Mesa Verde

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. For some 600 years these people farmed the green mesa tops, then in their final generations raised elaborate multi-story dwellings beneath the cliffs, including Cliff Palace, the largest on the continent. Abandoned around 1300, the sites are a haunting record of a sophisticated society and a sacred link to today's Pueblo peoples.

The Ancestral Puebloans — once called the Anasazi — settled the Mesa Verde region by about 550 CE, living first in pithouses dug into the mesa tops and farming corn, beans, and squash. Over the centuries their architecture grew more sophisticated, from pithouses to above-ground pueblos of stone and adobe, and their communities flourished across the high green tableland the Spanish would later name Mesa Verde, the 'green table.'

In the late 1190s and early 1200s, for reasons still debated, the people moved off the mesa tops and into the sheltered alcoves of the canyon walls, building the cliff dwellings for which Mesa Verde is famous. The largest, Cliff Palace, contains roughly 150 rooms and more than 20 kivas — circular ceremonial chambers — and once housed around 100 people. Balcony House, Spruce Tree House, and Long House are among hundreds of others tucked into the cliffs.

Within a century the dwellings were empty. By about 1300 the Ancestral Puebloans had left the region entirely, most likely driven out by prolonged drought, dwindling resources, and social upheaval, migrating south to the Rio Grande and to what are now the Hopi and Zuni lands. Their descendants are today's Pueblo peoples. The cliff dwellings were brought to wider attention by local ranchers in 1888, and in 1906 Mesa Verde became the first national park created to protect the works of humankind.