Mesa Verde National Park was created in 1906. The park has more than 4300 well preserved ancestral Puebloan archaeological sites, including 600 cliff dwellings. The Mesa Verdeans survived using a combination of hunting, gathering, and farming of crops. Around 1100 AD they began to construct the massive cliff dwellings for which the park is best known. Thousands of people lived in these dwellings. By 1285, following a period of severe and prolonged droughts, they abandoned the area and moved south to locations in Arizona and New Mexico. We drove through the park today, which was about a 40 mile round trip. The Mesa Verde (Spanish for "green table") was approximately 8500 ft above sea level. It was amazing to see these structures. What was even more amazing is that hand-and-toe-hold trails were the only thing that they used to climb from the mesa top fields to the villages and the canyons below.
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| Sights as we drive through the park |
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| More sights of the park as we are driving |
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| Cliff Palace dwellings |
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| Close-up of the Cliff Palace |
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| Another close-up of the Cliff Palace |
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| The Hemenway House |
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| A Pinion Tree. The pine trees yield edible pinyon nuts, which were a staple of the Native Americans |
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| A raven is a common sighting in the west. Much bigger than a crow. |
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| More cliff dwellings |
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| More cliff dwellings |
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| The Square Tower House |
Those are amazing! I'm sure it would have been so cool to see it when people crackly lived there. Just one more reason I need a Tardis. Lol. Were those holes in front for water or pools? Hard to tell. Love it Pop!
ReplyDeleteThe picture on the National Park brochure shows them bathing in the holes. It makes it look like a pool.
ReplyDelete