Mesa Verde

Mesa Verde is a high, forested tableland in Montezuma County, south-western Colorado, near the Four Corners of the American South-west. Between roughly 600 and 1300 CE it was home to the Ancestral Puebloans, who in their final century built the famous cliff dwellings tucked into its canyon walls. Protected as a national park since 1906, it holds more than 5,000 archaeological sites, around 600 of them cliff dwellings, and no archaeological preserve in the United States is larger.

Hunter-gatherers used the mesa seasonally from about 7500 BCE. By around 1000 BCE a farming way of life known to archaeologists as the Basketmaker culture had emerged from the older Archaic population, and out of that tradition the Ancestral Puebloans had emerged by 750 CE, growing maize, beans and squash. The first pueblos, linked rows of above-ground rooms lived in all year round, appeared some time after 650, while older pit-houses increasingly became places for ceremony. By about 860 some 8,000 people lived in the area, but erratic rainfall soon drove many south, and by 950 the great houses of Chaco Canyon had replaced Mesa Verde as the region's cultural centre.

As farming recovered in the eleventh century, people returned. Masonry replaced pole-and-mud building, small round ceremonial chambers called kivas became standard, and after about 1075 Chaco-style great houses, of which Far View House is the largest, rose at the centre of many villages. Whether Chaco actually ruled the area is uncertain; most archaeologists see Mesa Verde as a set of smaller communities that were never fully absorbed into a wider political system.

When a drought from 1130 to 1180 helped bring about the collapse of the Chacoan world, migrants moved north to Mesa Verde. By the early thirteenth century around 22,000 people lived in the wider region, most of them on the plains west of the mesa, and settlements grew to hold hundreds. Around 1200 many families moved from the mesa tops into canyon alcoves, where they built multi-storey dwellings of sandstone, timber and mortar. The largest, Cliff Palace, has about 150 rooms and 23 kivas and housed perhaps 125 people within a wider community of around 600.

The thirteenth century brought repeated dry years and, after 1270, unusual cold. Defensive towers multiplied, and excavations have found burned villages, evidence of massacres and of cannibalism, with violence peaking between about 1275 and 1285. The last tree cut for building on the mesa was felled in 1281, and during the "Great Drought" of 1276 to 1299 the inhabitants left; the last had gone by about 1285. Archaeologists generally explain the departure through a combination of drought, a heavy reliance on maize, population pressure and warfare. The migrants settled to the south, along the Rio Grande and the Little Colorado, and modern Pueblo peoples, including those of Acoma, Zuni, Jemez and Laguna, count them among their ancestors. Many Native Americans reject the idea that the region was simply abandoned.

The Spanish friars Francisco Atanasio Domínguez and Silvestre Vélez de Escalante passed the mesa in 1776 and gave it its name, meaning green table, but did not see the ruins. The Utes, who had long used the area and regarded the dwellings as sacred ancestral places and did not live in them, held the land under treaties with the United States of 1868 and 1873. A prospector, John Moss, reported ruins in 1873, and the photographer William Henry Jackson published images the following year. In December 1888 the rancher Richard Wetherill and Charlie Mason came upon Cliff Palace, and in 1891 the Swedish scholar Gustaf Nordenskiöld excavated and shipped a large collection of artefacts abroad, prompting calls for protection.

Campaigners such as Virginia McClurg and Lucy Peabody pressed Congress, and in 1906 President Theodore Roosevelt approved both the national park and the Antiquities Act. It was the first national park created to protect cultural remains. To enlarge it, the government in 1911 pressed the Utes to exchange land on Chapin Mesa for land elsewhere, a deal the tribe accepted reluctantly. Major dwellings were stabilised between 1908 and 1922, and the Wetherill Mesa project of 1958 to 1965 excavated Long House and Mug House. UNESCO listed Mesa Verde as a World Heritage site in 1978. The neighbouring Ute Mountain Tribal Park protects further Ancestral Puebloan and Ute sites.