Mesa Verde: The First Cultural National Park in the World

On June twenty-ninth, nineteen oh six, President Theodore Roosevelt signed a bill creating Mesa Verde National Park. The paperwork was not unusual for its time. Roosevelt had been signing park-creation bills with some regularity. What was unusual was what the bill protected.

Every national park before Mesa Verde, Yellowstone, Yosemite, Sequoia, Mount Rainier, the Petrified Forest, all of them, had been established to protect something natural: a geological feature, an ecological wonder, a landscape so dramatic or so rare that Congress decided the government should own it and keep it. Mesa Verde was different. What the bill protected was a city. A human-built city, empty for six centuries, carved into the alcoves of a sandstone mesa in the southwest corner of Colorado.

Mesa Verde was the first national park in the world established primarily to protect a cultural resource rather than a natural one. The argument Roosevelt and Congress were making was a new kind of argument: that what people had built, the stone rooms, the kivas, the towers of Cliff Palace and Spruce Tree House, was worth protecting with the same legal force as a geyser basin.

The bill had been a decade in making. Advocates like the Colorado Federation of Women's Clubs had pushed for park status since the eighteen nineties, alarmed by the commercial looting of the cliff dwellings. By the time Roosevelt signed, Cliff Palace had already lost artifacts to museums and private collectors across two continents.

The park has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since nineteen seventy-eight, one of a handful of sites in the United States on that list. The argument that human-built environments deserve protection equivalent to natural ones is now so standard it barely registers. In nineteen oh six it was genuinely new.