger House Community. This group of ruins covers nearly
seven acres. Your walk through this area is a journey through 600 years
of prehistory....



                           About The Past...


Archeologists learn about past human behavior mostly through studying
technology. As archeologists uncover settlements of different ages, as
here on Wetherill Mesa, they can compare patterns in architecture,
tools, and village layout and note how these changed through time. From
these things, archeologists can infer how societies organized to carry
out the tasks of life and how they reorganized when necessary to meet
life’s challenges.

In their interpretations of the past, archeologists do not always agree
with one another. There is no reason why they should. The evidence is
always incomplete and often difficult to understand....

    [Illustration: {Pot}]



                          About The People...


Archeologists call the prehistoric Indians of the Mesa Verde “Anasazi.”
Anasazi peoples once lived over a vast area of the northern Southwest,
from the Four Corners to southern Nevada. The Anasazi were descended
from nomadic hunting and gathering peoples who occupied the Southwest
several thousand years before the time of Christ. Food plants,
originally domesticated in Mexico, spread to the Southwest through
trade. People were then able to produce food as well as collect it.
Although the Anasazi raised crops of corn, beans, and squash, such foods
probably made up only about half their diet. The people still relied on
the hunting and gathering skills passed down from their ancestors. The
Pueblo Indians of Arizona and New Mexico are the descendants of the
Anasazi. Despite four centuries of contact—and sometimes conflict—with
European culture, today’s Pueblos carry on much of the way of life the
Anasazi developed over the centuries. The Anasazi heritage lives on.

    [Illustration: {Axe}]



                         Living in the Ground:
                 Modified Basketmaker Pithouse (AD 650)


By the late 500s, the Anasazi had settled on various parts of the Mesa
Verde. The people lived in pithouses clustered in villages. These also
included groups of small above-ground storage rooms built of jacal
(mud-plastered posts).


• STOP #1

Pithouses were structures with their floors and lower walls below ground
surface. Large posts set into holes in the floor supported a flat roof
and sloping sidewalls of poles, juniper bark, sage, and plaster. The
sidewalls rested on the low bench around the inside of the pit, where
impressions of the poles can still be seen.

Pithouse floor plans of this period resembled a figure-eight. The large
room was the living and sleeping area. It was equipped with a firepit or
hearth, usually located near the center.

One or both of the holes located behind the hearth was probably a
sipapu, an important spiritual symbol still found in this position in
modern Pueblo ceremonial rooms. Pueblo tales relate that the ancestors
originated in the spirit world beneath the earth. Aided by spirits and
culture heroes, the ancestors climbed through an opening linking the
world below with this one and settled on the lands the gods had prepared
for them. The sipapu symbolized this event and the place of emergence.
Its presence in the pithouse suggests that the family conducted some
religious ceremonies at home.

    [Illustration: Early Anasazi peoples lived in semi-subterranean
    homes called “pithouses.”

    The reconstruction (top) is based on the position of support post
    holes and other features on the floor plan (bottom).]

Near the far wall of the house, archeologists found a large pit
containing stones piled on a bed of sand. This was probably a heating
pit. In the evening, stones would be heated in the hearth, then placed
on the sand. They would radiate heat for several hours, warming the air
near the floor where the people slept.

This small room is called an antechamber. It probably was used as a
storage area and also as a passageway to and from the outside. At some
point, this room was converted into another living area and equipped
with a firepit, sipapu and antechamber of its own. The pithouse became a
“duplex” housing two families, an unusual arrangement.

    [Illustration: Turkey Vulture]

    [Illustration: Common Raven]


• STOP #2

This dense pinyon-juniper forest indicates deep, well-watered soil. Some
of the best farm land on the Mesa Verde was to be found here around
Badger House Community. Today the Mesa Verde looks much as it did when
the Anasazi arrived. The birds and mammals you may see during your
walk—mule deer, ravens, turkey vultures, jays—would have been familiar
to the prehistoric people. The conspicuous hills you will see in several
places along the trail are anthills. Modern Pueblo potters sometimes
collect the small pebbles from these nests to grind up and use as
temper, the material added to pottery clay to prevent the vessels from
cracking as they dry.

    [Illustration: Steller’s Jay]

    [Illustration: Mountain Chickadee]



                     _Developmental Pueblo Village_


Beginning about 750, Anasazi living arrangements changed rapidly. The
jacal storage rooms built near the pithouses grew into rooms of
three-room apartments. The Anasazi probably used these as summer homes,
then retreated into the better insulated pithouses with the coming of
cold weather.

    [Illustration: Plan of three-room apartments, AD 750.]


• STOP #3

The Anasazi occupied this site continuously for over 300 years.
Archeologists know of several other room-blocks and a few pithouses in
this area. This room-block was the last to be built.

The pattern seen here—a long arc of single-room houses—appeared after
800. Note the sunken floors.

    [Illustration: Plan of early Pueblo, after AD 800.]

These houses were built over shallow trenches. The walls were
constructed using an interesting mixture of materials and techniques.
Most were built of adobe, sometimes with stone slabs set upright along
the base. Some were built of rough stones set in thick layers of
mortar—the beginnings of true masonry, which the Anasazi would refine in
the centuries to come.


• STOP #4

Fire destroyed this entire block, and claimed a life. In one of these
rooms, archeologists found the skeleton of an adult sprawled across the
floor. An adobe wall had toppled onto the body, and it appeared that
this person was overcome by flames before this hapless victim could
escape the flames.

    [Illustration: {Sandal}]


• STOP #5

This large underground room was a great kiva or ceremonial chamber.
Here, perhaps, people from this community and others nearby gathered for
rituals marking events important in the lives of all, such as planting
and harvest.

In this kiva, you will recognize a familiar combination of pithouse
features: central hearth, bench, and postholes. Through time, the
pithouse was devoted more and more to religious activities.

The history of this kiva can be read in the stratigraphy, or layers of
colored soil, preserved in the earth opposite this stop. When the pit
was dug, the soil was piled around the rim. At some point, fire
destroyed part of the kiva roof. The rest was taken apart, the beams
probably used elsewhere, and the kiva abandoned. Gradually the soil
washed back over the rim and into the ruined structure. After a few feet
of dirt had accumulated, people built fires in this area, leaving the
dark charcoal stains. Finally the people filled the rest of the kiva
with earth and trash and built houses on the fill.

    [Illustration: {Decorative pattern}]



                              Badger House


• STOP #6

More towers have been found in the Mesa Verde-Montezuma Valley area than
in any other part of the Southwest. Most of these were located near
kivas, and many were connected to kivas by tunnels. This suggests that
towers were important in Anasazi ceremonial life, but archeologists are
not sure how. A tunnel extended 41 feet between a hatchway in the floor
of this tower and an opening in the wall of a kiva at the far end of
Badger House. This is the longest kiva-tower tunnel yet discovered in
the Southwest. The tunnel was built by digging a trench which was then
roofed with poles, brush and earth. When the kiva burned, the entrances
at both ends of the tunnel were open. Flames were drawn through the
tunnel some 20 feet towards the tower, charring the roof.


• STOP #7

This site was first occupied from about 900 through 1100. People
returned in the 1200’s, built the kiva and tower and a room-block, but
soon after abandoned the site for good.

The earliest houses here were so disturbed by later construction that
archeologists could not get a clear idea of their number or extent.

    [Illustration: Badger House as it may have appeared in the 1200’s.]

The ruins exhibited here are the remains of two room blocks built at
different times, one partially over the rubble of the other. The lower
foundations date from about 1000-1100, the upper from the late 1250’s.

    [Illustration: {Pitcher}]

Compare the changes in masonry that took place over this time span. The
walls of the earlier rooms are only one-stone wide. Except for the
chipping along the edges—a technique sometimes called “scabbling”—the
stones were left rough. The walls of the later rooms, however, were
built of two parallel rows of stone and the space between them packed
with earth and rocks. The stones themselves were finished by pecking,
similar to those you will see in the walls of the small kiva at the next
stop.

An earth-filled bench was built at one end of each of the later rooms.
These may have been sleeping platforms, raised to avoid drafts and the
cold air that settled near the floors overnight.

No roofing timbers were found in this room-block. Archeologists believe
that when the Anasazi abandoned this site they took much of Badger House
with them. Stones and beams from these rooms probably found a place in
the walls and roofs of Wetherill Mesa cliff dwellings.


• STOP #8

After about 900, Mesa Verde communities were dotted with kivas like this
one. Small kivas probably were used by several related families or by
secret religious societies whose members specialized in performing
certain types of ceremonies. The roof was at ground surface. Kiva roofs
were supported by an ingenious cribbed framework of logs. The ends of
the logs rested on the pilasters or columns along the kiva wall. Note
the large rectangular pit or vault in the floor. The ends of this vault
were stepped and supported a plank hewn from ponderosa pine.
Archeologists believe that this was used as a drum.

    [Illustration: WETHERILL MESA ARCHEOLOGICAL PROJECT

    Between 1958 and 1964, archeological crews excavated in several
    sites on Wetherill Mesa. This work was funded by the National
    Geographic Society and the National Park Service. At the time, the
    Wetherill Mesa Project was among the largest “digs” ever undertaken
    in the United States. A number of different fields participated,
    including botanists, zoologists, and geologists. All applied their
    special skills in this effort to better understand the world of the
    prehistoric peoples of the Mesa Verde.]

Around 1200, most of the Mesa Verde Anasazi abandoned their homes on the
mesa tops and settled in the alcoves or overhangs along the canyon
walls. Some people continued to live—or at least to use ceremonial
sites—on the mesa tops, however. Archeologists are virtually certain
that the tower, kiva, and last block of rooms at Badger House were built
in 1258.


• STOP #9

Archeology can tell us much about how human activities alter the natural
environment. Consider this tale of two rabbits:

When the Anasazi settled on the Mesa Verde, it looked much as it does
today. Cottontails are now very common in the mesas while jackrabbits
are rare. Yet the animal bone recovered from sites like Badger House
included as much jackrabbit as cottontail.


                                  Why?

    [Illustration: Cottontail]

In clearing land for farming, the Anasazi converted areas of the mesa
tops into the sort of open habitat jackrabbits favor. The species moved
into these areas and multiplied quickly. After the Anasazi abandoned
Mesa Verde, the brush and forest grew over the former cornfields. As the
brush returned, so did the cottontails—and the jackrabbits retreated to
the open country of the Montezuma Valley, where they are common today.

    [Illustration: Jackrabbit]



                            Two Raven House


The Anasazi occupied this site at various times from the 900’s into the
1100’s. They left behind some unusual and puzzling architectural
features....


• STOP #10

The sides and floor of this pit were fire-reddened, and archeologists
believe it was used as an oven. Food probably was placed on a bed of hot
stones, covered with earth, and allowed to bake for several hours.


• STOP #11

This small underground room was among the last structures built on this
site. Archeologists do not know its purpose, but it resembles a
miniature kiva.

The last building on this site was a small pueblo. From the time the
Anasazi began to live in above-ground dwellings, their villages usually
included open courtyards or plazas. The kivas were located in this area.
Modern Pueblo Indians use the plaza as a work area, a place to
socialize, and a stage for the dances that are often a part of religious
ceremonies.

    [Illustration: The palisade was built of upright poles, with
    branches probably woven between them.]


• STOP #12

A palisade, or fence of posts and brush, partially enclosed the plaza of
Two Raven House. Archeologists speculate that such structures may have
been windbreaks to shelter the plaza or even barriers to keep Anasazi
turkeys in (or out) of the village. Although palisades have been
discovered at only a few other sites in the Southwest, they may have
been common features of Anasazi villages. Archeologists seldom have the
time (or money) to spend stripping away the topsoil in search of the
telltale rows of postholes.


• STOP #13

Between 1280 and 1300, the Anasazi left Mesa Verde and moved south. Some
of the people may have joined the Hopi in northern Arizona, but most
probably settled among the Pueblos in the Rio Grande Valley of New
Mexico. Archeologists are still not certain why the Anasazi abandoned
much of their homeland at this time.

Drought conditions, which began around 1276 and persisted for nearly a
generation, may have been partly to blame. Yet, the Anasazi had survived
several previous droughts. By 1280, however, the people may have been
facing other serious problems in their environment, including exhausted
soil and erosion.

        _Even after a century of research, mysteries remain...._


• STOP #14

These stones are the remains of toppled walls. They were removed from in
and around the rooms during excavation.


A key ingredient in making a house into a ruin is neglect. Nature does
the rest. Walls and roofs of abandoned houses sag and fall. Soil, moved
by water and wind, builds up against the foundations. Plants with
shallow roots sprout, anchoring the soil, which eventually becomes deep
enough to support brush cover. Given time, the result is a mound—one
littered with lichen-covered stones, pot sherds, flakes of stone and
mortar, but otherwise nearly blending into the landscape. You may have
wondered how archeologists estimate the height of walls when so few are
left standing. The answer lies here. They collect the debris and measure
the pile.

    [Illustration: {Pitcher}]



                             Wetherill Mesa
                       Planning Information Sheet


The following information will help you plan your visit to Wetherill
Mesa. The road to Wetherill is open from 8:00 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. The
12-mile, 30/45 minute drive offers a number of excellent views of the
Park and Four Corners.

NOTE: Vehicles in excess of 8,000 G.V.W. and/or 25 feet in length are
prohibited.


                           Summer Activities

Wetherill Mesa offers a variety of sights, from cliff dwellings to mesa
top ruins. From the parking area, walk to the information kiosk and
mini-train loading area. There the Ranger will help you plan your visit
to the ruins.

Step House Ruin: The ½-mile self-guided walk takes 45 minutes to
complete. Guidebooks are available on the trail to the ruin. A Ranger is
on duty in the dwelling to answer any questions. This ruin may be
visited anytime between 9:15 a.m. and 5:15 p.m.


                               Mini-Train

    [Illustration: {Petroglyph}]

Departs from the kiosk area every ½-hour from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.
There may be an hour wait for tours. You must ride the mini-train to
visit:

  • The Ranger guided tour at Long House
  • The self-guided Badger House Community walk
  • The Kodak House Overlook
  • The Long House Overlook
  • The Nordenskiöld’s Ruin #16

Long House: This Ranger guided tour of the Park’s second largest
dwelling leaves every ½-hour from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. at the trail
head. The total round trip walking distance is ½-mile and takes
approximately one hour.

Note: Tours are limited to 50 people on a first come, first served
basis. This tour is not recommended for those with a heart condition.
Last tour to Long House leaves from the kiosk at 5:00 p.m.

Badger House Community: This ¾-mile self-guided trail will take you to
four mesa top ruins.

  1. Modified Basketmaker Pithouse
  2. Pueblo Village and Great Kiva
  3. Badger House
  4. Two Raven House

Guidebooks are available at the beginning of the trail and a Ranger will
be roving the trail in order to answer any questions or provide
assistance. This ruin may be visited anytime between 9:45 a.m. and 5:30
p.m. Visitors taking the 5:00 p.m. tour (last tour) to Long House will
not be able to visit Badger House or Step House.

Two Overlooks: Kodak viewpoint and Long House viewpoint.

NOTICE: The mini-train and most trails are accessible by wheelchair.

  • All hiking is restricted. Ask a Ranger for hiking information.
  • Smoking is restricted to the parking area.
  • Pets are not allowed beyond the parking area.
  • Please use trash cans.

The ARA (concessioner) van departs from Far View Lodge at 9:30 a.m.

    [Illustration: {Cliff houses}]

    [Illustration: WETHERILL MESA]

  STEP HOUSE
    Trail (Self-Guided)
    RANGER STATION
    RESTROOMS
    FOOD SERVICE
    INFORMATION
    MINI-TRAIN LOADING AREA
  NORDENSKIÖLD’S RUIN #16
  LONG HOUSE
    Ranger Guided Tours
  BADGER HOUSE
    Community Trail (Self-Guided)
    BADGER HOUSE Stop
  TWO RAVEN HOUSE
    Stop
  KODAK HOUSE
    Overlook
    Stop
  LONG HOUSE
    Overlook
    Stop
  PUEBLO VILLAGE
    Stop
  Legend
    Paved Road
    Foot Path
    Trailhead
    Primary Trailhead



    [Illustration: {Mesa Verde Museum Association Logo}]

                   This booklet was published by the
                  MESA VERDE MUSEUM ASSOCIATION, INC.
                  (No government funds were expended)


                            FOR YOUR SAFETY

   Do not allow your visit to be spoiled by an accident. Efforts have
  been made to provide for your safety and comfort. Warning signs are
 placed among the ruins and along trails and walls, but there are still
   hazards that require your alertness and vigilance. Please exercise
                       common sense and caution.


                   HELP US PROTECT THIS NATIONAL PARK

   Please leave plants, animals, rocks and other natural and manmade
  features undisturbed. Under the 1906 Federal Antiquities Act and the
    Archeological Resource Protection Act of 1979, it is unlawful to
 appropriate, excavate, injure, or destroy any historic or prehistoric
           ruin or any object of antiquity on federal lands.



                          Transcriber’s Notes


—Silently corrected a few typos.

—Retained publication information from the printed edition: this eBook
  is public-domain in the country of publication.

—In the text versions only, text in italics is delimited by
  _underscores_.





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