Mesa Verde: Cliff Palace and What Happened Before the Drought

Sometime around eleven hundred ninety common era, the people living on top of the mesa at Mesa Verde began moving into the cliff. Not down the slope but literally into it, into the natural alcoves formed by erosion in the canyon walls, south-facing sandstone shelves with overhead rock for protection from rain and snow. They built rooms. They built rooms behind rooms. They built circular ceremonial chambers sunk into the floors, the kivas that archaeologists would spend the next century trying to understand. They plastered the walls and decorated them. They stored food in sealed jars. They raised children in buildings that required hand- and toe-holds cut into the cliff face just to enter.

Cliff Palace, the largest of these communities, held approximately one hundred fifty rooms and twenty-three kivas. It was occupied for roughly a century, from about eleven hundred ninety to thirteen hundred common era. At its height, perhaps one hundred people lived there. The pueblo rose five stories in places. From across the canyon, in the right light, it looks like it was built yesterday.

The Hopi people, the Zuni, the Acoma, the nineteen Rio Grande Pueblos, and other contemporary Pueblo nations of New Mexico and Arizona carry oral traditions connecting their ancestors directly to this mesa. The National Park Service consults with twenty-six affiliated tribes in managing Mesa Verde. The cliff dwellers are not anonymous. They are the grandparents of living people.

The abandonment of Mesa Verde by thirteen hundred common era is documented in tree-ring records from the University of Arizona Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research. A megadrought lasting from twelve seventy-six to twelve ninety-nine stripped the plateau of adequate rainfall for twenty-three consecutive years. The people moved south and east into the Rio Grande valley, into communities that became the pueblos that still exist. They did not vanish. They relocated.

When the National Park Service asks visitors to stay on the designated paths, when rangers limit the number of people who can enter Cliff Palace on any given day, the reason is that the mortar holding those rooms together is still the original mortar. The building is not a replica. It is the thing itself. That is worth the permit and the patience it takes to book the tour.