Modern Life, Ancient Ruins Coexist in Southwest

SECOND MESA, Ariz. (AP) — A road trip to the Four Corners region of the Southwest offers a window into Native American culture, from ruins older than any other man-made structure in the U.S., to glimpses of contemporary life amid the Navajo and Hopi. Named for the spot where the borders of four states — Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Arizona — intersect, the Four Corners region is also home to surreal landscapes like the Painted Desert and Monument Valley.

Here are few highlights.

HOPI MESAS
Some native American sites are best visited with a guide. Our guide to the Hopi reservation, Gary Tso, met us at the Hopi Cultural Center, a museum, hotel and restaurant where the lunch crowd was split between locals and tourists. About 13,000 Hopi live on the reservation in Arizona, entirely surrounded by the Navajo Nation. Tso took us to villages including Old Oraibi, which dates to 1150 and claims to be the oldest continuously inhabited community in the United States. Some stone houses there are centuries old, a living link to native American ruins elsewhere in the region. Tso rattled off a graduate seminar's worth of information about the Hopi as he drove, explaining that he is Hopi even though his father is Navajo because the Hopi are matrilineal. We met craftspeople making silver jewelry and kachinas, the wooden figures that represent spirit beings; we bought souvenirs but took no photos because the Hopi do not allow photography in the villages. Nor did we pocket any of weathered pottery fragments that littered the ground.


CHACO CANYON
Chaco Canyon in northwestern New Mexico is the center of a culture that flourished from the 800s to the 1100s. It is run by the National Park Service and is accessible only via dirt road. Our guide there was Larry Baker, executive director of the nearby Salmon Ruins museum, who showed us the partially excavated ruins of Pueblo Bonito, Chetro Ketl and Casa Rinconada, with its Great Kiva (a room or chamber) 63 feet across. The people who built Chaco are sometimes called the Anasazi but the preferred term is now Ancestral Puebloan because Anasazi means "ancient enemy" in Navajo. We admired the intricate masonry that has lasted a thousand years and puzzled over how a people without written language, metal tools or the wheel could have built such monumental structures.


MESA VERDE
There were more mysteries at Mesa Verde National Park in southwestern Colorado, where Ancestral Puebloans built vast cliff dwellings starting about 1200 AD and then abandoned them 100 years later — because of drought? Invaders? Park Service tours are the only way to see most of the cliff dwellings up close, but Spruce Tree House, where visitors can descend a ladder into the circular kiva, does not require a ranger-guided tour. The tour to Balcony House involves climbing three ladders and crawling through a 12-foot tunnel. The inhabitants managed the vertiginous climb carrying water, roof beams and corn for their storerooms. Some sites at Mesa Verde close for the season after Oct. 20.