Human Ingenuity at Mesa Verde National Park, Colorado [April 26-27, 2019]

Cliff Palace - a construction marvel

Over the course of 700 years, Ancestral Puebloans evolved from being hunter-gatherers to constructing elaborate stone buildings in alcoves high up on a cliff face.  They left remnants of beautiful pottery, clothing made of turkey feathers, and elaborate villages that suggests a sophisticated social life and rich spiritual life.  They left Mesa Verde at the end of 1200s, likely moving on to establish some of the Pueblos that exist still today.

Remains of a Pit House with an anteroom, likely used for storage

Mesa Verde is Spanish for “Green Table” and the mesa is green with trees and shrubs growing on its sides and top.  This must have attracted the early people.  Archeologists call people from this early period Basketmakers, because of the baskets that they made, they had not learned how to make pottery yet.  They farmed, hunted wild animals and foraged plants.  They lived in pit houses, dug into the earth with wooden roofs.  We saw examples of these homes on the Mesa Top Loop at the park.

Coyote Village pueblo construction

Far View Tower

Eventually, they started building above ground, and innovated sharing walls between rooms of the building, the origin of what we know today as pueblo construction.  The walls were thick with two sides of stone and rubble between them.  The structures were sometimes built to be two or three stories tall.  They retained the concept of the original pit houses, making them round kivas, places where men gathered to work on their weapons, to weave, and perhaps to engage in spiritual rituals.  Clusters of these communities have been preserved in the Far View Sites, where we were able to walk into the remains of the rooms in the Coyote Village. 

Villages were close together

Reservoir used to collect water from rain or snow melt

Cliff Palace from across the canyon

These Ancestral Puebloans agricultural fields were around their communities.  There is a reservoir where they collected water, probably from rain run off or snow melt.  They also built check dams across dry washes, to collect water and rich soil rinsed down after storms.   

Ruins everywhere

The mesa is ribbed with steep sided canyons.  No one is sure why they decided to move their homes into huge alcoves on these cliff faces.  It could have been for protection from the elements.  It could be that they needed to cultivate all arable land and their population had outgrown the small communities.  We will never know.

A 4-story tower

A village in a cliff

The cliff dwellings are a marvel.  Stones were collected from stream beds and carried up the cliffs.  Water for mortar was carried up or down the cliff (depending on the location of the source).  Hand and foot holds were pecked out of the rock of the cliff face as they climbed up to the fields, to carry food or water, or to visit other cliff communities.  The communities have kivas, and public spaces.  There are storerooms and granaries to store the harvest for the winter.  Some of the towers are 3 stories tall.  There are remains of more than 600 of these communities in the park.

Spruce Tree House

Square walls and round walls

Built all the way to the roof

Spruce Tree House is behind the Museum Visitors Center.  It is the third largest in the park, and has been partially restored.  You usually can walk by it and look at it up close, however, the trail was closed because of damage to the trail over the winter.  We were able to look at it from the other side of the cavern.  The Spruce Tree House community is estimated to have included 60-90 individuals who lived in 19 households.  It has 120 rooms, 8 kivas and 2 towers.  Some of the interior walls are plastered and have the remains of geometric decorations drawn on them.  These were not primitive cave dwellers!

This was likely a grainary or storage area, above Spruce Tree House

As we drove along the Mesa Top Loop, we stopped at several overlooks, where we could see dwellings built into alcoves on the cliff on the opposite side of the canyon.  Once you get used to seeing them, it seems like every alcove has a wall, a few rooms, or a sizeable village built in it.

Inside Cliff Palace - kivas in the foreground

Small rocks were stuck into the mortar to support and straighten the stones

We took the ranger led tour of the Cliff Palace, a village of 150 rooms, 75 constructed open areas, and 21 kivas.  It probably housed 100-120 people.  It has a lot of rooms that do not have hearths that archeologists do not designate as “living” rooms, which might have been used for some kind of governance or other purpose for the region.  The entry stairs for tours to the palace were closed, so we entered by way of the exit, climbing down 3 10-foot ladders, and then followed a narrow, windy set of stone stairs down to the ruins from the cliff top.  We returned back up to our cars the same way.  You could see some foot and hand holds on the cliff face.  While we were there, we were allowed to walk among the ruins, peer in doorways, and look out at the view across the canyon.

Amazing

There are two other sets of ruins that you can visit with a ranger led tour, those tours start being offered in the end of May.

Double walls with rubble in the middle supported multi-story structures

White plugs were inserted where samples were taken for tree-ring dating of the wood used in construction

The Ancestral Puebloans were prosperous.  They had leisure time to create beautiful things.  They were able to shape stones and use them to build straight walls high up on the side of a cliff.  They did not have a written language and little is actually known about them.  The Navajo word, Anasazi, that used to refer to the people of Mesa Verde is no longer used.  Instead they are tied to the modern Pueblo peoples of the Southwest who revere the ruins as the places of their forefathers.  Much of what archeologists surmise about the Ancestral Puebloans is derived from current day Pueblo people, their social structures, beliefs, stories and legends. 

One question for which there doesn’t seem to be an answer is “why did they leave?”  Over the course of two generations, they moved away.  Tree rings in some of their wooden construction beams, tell us there was a 20+year drought, so perhaps food and water became scarce.  This could have led to fights between villages over resources.  No one knows, and legends say that they just left.  What they left behind is wonderful, mysterious, and awe-inspiring.

Toe and hand holds pecked out of the cliff rock

Statue at the Visitors Center

Mesa Verde is very near the 4 Corners Monument where Utah, Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona all meet in a corner.  The Monument is on Navajo land and is operated by the reservation.  You pay $5 a person to get in and take your picture standing at the 4 corners. Local artists have booths around the perimeter selling jewelry and other crafts.  We visited the 4 Corners Monument as we drove in to Mesa Verde.  We arrived 10-minutes before it closed, and most of the artists had left already.  

Standing in 4 states at once

Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona

Happy cliff visitors!