Mesa Verde, a high forested tableland in southwestern Colorado, holds the stone villages that ancestral Puebloan people built into its cliff alcoves in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and it is tied to living Native nations today.
The cliff dwellings
Ancestral Puebloan communities farmed the mesa top for centuries and, in a relatively short late period, built dwellings of stone and mortar into the sheltered alcoves of the canyon walls below their fields. Cliff Palace, the largest, has around 150 rooms and more than twenty kivas, the round, semi-subterranean chambers used for ceremony and gathering. The dwellings were reached by hand-and-toe holds cut in the rock, and their construction and abandonment within a few generations remain subjects of active study.
Departure, not disappearance
In the late thirteenth century the people left Mesa Verde, part of a wider movement out of the region in which prolonged drought, resource pressure and social change are all thought to have played a part. They did not vanish; they moved south and east and became the ancestors of contemporary Pueblo peoples. Twenty-six modern tribes, principally the Puebloan nations of New Mexico and Arizona, including the Hopi and Zuni, and the Ute, are recognised as culturally affiliated with the site, and for them it is a place of ancestors rather than a ruin. This account describes the archaeology and does not report the ceremonial knowledge of those living communities, which is theirs to hold.
The park
Mesa Verde was set aside in 1906 as the first national park established to protect the works of human beings rather than natural scenery, and it became a World Heritage site in 1978. It is administered in consultation with affiliated tribes, and the interpretation of the site distinguishes what archaeology can show from the traditions of the descendant peoples, whose relationship to the place is living and continuing.