Existing comment:
Trails To and...
When Tuzigoot reached its peak around 1300, perhaps 6,000 to 8,000 people lived in a complex network of villages with associated farming areas.
Around them, the region had become a very populated place and other farming groups were on the move. Compared to many places, the Verde Valley was a pocket of abundance with reliable water sources.
To continue to flourish, people likely had to accept and integrate immigrants, cope with population growth, and deal with their neighbors (both within and outside the valley). Their options: share and economize; accommodate, isolate, or fight; or relocate.
... From Tuzigoot
By the late 1300s, disease, conflict, disrupted trade networks, depleted soils, and changing, unpredictable weather patterns all could have contributed to decisions to leave.
Hopi say Tuzigoot and the numerous other villages in the Verde Valley were built and occupied by clans migrating in waves from Palatkwapi (The Red Land to the South). The villages here were springboards to their settlement further north, ultimately at villages on the Hopi Mesas. In their view, Tuzigoot was simply one stop in a larger journey, and not the final destination for these people. |