No great native civilizations appeared on the North American continent, but by the last centuries BC, what is now called the late Archaic period, at about the same time when the Maya dominated much of Central America, the people of North America had divided into at least two distinct and separate cultural groups – the Desert Culture of the West, and the Eastern Woodlands people.

By that time the American Southwest had become that familiar dry desert country that could no longer support grazing animal life in any great numbers, and the people of the region had, out of plain necessity, begun to make use of anything and everything that could possible be considered edible.  Living in small family groups, they roamed throughout their country in search of food; they collected seeds and roots and edible plants of all sorts; they hunted small animals whenever possible; and along the few rivers they became fishermen as well.  They used plant fibers to make baskets and even footwear for themselves, and it was basketry, in fact, that was to become so distinctive a part of the Desert Culture that later they became known as the Basket Makers.  But so successfully did they adapt to their environment that their way of life was able to continue for thousands of years.  At Danger Cave in western Utah, where the earliest basketry known anywhere in the world was found, one such desert culture existed as long ago as 8000 BC; in some areas of California and Nevada, this same kind of life still persisted virtually unchanged in the 16th century.  And people like the Pueblo Indians of today still rely on the practices and the knowledge accumulated by the ancient desert people.

Then, suddenly, around 300 BC, some of the people in central and southern Arizona began a most remarkable and mysterious transformation.  These descendants of the Cochise people inhabited what is now known as the Sonora Desert, a scorching plain, bristling with cactus, that stretches deep into Mexico; a region so hostile that it is said that all living things there either scratch, bite, or sting.  Its gullies and washes carry water only a few days during precarious summer rains each year.  Only at the very northern part of that region is its one reliable source of water, the Gila River, and it was near that stream that these people began to flourish, perhaps fortified by newcomers from the south who brought them knowledge of new practices and techniques.  At any rate, they suddenly displayed an amazing variety of skills, until then unknown and all but alien to the other inhabitants of the area.  They established what may have been the first permanent villages on the North American continent, complete with a diversified agriculture, growing maize, beans and a variety of fruits.  They produced the very first pottery in North America, and stone sculptures and the first true textiles.  They appear to have been familiar with astronomical data, which they used in calculating the proper times for planting their crops.  Most remarkable of all, they began to construct irrigation canals and dams that redirected the flow of water, and some of these canals eventually stretched 10, 15, even 20 miles into their fields of growing crops.  In the Salt River Valley alone there were more than 150 miles of such canals, some of which were put back into use in the 20th century.

This Southwestern culture flourished for centuries in the scorching environment of the Arizona desert, the envy of all its neighbors.  They also appear to have been eager traders, for their artifacts have been found in regions far from their settlements.  But suddenly, around 1400, almost as mysteriously as they had appeared, their way of life simply stopped, and their untended lands  were quickly reclaimed by the hostile desert.  Some of the people apparently returned to Mexico, the land of some of their ancestors; they are known today only as the Hohokam – in the language of their descendants, the Pima Indians, “Those who have vanished.”  Those who remained behind seem to have been unable to continue the same way of life; eventually they developed into the historic tribes of the Pima and Papago Indians of southern Arizona, pale shadows of the greatness that had once been Hohokam.

By that time, however, another culture had already appeared in the Southwest, one that remains today as the best known of all pre-Columbian people in North America.  In the language of the Navajo, who later occupied much of the same territory, they are called the Anasazi, – The Ancient Ones - a people who had already vanished again by the time the first Navajo warriors appeared in the Southwest.  But at the high point of their civilization, the Anasazi covered the immense high plateau of what is now called the Four Corners – the area where northern Arizona and New Mexico meet southern Utah and Colorado.

When the Anasazi became the dominant people of that area, they can actually be traced back several hundred years.  They initially appeared in the first century AD as the people known as Basket Makers, because of the many fine basketry items discovered among their remains of that period.  Apparently already a sedentary people, these Basket Makers expanded their interest in agriculture, adding beans and cotton to their cornfields and becoming perhaps the first North American native people to domesticate turkeys as well.  But since they lacked any sort of dependable water supply, their plots always remained comparatively small.  But their previously simple pit houses were now expanded to include chambers both above ground and below, used mostly for storage.

By about AD 700, the Basket Makers entered a new stage, which has become popularly known as the Pueblos.  They now abandoned their pit houses altogether and began building huge structures of stone, mortared with adobe, to house entire family groups.  Their pit houses became the kivas, the underground circular chambers used primarily for religious ceremonies, limited to the men only.  As different families joined together, the buildings became ever larger and increasingly complex.  Pueblo Bonito, in New Mexico’s Chaco Canyon, is a typical example of Pueblo construction of that period, the remnant of an immense apartment complex, five stories high, and containing something like 800 rooms.

Finally, about 1100, the Anasazi reached what known as the Classic Pueblo period, when their engineering skills produced the most impressive native structures ever found in North America.  In the huge, arched recesses in cliff walls so peculiar to that region, these Anasazi builders constructed their famous cliff dwellings of stone – immense multi-storied buildings of adjoining rooms, designed to accommodate entire family clans.  Monuments to this amazing period still survive today in such places as Mesa Verde in Colorado, Canyon de Chelly in Arizona, and dozens more sites throughout the American Southwest.

But around 1300, the Anasazi’s life, like the Hohokam’s before them, came to a rather abrupt end.  There are few indications of what might have happened:  war seems to have broken out between several of the Pueblos; newcomers like the Navajo and Apache were already beginning to drift into the Southwest from their original homelands in the north, no doubt disrupting the life of the Anasazi with frequent raids.  A 25-year drought is known to have occurred toward the end of the 13th century, which must have seriously affected their always precarious agriculture.  At any rate, the Anasazi quite suddenly abandoned their homes in one area after another, leaving behind their great centers like Mesa Verde and Pueblo Bonito, and simply moved elsewhere.  When the Spaniards arrived in the Southwest some two hundred years later, the land had reverted to the typical Desert Culture and was occupied the Navajo and a few scattered tribes.  None of these people could explain what had happened to the Ancient Ones who had so recently existed there.  Their only known descendants live today in the valley of the upper Rio Grande, in pueblos known as Acoma, Zuni, and Hopi.