BADGER HOUSE Community _Trail Guide_ _25¢ donation if you take book home._ BARNHART [Illustration: Badger House Community Trail] _TRAILHEAD_ _To Long House_ _Basketmaker Pithouses_ _Pueblo Village_ Mini-Train Pickup _Badger House_ Mini-Train Pickup _Two Raven House_ Mini-Train Pickup _To Kodak & Long House Overlooks_ (_Trail is accessible to the handicapped_) About Your Visit... Welcome to Badger House Community. This group of ruins covers nearly seven acres. Your walk through this area is a journey through 600 years of prehistory.... About The Past... Archeologists learn about past human behavior mostly through studying technology. As archeologists uncover settlements of different ages, as here on Wetherill Mesa, they can compare patterns in architecture, tools, and village layout and note how these changed through time. From these things, archeologists can infer how societies organized to carry out the tasks of life and how they reorganized when necessary to meet life’s challenges. In their interpretations of the past, archeologists do not always agree with one another. There is no reason why they should. The evidence is always incomplete and often difficult to understand.... [Illustration: {Pot}] About The People... Archeologists call the prehistoric Indians of the Mesa Verde “Anasazi.” Anasazi peoples once lived over a vast area of the northern Southwest, from the Four Corners to southern Nevada. The Anasazi were descended from nomadic hunting and gathering peoples who occupied the Southwest several thousand years before the time of Christ. Food plants, originally domesticated in Mexico, spread to the Southwest through trade. People were then able to produce food as well as collect it. Although the Anasazi raised crops of corn, beans, and squash, such foods probably made up only about half their diet. The people still relied on the hunting and gathering skills passed down from their ancestors. The Pueblo Indians of Arizona and New Mexico are the descendants of the Anasazi. Despite four centuries of contact—and sometimes conflict—with European culture, today’s Pueblos carry on much of the way of life the Anasazi developed over the centuries. The Anasazi heritage lives on. [Illustration: {Axe}] Living in the Ground: Modified Basketmaker Pithouse (AD 650) By the late 500s, the Anasazi had settled on various parts of the Mesa Verde. The people lived in pithouses clustered in villages. These also included groups of small above-ground storage rooms built of jacal (mud-plastered posts). • STOP #1