Indigenous America
Cliff dwellings, earthworks, and settlements built by the peoples who lived here for millennia before European contact.
Five landmarks across 4 states. Start with Mesa Verde, Taos Pueblo and Cahokia Mounds.
- Landmarks
- 5
- Period
- Pre-1500
Pictured Mesa Verde
mark byzewski · CC BY · via Wikimedia Commons
The Landmarks
- Indigenous America
Mesa Verde
Mesa Verde National Park, CO
Mesa Verde preserves the most remarkable cliff dwellings in North America — stone villages built into the canyon alcoves of southwestern Colorado by the Ancestral Puebloans more than seven centuries ago.
Indigenous AmericaTaos Pueblo
Taos, NM
Taos Pueblo is one of the oldest continuously inhabited communities in the United States — a striking complex of multi-story adobe houses that the Taos people have lived in for more than a thousand years.
Indigenous AmericaCahokia Mounds
Collinsville, IL
Cahokia Mounds preserves the remains of the largest and most sophisticated ancient city north of Mexico — a Mississippian metropolis that flourished a thousand years ago on the Mississippi floodplain.
Indigenous AmericaChaco Culture
Nageezi, NM
Chaco Culture preserves the heart of one of North America's most advanced ancient civilizations.
Indigenous AmericaNavajo National Monument
Shonto, AZ
Three cliff dwellings tucked into remote sandstone canyons, abandoned around 1300 and left largely undisturbed for six centuries, preserving one of the most intact windows into ancestral Puebloan life in the American Southwest.