'It’s a fairly pristine desert landscape. When former Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt recommended national monument status for the area to President Clinton, he said, “this landscape offers us a chance to study an entire culture, one that may have been as rich and diverse as the one we have today.” He argued that archaeological sites should not just be protected individually, “but rather as part of a landscape or ‘anthropological ecosystem.’”'
He said, “The real science on these landscapes doesn’t come out of digging out a room and extracting a few pots. The real discoveries today come from asking the deeper question of ‘How did communities live in spiritual and physical equilibrium with the landscape?’”
...a question I often ask; a question relevant for the past, as well as for the present. Native Americans seem to have lived as part of the landscape, as part of the entire universe. They did not command control over the earth, rather they showed immense respect for the environment that supported them through their lives. The footprint left by prehistoric and modern Native American peoples is slight compared to that being created by non-natives of today. Compare the pueblo dwellings with the concrete and skyscrapers of modern American urban environs.
http://www.archaeologynews.org/Link.asp?ID=306241
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