Utah canyon reveals ancient culture

''Many other places in the West have rock art panels, but hardly one of them doesn't have someone's name scratched across it. That's what makes this place so unique," Utah state archeologist Kevin Jones said.

Archeologists said the villages were occupied more than 1,000 years ago, and may be as old as 4,500 years.

A caravan of news organizations traveled for two hours from the mining town of East Carbon City, over a serpentine thriller of a dirt road that topped an 8,200-foot mountain before dropping into the narrow canyon in Utah's Book Cliffs region.

Officials kept known burial sites and human remains out of view of reporters and cameras, but within a single square mile of verdant meadows, archeologists showed off one village site and said there were five more, where arrowheads, pottery shards, and other artifacts can still be found on the ground.

Archeologists said the occupation sites, which include granaries full of grass seed and corn, offer an unspoiled slice of life of the ancestors of modern American Indian tribes. The settlements are scattered along 12 miles of Range Creek and up side canyons.

''We've documented about 225 sites, and it's just scratching the surface," Jones said. ''There are hundreds of other sites."

Hundreds of granaries, ranging from cupboard-sized to several yards across, are in some cases hundreds of feet up nearly inaccessible cliffs. They offer evidence, Jones said, that the people moved around seasonally and left stores of food.

The pit houses' roofs of cedar and dirt have long collapsed, but Jones said in their day they were ''warm and snug in the winter and cool in the summer."

The half-buried houses don't have the grandeur of New Mexico's Chaco Canyon or Colorado's Mesa Verde, where overhanging cliffs shelter stacked stone houses. But they are remarkable in that hold a treasure of information about the Fremont culture that has been untouched by looters.