Hisatsinom

The Hisatsinom, Hopi for ancient people, is the Pueblo name for the Ancestral Puebloans, centered on the Colorado Plateau's Four Corners country. Their tradition took shape around the twelfth century BCE; from about 700 to 1130 rainfall supported a tenfold population rise.

In Chaco Canyon they raised fifteen great houses of dressed sandstone, some with 700 rooms; Mesa Verde preserves cliff dwellings under canyon overhangs. Maize, beans and squash watered by check dams fed towns joined by hundreds of miles of roads.

A fifty-year drought from 1130 emptied Chaco Canyon, and twelfth- and thirteenth-century droughts and pressure from incoming groups drove villagers out of the Four Corners. By the fourteenth century the great houses and cliff dwellings stood abandoned; the people migrated into Rio Grande and Arizona Pueblo villages, among them the Hopi, who remember the builders as the Hisatsinom.