Mesa Verde

 

    Mesa Verde is arguably one of the most intriguing archeological sites in the world! Located in our own home state of Colorado, it is also the largest archeological site in the country. Mesa Verde, home of the Ancestral Puebloans, consist of more than 4300 sites, and also has a substantial number of their famous cliff dwellings. Mesa Verde area covered a large portion of the four-corner region. This area of immense flat- topped mesa’s and deep ravines attracts about half a million people annually.  While they are known for their settlements established underneath the cliffs, they also had settlements on the cliffs themselves and also on top of the mesas. It is believed that this area was inhabited for centuries though it was ultimately abandoned around the year 1300.

             

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       The Puebloans were able to venture down into these ravines with retractable ladders! They build their structures out of stone, mortar, and plaster, materials that still stand to this day. It is common to find fingerprints in the stone, likely from the creators. The largest of all the cliff dwellings, Cliff Palace, has about 150 rooms and more than twenty circular rooms. It’s location under the cliff made for excellent protection from the natural elements of the world. Their buildings ranged from one story to four stories tall reaching the natural stone of the cliff above them. Wooden beams along with the regular mud, stone and mortar made up the structures. At sites like Cliff Palace, families lived in architectural spaces, placed around kivas. Kivas were a circular type of space, held up by 6 support columns made of masonry and had a wooden roof. It is believed that these circular areas were used for ceremonial purposes aside from residential.

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        Recovering remains from the Mesa Verde area are complicated due a lot of items being looted and shipped/ traded all around the world in the nineteenth-century. They even put legislation in place in the 90’s for people to return items they had that might have been from the area. There were wall paintings found, like this one from the rectangular towers third floor. The geometric shapes in the painting represent a lot of the landscape that encompassed them. Though the reason for their abandonment is unknown,  the Puebloans left a huge mark during their time there.



            Dr. Lauren Kilroy-Ewbank, "Mesa Verde," in Smarthistory, August 9, 2015, accessed November 18, 2020, https://smarthistory.org/mesa-verde-cliff-dwellings/.

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