Ancient Indian Site Found in Colorado

Two college students have stumbled upon the virtually untouched ruins of a 1,100-year-old Anasazi Indian village in southwestern Colorado.

The six-acre Mountain Sheep Village, the name given the site, probably had about 200 structures and may have housed 150 to 200 Indians as early as AD 850, said Kristie Arrington, an archeologist for the Bureau of Land Management, the agency that controls the discovery site.

The discovery is significant because the site is on the north side of the Dolores River, which wraps around it on three sides. Previously, Anasazi ruins have been found only south of the river.

The Anasazi, or “Ancient Ones,” lived in the Four Corners area. Their best-known ruins are the cliff dwellings in Mesa Verde National Park in southwestern Colorado. The site discovered earlier this month by the University of Colorado students is about 60 miles northwest of Mesa Verde, not far from the Utah border.

Pottery fragments recovered at the site date it about 300 years before the height of Mesa Verde cliff dwellings.

Arrington said the people of Mountain Sheep Village may have traded big game and timber with other villages in exchange for food and pottery. She said tools associated with game procurement and processing, such as arrowheads, scrapers and knives, have been found on the ground.

Students Dave Merritt and Chris Kuzawa, working out of the Dolores Canyon Research Center on a federal archeology project, discovered the site. The project involves tracking desert bighorn sheep and river otters, conducting an inventory of water invertebrates in the river and probing historic mining sites.

The two were tracking bighorn sheep with another student, Patricia Dahnke, when they discovered the ruins.