Ancestral Puebloans and Mesa Verde

Before any European entered what is now Colorado, the alcoves of Mesa Verde in the southwestern corner held an entire civilization. The people archaeologists call the Ancestral Puebloans had lived in the Four Corners region for at least seven centuries. They arrived on the mesa by around five hundred CE and built increasingly sophisticated communities, first on the mesa tops and then, beginning around twelve hundred CE, in the natural rock shelters of the canyon walls.

Cliff Palace, the largest cliff dwelling in North America, contains roughly one hundred fifty rooms and twenty-three circular ceremonial chambers called kivas. It housed an estimated one hundred to one hundred twenty people at its peak. Balcony House, Spruce Tree House, and dozens of smaller communities occupied other canyon walls throughout the mesa.

The Ancestral Puebloans left Mesa Verde around twelve hundred eighty-five CE. Tree ring records document a severe drought lasting more than two decades, and archaeological evidence suggests increasing social stress within the region. They moved south and east into what is now New Mexico and Arizona, where their descendants are the Pueblo peoples of today, including the Hopi, Zuni, Acoma, and the Rio Grande Pueblos.

Mesa Verde became a national park in nineteen oh-six, the first park established specifically to protect the works of human beings rather than natural features. The campaign to protect it was led in part by Virginia McClurg and Lucy Peabody, Colorado women who organized years of advocacy before Congress acted. The park now holds more than four thousand known archaeological sites within its boundaries.