Letter Re: Lessons from the Anasazi Societal Collapse

Dear James:
I recently stumbled across a book with surprising relevance to survivalists: David E. Stuart’s Anasazi America. Stuart is a professor of anthropology at the University of New Mexico, and Anasazi America is an overview of seventeen centuries of New Mexico prehistory, focusing on the Anasazi, builders of the Chacoan civilization, and their descendants, the Pueblo.

At their peak in the eleventh century, the Chaco Anasazi were an extremely successful society, larger than any European state of the time, having built extensive road and trade networks and huge “great houses” that were used as food distribution and ritual centres. But over a period of a few decades, they underwent what qualifies as TEOTWAWKI by anybody’s standards; increasing disparity between the ruling class and the poor, several years drought leading to famine, failure of the ruling elites to recognize and respond to the exigencies of their situation, and a multigenerational collapse which saw a rise in warfare and a sharp decline in population. Although the book was published in 2000, Stuart attempts to draw parallels between the situation of the Chaco Anasazi and what he perceives as disturbingly analogous trends in American society at the time.

While most SurvivalBlog readers won’t find much of interest in the first five chapters unless they’re amateur archaeologists, and many of them might not agree with Stuart’s prescriptions for modern-day America, I suspect that they might find the remainder of the book of interest; it’s an interesting study of collapse, and one that supports a lot of current survivalist thinking; while the ruling Chaco Anasazi elites attempted to deal with the crisis by repeating old formulas that no longer worked, the smart Anasazi bugged out to the hinterboonies early and took up more self-sufficient lifestyles as opposed to staying dependent on the centralized food storage and distribution system, followed later by a Golden Horde of sorts. Several generations of warfare and population decline ensued. Unlike many other pre-contact societies in the Americas that underwent collapses, however, the Chaco Anasazi eventually managed to rebuild a more stable and successful society.

It’s not your average survivalist read, and rather academic, but it’s still worth a read for its big-picture perspective on a well-studied case of a complex society collapsing.

Best Regards, – E.D.R. (A moderately-well prepared Canadian)