Footprints

Footprints. Lowry Pueblo National Historic Landmark. , The Great Sage Plain, extending from southwest Colorado into southeast Utah, is covered with ancient villages, and was the most densely settled region of the Ancestral Puebloan world between AD 500 and 1300. More than just islands of architecture, these ancient places existed as single-family farms and field houses, check dams, reservoirs, great kivas, cliff dwellings, shrines, sacred springs, ancient roads, villages, clay sources, kilns, stone quarries, hunting stations, agricultural fields, rock paintings and petroglyphs, and towers. Many of these places appear today as subtle mounds of rubble, but have great value to Native Americans, scientists, and the public. In June 2000, 164,000 acres of public land in the Great Sage Plain was designated as Canyons of the Ancients National Monument. , Twenty-four native tribes claim cultural affiliation with Canyons of the Ancients National Monument. Along with generations of farming and ranching families, they continue to have traditional and modern relationships with this landscape. , I think Pueblo people all had the same idea, the same way of doing things. They all grind their own corn. They plant much the same way and their lifestyle is also the same, including caring for children and the elders, passing on their values. , , Esther Martinez, San Juan Pueblo , Hopi people consider [these places] to be the footprints or kiikiqo of our ancestors. We do not consider our ancestral sites to be abandoned. After centuries of migrations, our ancestors, Hisatsinom, People of Long Ago, left their ancient villages to complete their migrations by arriving at Tuuwanasavi, the Center of the Universe, in fulfillment of a covenant with Ma'saw, the Earth Guardian. , Wayne Taylor, Jr., Hopi Tribe Chairman, in a letter to Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton, July 24, 2002