Discovery 68 with Commercials (1969)

This is an ABC color presentation. This is Mesaver National Park in southwestern Colorado. Years ago, it was the home of a remarkable tribe of Indians whose civilization flourished and then suddenly disappeared. We'll find out more about this strange mystery, and we'll meet a 1600-year-old mummy named Esther today when Discovery visits the Stone Age Americans. [music] >> [music] >> Discovery 68, the award-winning program for young people with Bill Owen and Virginia Gibson. >> Are your children using Dad's hi-fi again? >> No, Mom. Dad got the swing stir. Sounds terrific, doesn't it? >> You bet. It's Kenner's transistorized Swingster. The small phonograph with the big sound. Take it any place. Swingster plays albums and 45s. The lift guide sets the tone arm. [music] Swingster by Kenner. It's Kenner. IT'S [music] >> AMAZING. These are just a few of the designs that can be made with Spyroraph by Kenner. [music] Change wheels, change colors, make a million multicolored designs, each so beautiful your eyes won't believe what your hands have done. Spyroraph by Kenner. So much fun you'll never want to stop. Spyroraph, the world's most fascinating new toy. If you had been a Colorado cowboy hurting your cattle down there in Soda Canyon one snowy day in December 1888, you'd probably have thought you knew your territory pretty well. >> After all, you'd been following your herd through these canyons for years. Down there, your trails. Up here, the broad flat land the Spanish explorers had named the Mesa Verde, the green table. empty, but for the ravens and swifts that [music] loop and glide in the high, clear air of the mason. >> Then suddenly, [music] in a branch of the canyon you really didn't know too well, you looked up [music] and there, halfway up the face of the cliffs themselves, round towers, square towers, more than 100 box-like houses, and strange circles hollowed out under the ground. A silent city of adobe and stone. No human being to be seen. [music] >> Who are the people who had built it? Where had they gone and why? This is Cliff Palace, the largest cliff dwelling in the Mesa Verde. A few hundred feet below the mesa top and cut into the face of the cliff. The city's built in a cave measuring 325 [music] ft long and 60 ft high at the opening. The cave cuts back 90 ft into [music] the mesa and is packed side to side with houses, rooms, towers, and storage chambers. It's estimated that when Cliff Palace was inhabited, there were over 200 separate rooms rising in eight different levels. And within this maze of terrace adobe buildings, there lived a community [music] of almost 400 people. >> Two cowboys found Cliff Palace on December 18th, 1888. Right after that, they left their cattle and went off in search of other Indian ruins. And they found them. [music] Three major cliff dwellings were discovered by two lonely cowboys in the space of a day and a half. These were small Indian cities. But when had they last rung with the sound of humanity? >> Was it a year ago? Or had it been a thousand? And why were they here in the first place? Hidden away in caves? >> What must it have been like to live in a cliff dwelling between the Mesa Top and the canyon floor? In a cave [music] cut into the sheer vertical walls of the Mesaver. A cave which we now know as balcony house. Below, far below, is the floor of Soda Canyon. Scrub oak, scraggly pine, a few mule deer. Population zero. Above a thick sandstone layer supporting the soil of Mesa Verde. In here, tucked away, a village, a small Indian town which thrived in the 13th century. This is Balcony House. There were 33 houses in this cave. Some of them rising two or three stories to the roof of the cave. A handful of these block-like one room structures are still intact. Others are only broken jagged walls or faint outlines of definition against [music] the stone. Balcony house has two of the large circular ceremonial chambers the Hopi language calls [music] kas. Today they look something like open wells. But when the ancient [music] Indians lived here, the kas were roofed over and the roofs formed the plazas and courtyards of the village. Back here where the cave roof meets the floor, there's a spring which made the problem of living here much simpler. Not many cliff dwellings had their own supply of fresh cold water. Must have made all the difference in the world to the women of the village not to have to carry water up from the canyon floor. The archaeologists estimates of population vary. Some say 45, others as many as 65 persons made an urban home inside this cave in the years between 1200 and about 1276. How do we know the years were the 1200s? >> Well, Bill, experts can date ancient ruins in several ways. Among the most certain is the one which has been used very often at Mesa Verde, the examination of the rings of trees. These houses were made of stone, adobe, and wood. This pole is part of a tree. Underneath here, a plug about the size of a bottle cork has been drilled out. This is called a core sample. It carries a cross-section of the treere's growth rings from the time the tree first started to grow until it was cut down. It's a kind of fingerprint by which scientists can date the chopping down of the tree and with it the building of the house. The end result is accurate enough for us to know that this house was built in 1202, but that the house next door was not added until 1274. And Jenny, the Indians of the Mesa Verde had only the simplest of stone age tools, like this hammer stone and this stone axe. But their masonry was of a high order, and they cared about the appearance of their houses. Walls are straight, corners are nearly perfect. Even these openings, which served as both doorways and windows, were constructed with great care. The Mesa Verde Indians were such resourceful builders that they were able to make natural handicaps work to their advantage. For example, the boulder, like this one, was too large to move. They built a wall under it and then pecked away at the face of the stone until it was smooth and pleasing to the eye. And on its surface, they carved an ingenious flight of stairs. All of these structures, plus the study of the life of the American Indians today, [music] can tell us a great deal about what life was like in Balcony House in the days when it was alive when men and women raised their children here and taught them lessons to get them through a difficult world. >> Jenny, the decision to make a life here on the face of a cliff must have been a very difficult one, but one the Indians were forced to make. [music] We know the Indians of the Mesa Verity hadn't always lived this way. Before the year 1200, the Indians had been surface dwellers, farmers raising corn and beans and [music] squash, vegetables which could do well in the fertile but dry soil of the Mesa Verde. [music] The Indians had lived close to their farming plots. They had lived on the Mesa Verde itself, on the flat top of that green table. The Mesa Verde is a vast high plane cut through with [music] canyons like this one. First they lived on top and then they moved or were forced over the edges into [music] the very face of the cliffs themselves and after that they disappeared or moved again. [music] But how about the people themselves? Do we know very much about them? The answer is [music] yes, more than you might guess. We're going to meet a 1600year-old Indian maiden named [music] Esther. And we'll do that in just a minute. This is a creature from the lost world. A creature created by you. With Mattel's strange change machine, you turn time capsules into weird creatures. You control the compression chamber, which turns these creatures back into capsules. Be the creator of a lost world with Mattel's strange change machine. Look, something's different about Mattel's baby first step. Her dress is different now, and her hair is full of soft, soft [music] curls. But there's something more. Look at her smile. Baby First Step has that happy smile because she's the one who can walk and skate and come straight to you from Mattel. >> [music] [music] >> At the beginning of the 1st century [music] AD and through the middle of the fifth century, the Indians lived in primitive caves of the Mesaverity region. [music] For food, they hunted game animals, gathered edible wild plants, [music] and raised corn and squash on the fertile mea tops. It was while exploring one of these caves that archaeologists came upon [music] a most unusual and valuable scientific discovery. [music] The mummified body of a young Indian woman who lived in the Mesaver region about 1600 [music] years ago. She was a member of the group which archaeologists call the basket makers. She's a mummy [music] but a natural mummy, not a product of inbalming fluids and artificial wrappings like the mummies of Egypt. This [music] is Esther. Esther died at about the age of 20 and she was placed in a cave near Durango, Colorado. In the dry air of the cave, her body did not decay and so she came down to us a silent messenger from the dark past. Museum experts out of affection have named her Esther. She is really a stone age American girl, an illustrated wordless page from our country's early geography books. Early as she is, Esther still doesn't belong in the first [music] chapter. The story of the Stone Age American started at least 15,000 years [music] ago. When man first began to appear in North America, they had come from Asia, crossing to Alaska and then [music] moving south. They were hunters and nomads. They kept on the move in search of the animals they hunted. We don't know very much about them, [music] but we know they were here. And we know they're the ancestors of a lot of today's North American Indians. >> These are the basket makers, the people of [music] Esther's time. They were farming Indians who had no homes and lived in whatever caves the land provided. They were the first farmers of [music] this area. >> When they came to the Mesaver, they brought with them the corn and squash which they raised. Corn was their basic food. They didn't use pottery, but they made baskets which they used as all-purpose containers. They knew the dog and used his hair in weaving sashes and sandals and bags. >> There was no bow and arrow, but they did have a weapon called an atalle. It was a throwing stick which threw long dartlike arrows. >> They lived simple lives, but they experimented and worked out new ideas. They handed down many, many things to those who came after them, including their own immediate descendants, the modified [music] basket makers. >> It is now between 450 and 750 AD. The Indians have developed pottery and adobe for the plastering of their dwellings, and they have taken to the use of the pit house, the earliest surface dwellings found on the flat open areas of the Mesa Verity. And there is now the bow and arrow. >> Beans came into use and women learned how to thresh them and cook them. And as a result, protein came more and more into their diet. [music] >> They had the stone axe and the mall and other stone and bone tools. There were more people and there were stronger and healthier. By the end of this period, there were hundreds of pit house villages in the Mesa Verde and the surrounding area. [music] >> And it was this period that saw the development of the domesticated turkey. And when the wild turkey became a pet, the Mesa Verde Indians had the only two domesticated animals they ever knew. The dog and [music] the turkey. >> This is a typical Mesa Verde PBLO of about 850 AD. The houses are joined together in long curving rows facing south. In the front are two underground ceremonial rooms, kas. One of them is complete and the other is under [music] construction. >> It is probably early fall judging by the crops in the activities. People are drying their food, building houses, dressing animal hides, and in some cases enjoying that byproduct of a more developed society, doing nothing at all. >> This too was a peaceful period with the population growing and the people spreading out over a wide area. But then something happened. Something [music] came along which drove these farming Indians over the edge of the mea and into the sheer vertical sides of the sandstone cliffs. This is how one of the Mesa Verde Indian cliff dwellings must have looked during the period of [music] its greatest activity. There were well over 100 rooms used for sleeping and storage. Most of the life [music] was lived out of doors in the open courts and on the house roofs. But for the first time, the element of danger is present. There are towers. The villages [music] themselves have been moved into caves. There is evidence of a complicated system of warning and defense. >> [music] >> Why had marauding bands of warlike Indians suddenly appeared on the mesa tops? The answer is a very probable yes. But in the caves with all the increased hardships, the life of the Indians of the Mesa Verde reached the highest [music] point in its development. [music] >> [music] [music] [music] >> After 13 centuries of steady development, this civilization had reached its peak. Then suddenly they were gone. Why? Is there an answer, a reason? We'll find out in just a minute. See the pattern now? Got it? Can you recall it? That's >> recall. >> Recall. Milton Bradley's fascinating new game. Perhaps the greatest game of all time. You set a pattern for the other players to match. Make it as difficult as you wish. You start the mechanism and the pattern ticks around. Can the others match the pattern you've set? Recall. [music] >> Maybe they'll get it right and maybe they won't. >> I won. >> Look, here's a winner and a loser. That's recall. >> It's exciting. It's absorbing. It's challenging. >> It's great. >> Yes, Milton Bradley makes the best games in the world. Then recall may be the greatest game of all time. >> Recall. You must get recalled. [music] What happened to this 1300-year-old civilization? [music] Why did it suddenly disappear? There are several theories. In the year 1276, a drought came upon the area. A drought which was to last for 23 years. It's also thought that during this same period, the Indians of the Mesa Verity lived under constant attack by hostile Indian tribes. To better understand what happened, let's examine some of the things we do know about their daily lives as they lived in cliff dwellings such as Balcony House. >> To get to Balcony House today, you have to climb a 32ft ladder that hangs out over the sheer walls of Soda Canyon. When the Indians did it, all they had were hand holds and tiny tow hold notches. In those days, there wasn't any entrance at this end, only a dwelling or two in some storage rooms like this one. Those racks were used for drying corn. The dried corn could last for years. When it was needed for food, it would be brought out of storage and grounded to cornmeal by the women of the village. This is how it was done. This is a corn grinding stone called a matate. The grinder is called a mono, which in Spanish means hand. The dried kernels are rubbed again and again between the mono and the matate until a fine corn meal results. like this balcony house takes its name from a system of ledges which once extended around the second floor level of many of these dwellings. This is actual Indian masonry of the 1200s. These floor beams extend out through the wall to form the basis for these balconies. Lighter beams are placed over them, then plaster, followed by a layer of dry juniper bark, then another layer of plaster to top off the whole thing. These balconies are useful as runways to get from one upper chamber room to another. Then, too, they must have been excellent vantage points on which to post a sentry. And centuries were needed, too, against the marauding enemies who had driven the people of Balcony House to the extreme measure of building such a dwelling in the first place. One of the times when a sentry must have been needed the most was when the men of the village were down below in the kas or ceremonial chambers where Bill is now. Jenny, the experts are absolutely certain that the kas were used for ceremonial observances and that they were largely restricted to men and large families or clans may well have had their own ka. The men would be down here seated around this ledge or band cap with a small fire going in the fire pit to keep them warm. The ka had an ingenious ventilation system. Ventilation was necessary, remember, because the kas were roofed over. Fresh air was drawn down into the room through this little chimney. Then this wall or deflector split the air current, so they passed around it without putting out the fire or blowing the ashes around. In addition to the deflector and the fire pit, there is a third standard item found in every KA floor. It's a small hole, perfectly round, and it's called a sepapoo. Capu, that's another Hopy word, and it refers to the symbolic opening from the underworld for the use of gods and spirits. The Hopi Indians, like their ancestors who lived here, believe that they originally came from under the ground, from mother earth, and that eventually they must return there where their spirits and their ancestors live. They believe according to many people that the great sea papu the real one is somewhere in the grand canyon. The ka is a combination of ceremony and solid function. It must have been the warmest spot in the village and winters on the mesa verity could go below zero. If the keeps were pretty much restricted to the men, what do you suppose the women did to keep warm, Jenny? Well, Bill, the smoke stains on the roofs of the individual houses tell us that people had fires in their own rooms. Here's a place where the fire got out of hand. There was once a house right here that burned down. You can tell because of the charred timbers and also because all the remaining walls are a bright, even pink. Burning actual contact with flame oxidizes the sandstone and turns it pink. Life in Balcony House had its problems. fire from within and the constant [music] fear of enemy attack from without. There's no mistaking that the people of Balcony House were very, very conscious of [music] the threat of enemy attack. The only approach to the dwelling was a narrow ledge running 400 ft along the face of the cliff. [music] And at one point, that trail passed through a narrow crevice. And if that weren't enough, the Indians [music] blocked the crevice with high walls and left only a tiny crawl tunnel. To get to balcony house, anybody, stranger or friend, [music] had to crawl through this little hole. And there were ledges just this side of the mouth of the tunnel. Anyone coming in on hands and knees, as Bill is doing now, is extremely vulnerable to someone standing up here with a club or a hatchet. >> All those precautions, [music] and still they weren't enough. The Indians of Balcony House had the best defenses of any village in Mesaver. They commanded this canyon in any direction you could name. But what they couldn't control was nature. They feared a hostile two-legged animal, man. But what cut them down in the end or forced them to move on was a drought. In 1276, the rain didn't come and the crops failed. No one will ever know how long their supplies held out or how the decision to leave was reached. Did they all leave or did some of them stay on hoping for rain but waiting too long? >> Those are questions without answers, Jenny. All we know is that 13 centuries of steady progress ended here and the people vanished. They left behind their cities like actors leaving the set of a play. All we can do is visit the stage, look at the scenery, [music] and examine the props. Like the corn grinding stone, used every day for many years, and then one day never used again. It's only a part of a mystery story. The story of the stone age Americans, the vanished Indians of the Mesa Verde. >> We'll be back in just a minute. >> Creepy crawlers. Creepy crawlers. Creepy crawlers. [music] Creepy crawlers are so much fun playing gags on everyone. All you need to make a bug is a thing maker set and electric plug. Pour plastic goop right in the mold. Then trade them. Sell them. Good as gold. You can tell they're Mattel. They're creepy crawers. Creepy crawers. Creepy crawers. Now Barbie talks. >> Stacy and I are having a tea. >> Who's Stacy? She's Barbie's new friend. She talks, too. >> Hello there. I'm called Stacy. >> Barbie is the very same size she's always been. She and Stacy can even wear the same clothes. Mattel's new talking Stacy. >> I think miniskits are smashing >> and talking Barbie. >> What shall I wear to the prom? want to talk to you. >> Do you know what's inside a baby Ruth? A whole candy store full of fresh candy. [music] Creamy fudge, crunchy peanuts, chewy caramel and chocolatey flavor. You can see how good it tastes. Delicious bite after bite. Baby Ruth, like a whole candy store full of fresh candy from Curtis. >> Here's a new kind [music] of pudding. You can make it. It's called shake a pudding. All you do is shake it. Shake [music] shake shake a pudding. >> Shake a pudding dessert mix from Royal. Add water powder and >> shake it in the park. Shake it in the pool. [music] Shake it for dessert. Shake it after school. Real pudding in your favorite flavor. Four complete servings. >> Shake, [music] shake, shake. >> What a crazy way to make a snack. [music] >> We hope you've enjoyed our visit to Mesa Verde National Park, Colorado. >> If you'd like to find out more about the Indians of Stone Age America, ask your librarian for these books. The PBlo Indians by Sonia Bleecker, The Ancient Ones by Gordon C. Baldwin and this book Honey by Marian Conrad Buff. >> Bye-bye. >> Bye. >> See you next week. >> The Discovery Production Unit's domestic transportation arrangements and production consideration provided by United Airlines. [music] [music] >> [music] [music] [music] >> This has been a Jewel Power production in association with ABC News. News and public affairs. >> U is for United. [music] United services that help children, [music] young people, families, [music] the elderly, the sick, and the handicapped. W is for way. [music] The United Way that works many wonders. Pledge your fair share. The United Way. >> Help the Boys Clubs of America today and you'll help yourself to a better USA.