The Old Ones

I wonder why these cliffs and homes
of ancestral pueblo farmers
who grew maize, beans and corn
who knew the native plants
who hunted deer and birds
who hunted native mammals
and made clothing from animal skins
and traded for cotton
who wove blankets from yucca fibers
who lived here for more than 400 years
who lived in small settlements of one or two families
who scattered through these mountains
who sometime between 1150 and 1325
began coming together in larger groups
who built villages we call pueblos
with as many as forty rooms
who increased during the next two centuries
and built larger structures
who built kivas to worship their gods
who disappeared and moved on by the middle of the 1500s

I wonder why when men from the Cochiti Pueblo
guided a self taught anthropologist
to their ancestral home in Frijoles Canyon
on the slopes of the Jemez mountains
and showed the man the sheer cliffs,
the year round stream, the talus slopes
I wonder why this land
took on the name of the man—Bandelier?

We spent the day exploring the ancestral pueblo landscape.