Mese Verde National Park - Colorado

Established June 29, 1906

52,074 acres

At Mesa Verde, Spanish for "Green table," ancient multistoried dwellings fill the cliff-rock alcoves that rise 2,000 feet above Montezuma Valley. Unique for their number and remarkable preservation, the cliff dwellings cluster in sandstone canyons that slice the mesa into narrow tablelands fingering southward. Here, and on the mesa top, archaeologists have located more than 500 prehistoric sites dating from about AD 550 to 1300.

The sites, from mesa-top pithouses and multistoried dwellings to cliffside villages, document the dramatic changes in the lives of a prehistoric people that archaeologists once dubbed the Anasazi. They are now

more accurately called the ancestral Puebloans, and 24 Native American tribes in the southwest today consider themselves descendants of these ancestral people. Some 40 pueblos and cliff dwellings are visible from park roads and overlooks; many of these are open to the public.

Beginning in about AD 750, the ancestral Puebloans grouped their dwellings in mesa-top pueblos, or villages. Around 1200 they moved down into recesses in the cliffs. Massive overhanging rock has so sheltered these later villages that they seem to stand outside of time, aloof to the present.

In 1888 two cowboys tracking stray cattle through snow stopped on the edge of a steep-walled canyon. Through the drifting flakes they could make out traces of walls and towers of a great cliff dwelling across the canyon. Novelist Willa Gather, a later visitor, described the scene: "The falling snowflakes sprinkling the pinons, gave it a special kind of solemnity. It was more like sculpture than anything else.. .preserved.. .like a fly in amber."

Climbing down a makeshift ladder to the deserted city, the excited cowboys explored the honeycombed network of rooms that they named Cliff Palace. Inside, they found stone tools and pottery and other artifacts. Later investigators learned that these rooms had been uninhabited for some seven centuries.

Why the Mesa Verde people eventually left their homes may never be known. Indeed, they lived in the cliffside dwellings for only about the last 75 to 100 years of their occupation of Mesa Verde. Early observers guessed warfare, but the evidence for this never turned up in later excavations. Archaeologists now think they may have been victims of their own success. Their productive dry farming

allowed their populations to grow perhaps as high as 5,000. Gradually woodlands were cut, wild game hunted out, and soils depleted. Years of drought and poor crops may have been aggravated by village squabbles. By the end of the 13th century the ancestral Puebloans had left the plateau, never to return.