Tina Guo Instagram – The Navajo Nation is the largest reservation in the US, at 16 million acres and a population of over 200,000 Navajo. The Navajo name for Monument Valley is Tsé Biiʼ Ndzisgaii. tsé (“rocks”) biiʼ (“in, within”) noodǫ́ǫ́z (“it is striped”) łigaii (“it is white”) (white streaks around in the rocks)
The valley’s earliest inhabitants include the Ice Age Paleo-Indian hunters (12,000-6,000 B.C.), Archaic hunter-gatherers (6,000 B.C.-A.D. 1), and Anasazi farmers (A.D. 1-1300). The ancient Anasazi Pueblos inhabited the Four Corners and areas of Monument Valley, and their ruins are scattered throughout the formations and can still be seen today, including petroglyphs and pictographs.
Before human existence, the Park was once a lowland basin. For hundreds of millions of years, materials that eroded from the early Rock Mountains deposited layer upon layer of sediment which cemented a slow and gentle uplift, generated by ceaseless pressure from below the surface, elevating these horizontal strata quite uniformly one to three miles above sea level. What was once a basin became a plateau.
Natural forces of wind and water that eroded the land spent the last 50 million years cutting into and peeling away at the surface of the plateau. The simple wearing down of altering layers of soft and hard rock slowly revealed the natural wonders of Monument Valley today.
🏜️🙏🏼 | Posted on 08/Aug/2024 23:02:25
