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Outstanding Features The ancient people of the Bandelier area, like Puebloan ancestors elsewhere, were farmers, who grew maize (corn), beans, and squash. They supplemented their diets with native plants and by hunting and trapping deer, rabbits, squirrels, other mammals, and birds. They made clothing from animal skins and traded for cotton, which they wove into garments. They ingeniously made winter blankets from fibers of the yucca plant interwoven with turkey feathers or strips of rabbit skin. Tools, including a wide variety of axes, mauls, and knives, were fashioned from animal bones, wood, and such local stone as obsidian and basalt.   The
people obtained other items, such as shell, turquoise, and parrots,
through trade networks that ranged as far as central Mexico and
Baja California. The Puebloan ancestors occupied the Bandelier area
for nearly 500 years. With less than half the monument surveyed,
more than 2,400 sites have been located, but not all sites were
inhabited at the same time. For generations the people lived in
small, scattered settlements, each consisting of perhaps only one
or two families. Then from about A.D. 1150 to 1325, sometimes called
the Rio Grande Coalition Period, the population increased. People
began coming together in larger groups and, by the end of the period,
villages (pueblos) often included as many as 40 rooms.
The following two and a half centuries, called the Rio Grande Classic Period, were characterized by fewer and larger pueblos, some exceeding 600 rooms, and by the prevalence of very small structures that archeologists call field houses and believe show seasonal dispersal to agricultural fields. Ceremonial rooms called "kivas" were up to three times larger in classic times and may reflect a changing role in ritual or social life. The pueblo of Tyuonyi and its adjacent cave dwellings in Bandelier are examples from the Rio Grande Classic Period, which ended in the late 1500s when the Spanish colonized New Mexico, bringing immense change to the American Southwest.
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