Tribal Park Whispers of Ancient Ones

A nondescript, little-traveled dirt road winds past oak brush and juniper deep into canyon lands dotted by mounds of rubble and sunken depressions.

Vehicles move slowly past crude storage rooms and dwellings built into cliffs. White pieces of pottery shards bearing black painted designs are scattered across the mesa, seeming to outnumber rocks.

While neighboring Mesa Verde National Park has noisy tourists, uniformed rangers and snack bars, the Ute Mountain Tribal Park takes on a ghostly feel among the remnants of a city mostly untouched since the Anasazi left 800 years ago.

The tribe operates tours, offering up to 50 people per day a glimpse of the sites, which hold clues to the mysterious Indian tribe, said Selwyn Whiteskunk, vice chairman and tribe resource manager.

Like the archeological treasures displayed at neighboring Mesa Verde, the tribal park’s sites were spared during July and August wildfires that charred about 28,000 federal and private acres.

For the first time, the Utes plan to survey those sites in 6,000 acres just south and west of Mesa Verde, using federal money set aside to help rehabilitate areas burned by the fires.

The 125,000-acre Ute Mountain Tribal Park, adjacent to the national park’s southwest border, is about 2 1/2 times the size of Mesa Verde, with a similar number of archeological sites per square mile, archeologists say.

“To us it’s thrilling to think in the next two to three years of what we might discover,” said Doug Bowman, who recently retired as the park’s archeologist but returned to work after the fire. “You literally can’t put a shovel in the ground without hitting an archeological site.”

Bowman estimates the park has about 200 houses; kivas, or ceremonial rooms; ancient landfills; and other items per square mile, a density similar to Mesa Verde, the nation’s largest archeological preserve.

“Their civilization did not stop at the park’s boundary,” Bowman said. “They didn’t have fences back then.”

Thousands of Anasazi, ancestral Pueblo Indians, mysteriously abandoned Mesa Verde and the surrounding mesas and canyons about 1300, probably during a prolonged drought, leaving behind impressive structures and remnants of a sophisticated culture.

From the ruins, archeologists have surmised the Puebloans were farmers who planted corn and squash and raised turkeys. And they were engineers who built stone apartment houses with little mortar and a network of aqueducts.

Some sites in what is now Mesa Verde National Park were on reservation land when discovered by cowboys nearly a century ago.

Five years after the park was created in 1906, park boundaries were redefined so 14,000 acres of former Ute land could become part of the national park’s 52,000 acres.

The Weeminuche Ute band, which later became the Ute Mountain Ute tribe, knew of more sites south of the park but kept them secret.

Some remote sites on the reservation still contain intact pots, although their exact locations have not been revealed publicly.

A small cliff dwelling near the Mancos River known as Sandal House is an example why.

Carved into the dwelling’s original red clay plastered walls are dates--1917, 1954--and proclamations of discovery by Anglo hikers.

It bears the scar of an early plunderer breaking out a wall to retrieve what tribal members believe was a large intact water vessel.

“We really don’t want to expose sites on our land too much because we could lose them,” Whiteskunk said.

Nearly two dozen tribes in New Mexico and Arizona claim affiliation with the people who lived in the area. Former Ute Chief Jack House separated the archeological sites from the reservation in 1961 and began operating the land as a park.

Tribe members who lived in the mesas and canyons in the park before being placed on a reservation in 1934 kept away from the sites out of fear and superstition similar to those surrounding graveyards in white culture, Whiteskunk said.

“The spirits live there,” Whiteskunk said.

Now the tribe stays away out of respect, he said. The tribe sees itself as a caretaker of a cultural site and resists any attempts at excavation.

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On the Net, Ute Mountain Tribal Park: https://www.utemountainute.com/tribalpark.htm