The Ancient Ones

My wife was going out to a conference in Scottsdale last March, and asked if I wanted to come along. "Absolutely!", I said. She would be spending her week trapped in a hotel conference room - I would be spending my week wandering the desert with a camera, visiting Anasazi Sites I have yet to see. Anasazi is a Navajo word meaning "The Ancient Ones" and they lived in the Southwest United states around 700AD to 1300 AD. They built some amazing cities, Mesa Verde being perhaps the best known. And then they abandoned them. Many Anasazi ruins take the form of pueblos, which are multi room dwellings, constructed from stone and plastered over with clay. Many are multi storied. Some of the most impressive, like Mesa Verde and Canyon de Chelly, are dwellings built into openings in cliffs that may be 1000 feet high. These structures are very impressive, and I have spent the last 18 years visiting and photographing them in the four corners area. This is a smaller ruin which has been reconstructed, called Besh Be Gowah, outside Globe, Arizona. I was probably photographing the light more than the architecture.