page_title: Bears Ears National Monument
section_title: Pre-history and history
hierarchical_section_title: Bears Ears National Monument / Pre-history and history
caption_attribution_description: English: Aerial shot of the Valley of the Gods in Bears Ears National Monument
context_page_description: Bears Ears National Monument is a United States national monument located in San Juan County in southeastern Utah, established by President Barack Obama by presidential proclamation on December 28, 2016. The monument's original size was 1,351,849 acres, which was controversially reduced 85% by President Donald Trump on December 4, 2017. The monument protects the public land surrounding the Bears Ears—a pair of buttes—and the Indian Creek corridor rock climbing area. The Native American names for the buttes have the same meaning in each of the languages represented in the region. The names are listed in the presidential proclamation as "Hoon’Naqvut, Shash Jáa [sic], Kwiyagatu Nukavachi, Ansh An Lashokdiwe"—all four mean "Bears Ears".
  The area within the monument is largely undeveloped and contains a wide array of historic, cultural and natural resources. The monument is co-managed by the Bureau of Land Management and United States Forest Service, along with a coalition of five local Native American tribes; the Navajo Nation, Hopi, Ute Mountain Ute, Ute Indian Tribe of the Uintah and Ouray Reservation, and the Pueblo of Zuni, all of which have ancestral ties to the region.
context_section_description: There are over 100,000 archaeological sites protected within the monument. The buttes and surroundings have long been held as sacred or significant by a number of the region's Native American tribes. In their proposal to have Bears Ears designated as a national monument, the Bears Ears Intertribal Coalition (BEITC) described the 1.9 million acres on the southeastern Utah canyonlands Colorado Plateau as ancestral land. The Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance (SUWA) described the Bears Ears as "the most significant unprotected cultural landscape in the U.S."
  As early as 13,000 years ago, Clovis people, who are considered to be the ancestors of most of the indigenous cultures of the Americas, hunted in Cedar Mesa, most of which is now included in the Bears Ears National Monument. Their tools, including the "Clovis points", have been found there. One of the oldest known archaeological sites with Clovis tools in Utah is Lime Ridge Clovis Site.
  Following the Clovis people—at least 2,500 years ago—Ancestral Puebloans began to occupy the Bears Ears area. They left behind "baskets, pottery, and weapons". These are the ancestors of the Hopi and Zuni people who "moved from foraging to farming about 3,500 years ago". Archaeological sites of prehistoric American southwestern culture dating 3,000 to 2,000 ago, contained a large number of baskets used for storage of corn and for burial. The pre-Ancestral Puebloans culture became known as the Basketmaker culture. The next period the Pueblo I Period began about AD 500, followed by Pueblo II and III. The "complex cultural history" of these early farmers is visible in the remains of "single family dwellings, granaries, kivas, towers, and large villages and roads linking them together".
  Along Comb Ridge (Navajo: Tséyíkʼáán)—a one-mile wide and 80-mile long "dramatic geologic fold" with some of the best-preserved cliff dwellings—Ancestral Puebloans lived in the "alcoves and grew corn" from about AD 900 to 1350. They relied heavily on domesticated corn, beans, and squash and a domesticated breed of turkey (Meleagris gallopavo). In the Pueblo II period, they "construct[ed] reservoirs, checkdams, and farming terraces in an effort to capture and conserve water for agricultural use." By c. 1250 the San Juan home of the Ancient Puebloans was "one of the most populous parts of North America."
  Between the "mid-1200s and 1285" "nearly 30,000 people disappeared" from the San Juan region and resettled in the Rio Grande area of New Mexico and Arizona. They suddenly walked away from their home, leaving behind cooking pots and baskets. A 2015 article in Nature called it "one of the greatest vanishing acts documented in human history" in which the San Juan region "became almost instantly a ghost land." A "monster drought" destabilized the region in the 1200s, and Mesa Verde became overcrowded. When a second drought hit in the late 1200s, the mass exodus began.
  Archaeologists and the Hopi "trace Hopi ancestry to the Ancestral Pueblo people, whom the Hopi call Hisatsinom meaning "our ancestors". "The Hopi had always considered the land occupied by their ancestors to be theirs: bounded by the junction of the San Juan and Colorado rivers in the north, the Arizona-New Mexico state line in the east, the Mogollon and Zuni rim on the south and the San Francisco peaks to the west."
  The Zunis, who are descendants of both the Ancestral Pueblo and Mogollon inhabited the deserts of Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, and southern Colorado "for a very long time". They "started irrigated cultivation of corn" 3000 years ago. They have been in their "present location for up to 4,000 years".
  In the early 16th century Native American ancestral lands, now called Four Corners, was claimed by Spain as part of New Spain.
  In 1848 the land was purchased from Mexico as part of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. In the 1860s the Navajos were forced to leave their ancestral lands in what became known as the long walk to Fort Sumner. However, many Utah Navajos were able to stay in southern Utah by hiding in canyons. The history of these Navajo "di
caption: Valley of the Gods, an area outside the redefined monument boundaries of December 2017
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