Barb and I spent a fascinating day exploring the ruins in the Mesa Verde National Park in Colorado.  We arrived at the campground the night before and got oriented at the Visitor Center.  We learned that some 4500 archeological sites have been discovered, of which about 600 are the iconic cliff dwellings.  “Mesa Verde” means “green table” in Spanish.  The name derives from the vegetation that thrives on the top of the plateau or mesa of the region.  Actually, the words should be plural, since the original prehistoric solid mesa was already carved into a large number of mesas separated by deep canyons by the time the ancestors of the current native peoples settled there about AD 550.  Archeological research has revealed much about the ancestors, originally called Anasazi – a Navaho word roughly translated as “the ancient foreigners” – but now called Ancestral Pueblo people to reflect their modern descendants.  The archeological evidence reveals the gradual development of increasingly sophisticated lifestyles.  From the beginning they farmed corn, beans and squash on the mesa tops and hunted wild animals and built pit houses on mesas and in cliff alcoves. They gradually became prolific potters and advanced from using the atlatl to throw spears to using the bow and arrow.  By about AD 750 they began building houses above ground with upright walls fashioned from poles and mud, often with a pit house or two in front.  Later the pit houses evolved into kivas.  Kiva is a Hopi word and refers to round chambers built in a fairly standardized fashion that features a separate ventilation shaft that opens into the kiva and delivers fresh air to a fire pit located centrally on the floor.  Between the shaft opening and the fire pit there was an air deflector that protected the fire and increased circulation and encouraged the smoke to rise up through the hole in the roof that was also used for access into the kiva by way of a ladder.  Another standard feature was the existence of a sipapu – a hole in the floor that related to the belief that people had entered the world through such a hole in the beginning.  In modern Pueblo communities the kiva is still an important ceremonial structure.

By AD 1000, architectural skills had advanced from pole-and-adobe construction to stone masonry.  Double-coursed walls of stone often rose two or three stories high and were joined as units of 50 or more.  Pottery evolved with better techniques and decoration.  Farming became more important and extensive on the mesa tops.  And then, in the late 1100’s, for unknown reasons, the population moved back into the cliff alcoves, which they accessed by chipping hand and toe steps that permitted movement between their homes and the fields in the mesas above.  But now the cliff dwelling were no longer pit houses, but were the masonry structures that endure until this day.

On our first full day of the visit, Barb and I joined a ranger-led tour of the “Cliff Palace” that required climbing four ladders.  We also visited “Spruce Tree House”, the best-preserved dwelling and one that permitted self-guiding.  There, we climbed down into a kiva whose roof had been restored.  We also took our car on the Mesa Top Loop Drive that took us to a number of early pit house sites and also to a number of canyon overlooks from which we could look across to other cliff dwellings.  Near the end of that loop was Sun Point View from which a dozen cliff dwellings are visible, as well as the mesa-top building called Sun Temple across the canyon.  A short ride later, we were at the intriguing Temple itself, a large D-shaped structure whose four-foot-thick walls feature stones onto almost all of which texture has been carefully pecked.  Neither household goods nor roof beams have been found, indicating that the structure of nearly 30 rooms was probably never finished.  Why was it abandoned?  Indeed, why were the cliff dwellings in the alcoves below also abandoned?  No one knows for sure.

After another night in the campground, we continued on our voyage south and west toward our friends Bill & Colleen (Dolce Vita), who live near Parks, Arizona.  But the account of that visit deserves its own blog entry.