By Victor Greto
A thousand years is nothing.
On a planet that’s been spinning for more than four billion years, it’s the blink of an eye.
Only 14 of those blinks or so ago, the fall of a tree didn’t make a sound in the Pikes Peak region: no human being was there to hear it.
Probably.
Archaeology – the study of the past through artifacts and remains that are dated both reasonably and precariously – is notoriously unsure of the dates concerning the peopling of North America. Estimates range from about 14,000 years ago to as much as 50,000 years ago. But the consensus tends to be later, around 14,000-20,000 years ago.
You’d have hardly recognized the place.
When human beings wandered across the Bering Strait land bridge near Alaska from Siberia for the first time during the ice age, North America was filled with large animals.
The continent teemed with woolly mammoths, mastodons, saber-toothed tigers, lions, camels, bighorn bison, wolves, bears, beavers, sloths, oxen, and pig-like animals called peccaries.
Archaeologists have been busy in the last 70 years finding remains of people who once lived and died in North America.
The most ancient undisputed human remains found in the Americas are in Alaska and have been dated to about 14,000 years ago. Archaeologists have also found remains at sites on the Canadian border and in Mexico from just after that time.
Those sites are called Clovis sites, after the town in New Mexico where many of the same sorts of remains – large stone spear points – were found.
These first Americans were hunters. Because many of the animals didn’t know enough to be afraid of people, they paid a heavy price. Many of them became extinct nearly a thousand years after the arrival of these hunters, that is, around 13,000 years ago.
People spread rapidly throughout North America shortly afterwards.
With the passing of the ice age and starting about 8,000 years ago, these early Americans began using different sorts of materials than stone for a wider variety of tools: wood, plant fiber and bone to make spears, axes, knives, chisels and fish hooks.
Historians call this time the Archaic period.
Among many other innovations, Americans began to use new hunting techniques, including stampeding herds over cliffs, or, later, into corrals.
Archaic or foraging Indians also were the first Americans to build boats and domesticate the dog.
As we make our way to 1,000 years ago, we’re in another period of North American civilization called the Formative or Classic Indian period, a “golden” age where such peoples as the Mayans, Aztecs, Anasazi and Mound Builders thrived.
This is also the period of the beginnings of agriculture, an innovation first practiced in Mesoamerica (Latin America) where corn, squash and beans were first cultivated, and the eastern part of what’s now the U.S., where may grass, barley, knotweed and squash were grown.
Agriculture spread slowly to surrounding cultures either through trade or war.
Still, there were many early American cultures that either didn’t adopt agriculture at all, or only partially.
Three distinct cultures that thrived a millennia ago probably influenced the Pikes Peak region: the Anasazi, Mogollon and Hohokam cultures. Spread throughout the southwest, these farming peoples lived in parts of what are now Utah, Arizona, New Mexico and southwest Colorado.
The Pikes Peak region itself seems to have straddled numerous settled cultures, but was evidently not at the center of a civilization.
However, archaeological evidence reveals the semi-nomadic presence of a people who lived and walked through this area about a millennia ago. They were named by a 1930s archaeologist who found their distinctive remains on a tributary of the Arkansas river called the Apishipa.
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Pikes Peak was there, too. In fact, if you weren’t careful and your gaze started at the top of the Peak and followed the ridge of the mountains, you probably wouldn’t at first know the difference between 1999 and 999 – except for the missing towers on Cheyenne Mountain.
But look down a little bit.
Trees: cottonwoods mainly, but also willows and fruit-bearing bushes along the creeks and tributaries.
If you’ve ever seen pictures of 1870s Colorado Springs, you may have wrinkled your nose at the nothingness of the plains.
It wasn’t that way even a century or more before those pictures were taken.
By the time the Springs was founded in 1871, most of the trees had been hacked down by early European settlers, trees that had once stretched along numerous watercourses and drainages throughout the area.
But it wasn’t just that. Europeans also introduced a new form of erosion via an animal that became indicative of the “old west,” but which also destroyed many of the blackberry and raspberry bushes, sage, blue grama grass and wildflowers that had dotted the prairie: cattle.
But all that will happen about eight centuries later.
A millennia ago, your breath would have been taken away by the overwhelming scent of pine, sage and juniper.
If you looked away from the mountains, you’d probably notice intermittent oases of cottonwoods and willows.
But don’t think tumbleweeds. That’s a Russian thistle that came to the Americas only in the 19th century.
But there were probably more oases because the water table was higher, and the trees would have had a more steady water supply to tap into through porous, sedimentary rock.
Aside from eroding the landscape with cattle and chopping down trees for shelter, we have drilled, tapped and dammed sources of water throughout the region in the last two centuries.
The “old west” of the movies really isn’t that old.
Journals from the early 19th century also describe a thriving animal population, including elk, bears, mule deer, large prairie dogs, small herds of bison, rabbits, wolves and foxes.
According to eyewitnesses from more than 130 years ago, black-tailed deer traveled through the region in herds that ranged from five to 20. Settlers in 1861 observed a herd of elk 300-strong.
A millennia ago, however, you wouldn’t find another animal also associated with the old west: horses. They were introduced to the continent with the Spanish more than 500 years later.
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The Apishipa who roamed the Pikes Peak region from about 1,300-600 years ago probably contributed to the gene pool of several present-day American Indian tribes.
But archaeology cannot tell us this as yet.
The Apishipa are as silent as their remains.
Like many ancient peoples, they were illiterate, and left no stories that could have helped tell us how they understood the world.
Nor were the Apishipa the only tribe to travel through the area a millennia or so ago. Archaeologists have simply found more evidence for their presence than any other people.
From evidence that includes fragments of bones, sandals, cloth and stone tools, we know something of how they lived, what they ate and what they looked like.
They had both high cheek bones and narrow faces. The average male reached the height of 5 feet 7 inches; the average female stood about 5 feet 2 inches.
If short, they were gracile and healthy. There is little evidence of malnutrition.
And they were in shape. In a west without horses, they walked a lot, and their legs were muscular.
They carried a lot of weapons and tools with them, but they also had domesticated dogs, probably about the size of small German shepherds, to help. They used the dogs to carry travoises or crude sleds, which were made of a woven mat that was dragged along the ground while attached to two poles that were pulled by the dogs.
The Apishipa used the bow and arrow, and spears and knives made of stone. The used the atlatl, a spear thrower made of a wooden stick about two feet long, with loops made of animal hide for a better grasp, a stone weight for balance, and a wooden hook toward the tip to hold the spear. They probably used these tools for both hunting and war.
The Apishipa may have been nomads, but that’s debatable because they built and lived in what may be at least semi-permanent, free-standing stone slab enclosures. Evidence for brush-covered structures of wood shaped like teepees but not covered with animal skins has also been found.
Petroglyphs or rock carvings have been found on rock faces close to the stone structures. This “rock art” may have been religious.
They used hides and fur for clothing, skinned from antelope, rabbits and badgers. They had no buttons or buckles; clothes were probably fashioned with lace.
Unlike the Anasazi, they did not bury their dead in the same area where they lived, that is, in the stone slab sites. Some remains have even been found in rock crevices.
This is not surprising. Many early Americans practiced other ways of disposing of their dead than burial, from cremation to “scaffold burials,” where the dead were laid to rest on an open-air scaffold. After the bodies decomposed, the bones were either collected or left to bleach in the sun.
Most of these Apishipa sites have been found in Fort Carson and Pinon Canyon.
Also unlike the more famous Anasazi, there’s little evidence that the Apishipa grew their own food.
Rather, it seems they were mainly effective gatherers, and ate wild vegetable products, including chenopods (wild grain), rice grass and pinon nuts. They also hunted small mammals, including rabbits and ground squirrels, as well as bigger game, such as antelope, mountain sheep and buffalo.
But they did eat some agricultural products, such as corn and squash. Still, the tools they left behind don’t include things such as bone digging sticks used by early American farmers. This may mean they traded for these foods with other peoples.
There wasn’t just a few of them around the Pikes Peak region, either.
While you were perhaps admiring the different scenery of a millennia ago, you may be surprised at the number of people in the area.
North America was a thriving continent long before Europeans encountered it, and the Pikes Peak region may have been no exception.
The Apishipa probably gathered themselves in tribes. Tribes are typically made up of a few hundred people, and live in either a village or a close-knit cluster of villages. Each tribe is made up of a few separate clans or kinship groups.
If Apishipa tribes were anything like other tribes at the same stage of development in different parts of the world, they probably lived in an egalitarian social system, which means that everyone was more or less equal.
No member of a tribe could probably gather excess wealth because each had a network of obligations toward everyone else in the tribe.
No bureaucracy. No police force. No taxes.
Nor did anyone probably specialize in any one thing, such as basket weaving or making tools and weapons. Most likely, every adult participated in gathering the food, and each family or clan made its own baskets, clothes and tools.
Archaeological remains of the Apishipa disappear about 600 years ago, perhaps due to an extended drought in the Pikes Peak region.
But the Europeans who came a century later would have eventually decimated their population just as effectively, and not through the use of their superior weaponry.
Through disease.
Why? Through accidents of both geography and nature.
Even though North Americans had domesticated the dog, they couldn’t domesticate other animals that were not native to the area – unlike the ancestors of the Europeans that began to inundate the Americas in the 16th century.
Europeans had lived for thousands of years with many diseases propagated from domesticated cattle, sheep, goats and pigs. Among other blights, these animals contributed measles, tuberculosis, smallpox, influenza and whooping cough to European life.
Thousands of years of exposure to epidemics caused by these animals helped immunize many Europeans. When they encountered America, they brought those germs to a native population that had no immunity.
The Apishipa probably would have met the fate of other early Americans if they had survived in the Pikes Peak region a century or more after they actually disappeared from the archaeological record.
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Sources: “Atlas of the North American Indian,” by Carl Waldman; “Creating Colorado: The Making of a Western American Landscape,” by William Wyckoff; “Guns, Germs, and Steel,” by Jared Diamond; Gazette files.
Archaeologists consulted: Steve Chomko, Fort Carson; Bill Arbogast, University of Colorado at Colorado Springs (UCCS); Minette Church, UCCS; Michael Nowak, Colorado College.