The earliest human habitation of the American Southwest has been documented between 10,000 BC and 5,500 BC with the earliest cultural tradition known as the Lithic or Paleo-Indian. The Paleo-Indian stage is marked by big-game hunting of mega-fauna such as bison and woolly mammoth. As big-game became extinct or were hunted out, the Archaic cultural stage evolved, characterized by the hunting/gathering adaptations of the Desert Cultures or Archaic in the Southwest.

For over 7,000 years, the specialized Archaic subsistence strategy consisted of annual migrations for seasonal vegetables, fruits, wild grains, nuts, berries, and smaller game such as mule deer, pronghorn antelope, big-horn sheep, and rabbits. Archaic peoples lived in caves, rock and brush shelters, and created distinctive arrowheads and spearpoints, sandals, stone food processing tools, fur blankets and netting. The Archaic on the Colorado Plateau are perhaps best recognized for their extensive rock art often consisting of large, elaborately decorated human-like figures.

It is generally accepted that over time, cultural traits such as horticulture diffusing northward from Mexico affected the indigenous Archaic population on the Colorado Plateau. As early agriculturalists, the people became semi-sedentary and began creating distinctive baskets by which the culture became known as "Basketmaker Anasazi." The term "Anasazi" is now being replaced by the term "Ancestral Pueblo" for political correctness. By about the time of Christ, the Basketmaker had begun domesticating maize (ancient corn), beans, and squash. They began living in subterranean and above-ground mud houses and created functional, plainware pottery.

Between 400-700 AD, the peoples of the Colorado Plateau began creating organized small stone villages called Pueblos, by which the culture tradition was labeled. Dry-land farming became the norm with some instances of irrigation, and pottery developed into a highly stylized, utilitarian art form. The construction of multi-story cliff dwellings with food storage systems, underground ceremonial chambers (kivas), and distinctive rock art marked the apex of this creative period.

The Ancestral Pueblo flourished on the Colorado Plateau until approximately 1200 AD when the people began a gradual but thorough migration out of the region. Natural resource depletion, drought followed by floods, disease, and possible pressures by invading nomadic cultures have been cited by archaeologists as reasons for the exodus. Modern-day Hopi, Tewa, and Zuni cultures, claiming direct ancestry to the Ancestral Pueblo, contend that it was for traditional cultural reasons that the people exited the area for the high-deserts of Arizona and the river valleys of New Mexico.

Sometime between the 15th and 17th centuries, nomadic native cultures from the North including the Ute and Navajo settled on the Colorado Plateau. They entered a region replete with the ruins and artifacts of a once abundant civilization, and the Navajo named the vanished peoples, "Anasazi," meaning "ancient enemies." As sheep and cattle herders and weavers, the Ute and Navajo have successfully survived and preserved their own traditions in the land of the ancients.