Tucked under the Green Table

.... that's where the Ancestral Pueblo people that lived in the four corners area of the American southwest built their beautiful, sturdy, and somewhat mysterious cities.

Conventional wisdom, at least as dispensed in my youth, would have suggested that there weren't any cities in North America in the 1200's, but after standing at the Sun Point overlook in Mesa Verde National Park, I would beg to disagree.

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The scenery in national parks is of course a major attraction but there's deeper enjoyment when you can also learn some history and culture while you're there. And since my storehouse of Native American historical knowledge is woefully slim, I augmented it a great deal on our all-too-brief visit to Mesa Verde. I definitely recommend a longer stay there if you can manage it, but you can see and learn a lot in just a few hours if that's all you've got.

It's always a good idea to make a park visitor center your first stop, especially if you're pressed for time, and we got a lot of useful information to plan our morning at the very aptly named Far View Center (see Joan enjoying the scenery from the center's balcony). There was also a really interesting exhibit about Gustav Nordenskiöld, the very young amateur archeologist who did much early excavation in the area (and who also made off with some artifacts from the then-unprotected sites).

We decided that we really didn't have the time to take one of the intensive, ranger-guided tours of the larger ruins, much as we wanted to. But there is a well-preserved site that you can see relatively quickly by taking a self-guided tour. So we opted for that plus a drive around the Mesa Top loop road, which would afford views of most of the major cliff dwellings as well as a selection of the mesa-top sites that provide historical context for appreciating the under-cliff complexes.

First stop was the Chapin Mesa Museum, for more orientation. It's also just adjacent to the do-it-yourself site, Spruce Tree House. The Museum was very interesting, with artifact exhibits showing what life was like during the different phases of habitation in the history of the area. I particularly liked the beaded items on the right (which are modern products showing historical influences), as well as a series of really interesting dioramas that were originally made by CCC workers during the 1930's (probably not the same guys that made the trails in Mammoth Cave, but it was the same program).

Spruce Tree House is a really beautiful complex of buildings, offering an up-close look at how life might have been for the folks living in the cozy confines of the natural alcove.

There are exposed kivas (like the one on the left) and one that has been reconstructed to give visitors a taste of what they might have been like in use. You can see Joan descending into the demo kiva. [She's just mugging for the camera...it really wasn't scary.]

You can wander through the site on your own, but there are rangers there to answer questions (and also, I'm sure, to keep people from doing damage to the site). These knowledgeable folks are always keen to enrich visitors' experiences. Here's a ranger showing some kids how to use the replica metates that are set into depressions in the rocks, where the real ones doubtless used to be. The pueblo dwellers used this technology to grind corn, and the modern kids are eager learners.

You can also get a comprehensive view at Spruce Tree House of how the society worked, since the top of the mesa was important, too. That's where that corn was grown. Our guidebook indicated that there were indentations and bumps down the cliff face for climbing up to the fields and descending back down to the buildings. Pretty intense rock-climbing, especially if carrying bundles of grain for the metate operators!


We got another, even more spectacular view of the mesa top on the loop road of the same name. This picture was taken at the Sun Temple site, looking back at the Sun Point viewpoint, where I took the photo at the top of this post. What an amazing cliff! A wonderfully scenic location for this great conurbation—Joan called it the New York City of peak Mesa Verde culture.

The dwelling at the top of the post is the Cliff Palace, the largest site in the park and one of the ones that you can see close-up on one of the long scheduled tours—definitely on my list for a return visit. And here's another view from the Sun Point overlook, showing one of the smaller sites in Mesa Verde's New York:
Another viewpoint along the loop road shows you Square Tower House, a dwelling which features the tallest building among all the cities of the area. Unfortunately it's not open for tours, but you get a great view from the overlook:

The Mesa Top road loop gives you a good variety of views and learning experience at sites on the mesa top, most of which pre-date the alcove dwellings. Unfortunately, due to the dunking my camera suffered on the Rockcastle River in Kentucky earlier this summer, my photos don't get time-stamped, which makes it hard for me to match up the photos with the sites described in our guidebook. So I'll have to show these two samples of the archeological sites on the loop without postive identification. You'll notice the nice protective structures around the digs: protective of the sites as well as the visitors. It was very nice to have shade on these stops!

This next site is distinctive enough that I'll attempt a tentative id. I think it is Sun Point Pueblo:

As much as we learned about these clever and industrious people, one of the main themes of all the educational materials on display at the park is that archeologists don't have answers to the really big questions about them.

Why did they move into the alcoves, when their all-important areas of cultivation remained on the tabletops? Defense? Better shelter from the elements? Desire for closer communities?

Then, why did they move away? The cities were such marvels—efficient, beautiful, sturdy—and obviously such large investments of time, effort and expense. Why leave them? By 1300, the cities were ghost towns. At one time, it was thought that the people simply vanished.

I can remember hearing of their mysterious disappearance when I was younger and imagined that they had died of some strange illness or, more fancifully, were somehow transported from their cozy dwellings to some other plane of existence. That's when they were called Anasazi, but now the preferred terminology is "Ancestral Puebloans," because we don't think they vanished at all, but simply moved and became the later Pueblo cultures of the southwest.

They perhaps left their lovely cities because of prolonged drought, new threats from hostile neighbors, exhausted soil...or some combination of these and other reasons. But even if the big questions concerning their lives and societies will never be answered, we can certainly enjoy and admire what they left behind, as well as the starkly beautiful scenery that's still there today.