After the United States Army took the region of New Mexico from the Republic of Mexico in the War of 1847, the citizens of New York, Boston, and Washington, D.C. read in the illustrated weeklies of the remarkable ruins at Mesa Verde and Chaco Canyon (see figs. 1, 2). The public imagination peopled these exotic buildings with conveniently vanished civilizations: the lost tribes of Israel, Phoenicians, and—a little more realistically—the “Chichimec” peoples who left their homes in the north and …