The Bears Ears: A Human History of America's Most Endangered Wilderness

by David Roberts

From 1995 to 2004, a team under the leadership of University of Colorado archaeologist Catherine Cameron excavated an Anasazi site on the bench just above town on the north, only a few paces from the cemetery containing the graves of Bluff pioneers such as Jens Nielson and Platte Lyman. The dig morphed into a major discovery: not only did the site contain fifty to sixty rooms, four regular kivas, and a great kiva, but it proved to be a Chacoan great house, linked by the enigmatic Chacoan road system to the greatest Anasazi center of all, Chaco Canyon in western New Mexico, the hub of a virtual empire that flourished from AD 1000 to 1150. Among the more than 150 Chacoan outliers yet identified, the Bluff great house is one of the most northern and among the farthest from the center. During