Mesa Verde

by Anne Sands

Title

Mesa Verde

Artist

Anne Sands

Medium

Photograph - Photography

Description

This photo was taken outside the welcome center At Mesa Verde. The landscape was glowing with beautiful purple flowers. Well worth seeing this amazing area!
At Mesa Verde, Spanish for "green table," multistoried dwellings fill the cliff-rock alcoves that rise 2,000 feet above Montezuma Valley. Remarkably preserved, the cliff dwellings cluster in canyons that slice the mesa into narrow tablelands. Here, and on the mesa top, archaeologists have located more than 4,800 archaeological sites (including 600 cliff dwellings) dating from about A.D. 550 to 1300.
Natives lived in the cliff dwellings for only about the last 75 to 100 years of their occupation of Mesa Verde. Early archaeologists guessed warfare, and the evidence for this seems to concur. Archaeologists also think they may have been victims of their own success. Their productive dry farming allowed the Mesa Verde population to grow perhaps as high as 5,000. Gradually woodlands were cut, wild game hunted out, and soils depleted. Years of drought and poor crops may have been aggravated by village squabbles. By the end of the 13th century the ancestral Puebloans had left the plateau, never to return. It is worth climbing down into the dwellings to see the well preserved dwellings.

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April 19th, 2016

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