Mesa Verde

The place that Wetherill stumbled upon was called Mesa Verde, Spanish for “green table,” located in the southwestern corner of

Colorado. It is one of many ancient abandoned communities in the Southwest, particularly in New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, and Arizona. From 550 to 1300 a. d., thousands of people lived and worked in this area. They carved and constructed multistory buildings from sandstone while people in other parts of the world still lived in caves or primitive huts.

One of the main activities of this civilization was making sure there was enough food to survive. A young girl of the time would probably help her family farm corn, beans, and squash.

Cliff Palace at Mesa Verde National Park.

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After planting the crops with digging sticks and irrigating them with nearby water, the people waited until harvest time. They spent their free time socializing and playing games.

At harvest, the girl might carry ears of corn in a basket woven from yucca or other plant fibers. She would take the basket to her home, located in a building shared with fifteen other families of her clan. The girl would climb two ladders to reach her third-floor home. In a small room, her mother would sit on her knees, grinding corn for the family’s meals. A black-and-white clay pot would sit on the fire cooking a dinner of stew. The smoke from the fire rose up the center of the room until it exited out the hole in the ceiling.

The cliff dwellings faced south, so they enjoyed the warmth of the sun in the winter. Small stones called chinking stones filled the gaps between the sandstone blocks that the buildings were made from. Mortar from soil, ash, and water cemented the parts of the walls together. The thickness of the walls kept out the worst of the summer heat, too.

In addition to the cliff dwellings where families lived. Mesa Verde contained below-ground circular chambers, known as kivas. Kivas probably served as meeting places for special gatherings. Clan leaders might meet in kivas to settle disputes, hold council meetings, or conduct religious ceremonies. The largest kiva at

Pueblo Bonito ruins at Chaco Culture National Historic Park.

CHACO CANYON

Mesa Verde is just one of many settlements left by ancient people. Another is in Chaco Canyon, located in New Mexico’s Navajo (also known as Dine) country. Mesa Verde was made a national park in 1906. Chaco Canyon was part of the first group of sites President Theodore Roosevelt gave national monument status in 1907. White Americans first heard of the spectacular ruins in 1849 when the U. S. military recorded their existence and did some excavating. Archaeologists were able to date the buildings in Chaco Canyon because of the large amount of ponde-rosa pines used in the construction. Tree ring data proves that building began in the ninth century.

Chaco Canyon has been the source of much curiosity and study. It's estimated that at least 5,000 people lived at Chaco Canyon around 1100 a. d. Although it was a primitive time period, these people were able to build a city and a key center of trade with roads leading in and out.

The people who lived in Chaco Canyon didn't construct cliff dwellings, they made large stone buildings called "great houses."

The largest was the five-level Pueblo Bonito, which contained hundreds of rooms. Both the great houses and the cliff dwellings resemble apartment buildings with many floors and rooms. The homes of the Ancestral Puebloans predated apartment buildings by over 600 years—the first apartment building in the United States wasn't built until 1882, in New York. The degree of technical skill needed to create such communities continues to astound visitors.

Cliff Palace kivas.

Cliff Palace, 12 feet deep and 50 feet across, was located in the center of the village.

The Navajo, who live primarily in New Mexico and Arizona, first named the people of these ancient abandoned villages “Anasazi,” which means “evil ones” or “ancient enemies.” Anasazi was also the name that white people first used when they began exploring the different ruins, trying to solve the mystery of what happened to the people who disappeared so suddenly, leaving baskets, pottery, and tools behind. The correct name for these people who lived over 800 years ago is Ancestral Puebloans.

While the Ancestral Puebloan girl helped with the farming and her mother ground corn, her brother and father would hunt in nearby forests with spears or bows and arrows. The deer and rabbit provided meat to eat and skins to keep people warm in the winter. When food from farming and hunting was scarce, the people searched for food among the wild plants. Much of each day was spent gathering or preparing food.

Late in the 20th century, scientists determined that the people didn’t disappear, they just migrated. The current preferred theory states that an extended drought forced the inhabitants to move to locations where they could grow crops. Although the Ancestral Puebloans had experienced dry periods before, a 25-year drought at the end of the 1200s made farming almost impossible. Additionally, the people had been living in the same area for over 700 years, so other resources such as firewood had likely been depleted.

The descendants of the people who lived in the great houses and cliff dwellings live today as members of the Hopi, Zuni, and dozens of other nations known as Pueblo nations. Like their ancestors, many Pueblo communities depend on agriculture.