Today, their descendents are believed to be the members of the various Pueblo tribes in New Mexico and Colorado. Roberts believes that the Anasazi of places like Nevada were drawn south from their homeland to the pueblos of New Mexico by the kachina religion, which encouraged communal living-particularly attractive in the harsh Southwest where drought and famine were common. Roberts hypothesizes that a combination of factors contributed to the Anasazi retreat, including the rise of a new religion-an early version of the Pueblo Indians’ kachina beliefs. Scholar David Roberts has written in National Geographic magazine that the Anasazi abandoned every site northwest of a diagonal line drawn between Flagstaff, Arizona, and Pagosa Springs, Colorado. The Anasazi were so sophisticated that they developed permanent settlements, including the Pueblo villages built in cliffs throughout Arizona and Colorado, learned how to cultivate a variety of crops and mined minerals such as salt.Ībout 800 years ago, however, the Anasazi mysteriously departed from their northernmost villages, including those in Nevada. Naturally one of those mysteries was what ever happened to the Anasazi - among the earliest inhabitants in Nevada - who just seemed to disappear from the southeastern part of the state about 800 years ago.Īt the peak of their civilization, which is thought to have been 1,500 to 2,000 years ago, thousands of Anasazi - although no one is quite sure what they actually called themselves-lived along the banks of the Virgin and Muddy rivers in Southern Nevada. A couple of years ago when I was working on a book entitled, “Mysteries and Legends of Nevada,” I compiled a list of some of the most enduring and unexplained stories about the Silver State.
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