For more than 12,000 years, Native American people have inhabited this area. As the Ice Age ended, nomadic people hunted bison and mastodons in the valleys and gathered plants along the edges of glacial lakes and wetlands, traveling great distances in search of big game; today they are referred to as Paleo-Indians and Archaic Hunters. About 1500 BC, the Ancestral Puebloan People began to settle the Four Corners, and during the Basketmaker Period they shifted from a nomadic existence to a more sedentary life with cultivated crops, building pithouses in small villages, weaving intricate baskets, and depending on native plants and wildlife while supplementing their diet with corn and amaranth. As their population grew, they built above-ground villages during Pueblo I and Pueblo II, produced pottery, and grew beans, squash, and melons in addition to corn and amaranth, while also hunting deer, elk, bear, turkey, and rabbits. At its peak, as many as 30,000 Ancestral Puebloan People lived in what is now Montezuma County, and during Pueblo III they developed multi-storied villages and built cliff dwellings in sandstone alcoves. About AD 1300, the Ancestral Puebloans migrated from this area to the mesas of northeastern Arizona and along the Rio Grande Valley of New Mexico; their descendants are the Pueblo People living in modern communities in New Mexico and Arizona, who consider the Four Corners their traditional homelands. The Navajo, or Diné, believe they have always been part of the Southwest and teach that the present world is the earth surface world, an orderly system containing both good and evil, created with four cardinal mountains: Tsisnaasjiní to the east, Tsoodzil to the south, Doko'ooslííd to the west, and Dibé Ntsaa to the north. The Ute call themselves the People of the Shining Mountains and once inhabited all of Colorado, moving seasonally between mountains and valleys to hunt, gather food, and rendezvous with other Ute bands. After the discovery of gold, Euro-American prospectors trespassed on Ute land, and Chief Ouray negotiated the Brunot Treaty with the United States in 1873, allowing miners and settlers to occupy Ute land. In 1879, a confrontation between the Ute and Indian Agent Nathan Meeker at the White River Indian Agency led to Meeker's death, and as a result the Utes were forced to accept reservation land in southern Colorado and central Utah.