Prehistoric Anasazi Ruins at Home in...

Views from Nancy Reynolds’ log house high above this Four Corners town resemble scenes from a classic Western film.

The deck offers a panorama of Shiprock, N.M., more than 40 miles away, Sleeping Ute Mountain, Mesa Verde National Park and the La Plata and San Juan Mountains.

“There’s different weather on each side,” Reynolds said, adding that the “sunsets, double rainbows and crackling lightning make this the best show in town.”

But it’s the back yard that makes her Indian Camp home unique. It has its own Anasazi ruin, left by the prehistoric people who lived here for more than 1,000 years, mysteriously disappearing about the year 1300.

Anyone who buys one of the 31 sites among the junipers, pinons and sage at Indian Camp, six miles east of Mesa Verde, must agree to preserve the pueblos and semi-subterranean ceremonial kivas of those the Navajos call the “Ancient Ones.”

They may only be excavated under the supervision of a certified archeologist, excavations must be covered and artifacts cannot be sold. Upon the owner’s death, they must be given to a museum.

Archie and Mary Hanson of Templeton, Calif., whose family has developed the exclusive Rolling Hills, Hidden Hills and Hidden Valley subdivisions of Southern California, decided to buy land here after taking an archeological tour.

Once they had acquired more than 800 acres they decided to build Indian Camp.

“We fell in love with the Southwest many, many years ago and then we went on this trip to Crow Canyon and thought it would it be great fun to live in the area. And then it grew sort of topsy-turvy. We had no choice but to develop along archeological lines because there they were,” said Archie Hanson.

“This isn’t massive intelligence. We just fell into this. We’re trying to have our cake and eat it too.”

Four more housing starts are expected next year. Seventeen sites have been sold.

The sites, all at least 35 acres, are selling for between $151,000 and $200,000, with utility connections provided but homes to be built by owners. Covenants bar trailers or modular homes, and archeologists approve building sites for homes.

“For my husband, money is only spent to do something well,” said Mary Hanson. Only one home and one guest home are allowed per site.

Reynolds is the first Indian Camp resident to build a house. She had it blessed by a Navajo chanter before moving in last August.

“I think it’s fantastic. It’s unique. Archie’s got the foresight to see that the people who are going to buy their lots are into preservation and love the rules,” she said.

Reynolds says she expects most of those who buy into Indian Camp will be amateur archeologists like her who studied at neighboring Crow Canyon Archaeological Center. Thousands of students, many of them retired people, have paid the privately run research center to take part in archeological digs.

More than 200 sites have been found at Indian Camp, the highest recorded site density in Colorado, said Archie Hanson. More than 10,000 artifacts have been recovered from the pueblo the Hansons have excavated on their own site.

Home sites are marked by metal statues of Kokopelli, the legendary humpbacked, flute-playing magician and medicine man who supposedly traveled the Southwest seducing women and bringing fertility to the land and its people.

*

So far the project hasn’t drawn any public opposition, although William Doelle of Desert Archaeology Inc. of Tucson, Ariz., says that in most areas local or state laws would preclude this kind of development.

Sandy Thompson of the Crow Canyon Center said that “given the alternative”--the likely ransacking of the sites if the area is developed piecemeal--Indian Camp is a good idea. There are thousands of sites in Montezuma County, where Mesa Verde is located, and some landowners have sold archeological rights to pothunters who peddle their finds.

Judy Knight-Frank, chairman of the Ute Mountain Ute tribe, isn’t so sure. “If anybody disturbed my bones I’d haunt them,” she said.

Mary Hanson said any bones uncovered are reinterred immediately at the site.

“The only bones we encounter are found in kivas,” Archie Hanson said. “We avoid burial grounds like the plague.”