REGIONAL REPORT : A Centuries Old Village Sets Off Familiar Dispute : Clay pot sherds lead to the discovery of an unmapped Anasazi site in Colorado. It has 200 rooms and remains unexplored.

Christopher Kuzawa, a Colorado University undergraduate student on a $750 summer research grant, thought he had stumbled onto something special last July when he found a handful of gray clay pot sherds that had washed down from a 600-foot cliff to the banks of the Dolores River.

Two days later, when he finally found a scrambling route up the rocky cliff face to a hidden five-acre shelf, Kuzawa encountered a find he could not have imagined--a previously unmapped and unstudied Anasazi village that dates back to at least AD 850.

Now, almost four months later, the village, which may contain as many as 200 rooms, is still unexplored. It remains as it has for 12 centuries, protected only by its remoteness and the secrecy surrounding its location.

The village has also spurred a familiar controversy over access among scientists, bureaucrats, local farmers and deer hunters in the Four Corners region, where Arizona, Utah, Colorado and New Mexico meet. It is one of the richest archeological fields in the United States.

The region was once the homeland of the Anasazi, a people thought to be America’s first farmers and villagers. From AD 1 to the beginning of the 14th Century, Anasazi farmers, hunters and traders ruled the Southwest, leaving behind scores of thousands of cliff dwellings and canyon ruins.

Today, an estimated 500 professional archeologists are at work throughout the region, studying and trying to protect Anasazis sites, some of which are in public lands--like the village Chris Kuzawa found--and many of which are on private property, like the rangelands and pinto-bean fields around Dove Creek.

The site located last July was not marked on any maps, although the Dolores River Canyon had been studied intensely over the years by archeologists. After news of the find was released, a few local residents claimed to have known about the site for years.

“There are lots of sites around that us locals don’t talk about,” said a Dove Creek native who has roamed the canyons and scrublands for years hunting both deer and mineral specimens. “If the (federal Bureau of Land Management) and the ‘arkies’ (amateur and professional archeologists) find out about a ruin, we’re shut out. Those are supposed to be public lands but I guess they don’t regard us as part of the public.”

Kristie Arrington, a BLM archeologist, said the village appears to have remained virtually undisturbed because the pottery in the middens (trash piles) and room ruins are so old and unsophisticated that it was unattractive to pot hunters, the looters who prowl Anasazi sites in search of artifacts that are sold to collectors around the world.

Arrington said the value of the site lies not in its artifacts but in what it suggests about heretofore poorly understood aspects of the Anasazi lifestyle. She believes the village is unusual, perhaps extraordinary, because it lies at the northern fringe of Anasazi influence, in a spot that is remarkably distant from the corn and bean fields that usually support such sites.

Sarah Schlanger and Signa Larralde, archeologists with the Museum of New Mexico in Santa Fe, agree. They are seeking grants to study the possibility that the site was used by Anasazi who were primarily hunters rather than farmers. Such a finding could upset a number of contemporary beliefs about Anasazi life.

“We tend to think of Anasazi villages as self-contained units supporting themselves by farming,” Schlanger said. “This place seems to break that pattern.”

Some archeologists doubt there is much significance in the new site. David Breternitz, a retired University of Colorado archeology professor who headed a seven-year study of the Dolores River Canyon before part of it was flooded by a Bureau of Reclamation dam, said the village is “interesting but probably not that big a find.”

Breternitz, who retired eight years ago in Dove Creek to be close to his favorite digs, acknowledged that his study team missed the village Kuzawa recently found. But the study did turn up other hunting camps and “special-use sites” that were similar, he said.

There is general agreement, though, that the new village should be studied and protected before it becomes a kind of back-country tourist attraction. That protection may be some time in coming, however. BLM archeologist Arrington said there may be as many as 100,000 unprotected Anasazi sites throughout the Southwest, with public interest and tourist pressure building all the time.

“At one of our local sites, 30 miles from pavement, we logged 600 annual visitors six years ago,” she said. “Now we’re logging 8,000 visitors a year.”

Until more money for staffing is found, she said, the best protection for the new village “may be to make sure the public doesn’t find out where it is.”