The Smoky Mountain Relic Room occupies the Smoky Mountain Knife Works showroom in Sevierville, Tennessee, where it showcases many fossils, minerals and historical artifacts. To discover these fossils, teams from the Smoky Mountain Relic Room work with landowners to search for fossils on private property to ensure that each piece may be legally owned and sold.
On a recent expedition to Colorado, a team digging for dinosaur fossils discovered previously unexplored ruins that belonged to the prehistoric civilization of the ancestral Puebloans. Living in Northwest Colorado from AD 700 to 1130, the ancestral Puebloans constructed towns from stone buildings, similar to structures found in parts of Mexico. Evidence shows that the people lived in family units, practiced religion, and created art.
The Puebloan civilization cultivated squash and maize and stored the food in granaries. A drought in the area during the early 12th century forced the people to adapt. The civilization built their stone structures farther back into canyons and camouflaged their granaries to protect them from raids and attacks by outsiders. By AD 1130, everything the Puebloans built had been abandoned.
