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Show 60 V. KEYAH SANI eastern Colorado to Promontory, Utah, near the Great Salt Lake. Athabascans, these scholars argue, seem to have favored mountain sites. Because of that, the mountain trails would have caused few problems for the People, who might even have preferred them to the Plains routes. Also, the People would not have needed to stay on the Plains to hunt buffalo. As late as the beginning of the last century, buffalo roamed across Colorado and into northern Utah. An early arrival of the People could answer other puzzles, too. As more than one scientist has pointed out, the complex Navajo religion could only have come about through long contact between the People and the Pueblos. If the People did not arrive until a.d. 1525, there would not have been enough time for such a complex religion to develop. Also, during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the Anasazi peoples of the Southwest built dwellings that came to look more and more like forts. Then, about A.D. 1300, the Anasazi left these homes. Pressure from Athabascan neighbors might help to explain these things. But most scholars have not accepted this intermountain route. They point out that there were many reasons why the Anasazi moved out of the Four Corners area. Of those, the scholars argue, pressure from a competing culture was perhaps the least important. Recently some scholars have suggested a third explanation. The Navajos, they say, could have reached the Southwest as early as a.d. 1000, traveling over a number of routes. George Hyde was the first to suggest this idea. He believed that a large group of migrating Athabascans split up somewhere in central Wyoming. Then, he stated, the Navajos traveled through the area near the Great Salt Lake. From there they crossed the Wasatch Mountains and went south through eastern Utah. The Jicarilla Apaches went around the eastern edge of the Uinta Mountains and then traveled across central Colorado into northern New Mexico. The Dismal River Apaches, ancestors of the Lipan Apaches, came down through the High Plains. Of the three explanations, Hyde's seems the most reasonable. There is support for it in both Navajo tradition and recent studies of the Fremont Culture of Utah and Colorado. Between a.d. 400 and a.d. 1300, changes began to appear in the Fremont Culture. Most important, some Fremont peoples began to make a new kind of pottery. It has been found throughout eastern Utah and southwestern Colorado, near regions through which the Navajos might have traveled. The new pottery was made with calcite and |