Two University of Colorado students who were tracking bighorn sheep in southwest Colorado stumbled upon the virtually untouched ruins of a lost Indian village more than 1,100 years old.
The six-acre Mountain Sheep Village, as the site is being called, probably had about 200 structures and may have housed 150 to 200 Anasazi Indians as early as the year 850 A.D., said Kristie Arrington, an archaeologist for the Bureau of Land Management.The newly discovered site is about 60 miles northwest of Mesa Verde, not far from the Utah border.
The students, Dave Merritt and Chris Kuzawa, struggled over the rim of a cliff and found mounds and vertical slabs of sandstone sticking out of the ground at the site by a forest of ponderosa pine.
"We were just hiking around and we found it," said Merritt.The slabs are the foundations of structures made of poles, brush and adobe.
"It was pretty spectacular," Kuzawa said. "Once we realized what it was, we started to look around. We stayed until dusk. We knew we were on to something pretty big."
The discovery is significant because the site is on the north side of the Dolores River, which wraps around it on three sides. Previously, Anasazi ruins have been found only south of the river.
The Anasazi, or "Ancient Ones," lived in the Four Corners area. Their best-known ruins are the cliff dwellings in Mesa Verde National Park in southwestern Colorado. Several sites are found in Utah, particularly in southeastern Utah.
Pottery fragments discovered by the students date the site about 300 years before the height of Mesa Verde cliff dwellings.
Arrington said the people of Mountain Sheep Village may have traded big game and timber with other villages in exchange for food and pottery. She said tools associated with game procurement and processing, such as arrowheads, scrapers and knives, have been found on the ground.
"Local people hunting may have been through there and one area shows evidence that it had been `potted' a little bit," said Arrington. "But it's fairly unusual that it hadn't been recorded and documented before now."
Potting is a term used to describe the illegal digging for Indian pots.
Merritt and Kuzawa were working out of the Dolores Canyon Research Center on a federal archaeology project this summer. The project involves tracking desert bighorn sheep and river otters.
"It needs mapping . . . We would like to get an idea of what was going on there day by day," Arrington said. No massive excavation is planned.