Mesa Verde

Mesa Verde National Park is found near Cortez, Colorado.  It is the home of a group of cliff dwelling people, who I learned about as the Anasazi many years ago.  The term that they use now is Ancestral Pueblan, referring to the fact that these people were the ancestors of the Pueblo indians who live here now, members of the Hopi and Zuni Indian tribes.  Around the year 1300, there were more people living in this area than there are now, many of them living on top of the mesas and in the valleys.  Groups of natives began to build communities in the cliff walls.  Archeologists have a variety of theories about these people, but there is no written history, so most of it is just "theory".  These tribes would farm on the mesa top, growing crops of corn and beans, hunting deer, rabbits and other animals.  We took these photos from across the valley, which is probably three to four hundred feet deep.  The photo on the left shows green trees and scrub brush in the area that they would have farmed on top of the mesa.  They found alcoves in the cliff walls and built communities there.  In the photo on the left, right in the middle, you can see an arch in the stone.  The photo on the right is a close up of this arch, which shows the remnants of a series of structures, with 16 rooms!  It is amazing to believe that these people climbed up and down the rock face on a daily basis in order to provide their basic needs from the mesa above.  This area gets 8 or 9 feet of snow during the winters, so they had to harvest enough food, and store it, to last them through the winter.  Collection of rain water was important as there are no rivers in the immediate area.

These tribes lived, built, traded and expanded here for about 100 years.  After many years of drought the tribes moved south to New Mexico, settling in new areas, leaving the cliff dwellings abandoned.