Park Brochure

The Mesa

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A person standing across the canyon from Spruce Tree House in the middle 1200s might have seen something like the view below. This village was one of the largest in Mesa Verde. It had 130 rooms and 8 kivas. About 80 people may have lived here. Hundreds of years before this village was built, their ancestors probably lived in pithouses in this same shelter. These villagers were experienced builders, as we can see by a glance at the construction. The walls are tall and straight, each composed of carefully shaped stones. The season in this scene is autumn, the busiest time of the year for the villagers. The harvest is underway. The men are probably still gleaning the fields, while others spread crops on a roof top to dry. These are the stores that will see them through the long winter and even the next year or two if there is drought. Women are probably making pottery and grinding corn. Children scamper about and old men sit in the sun and tell stories. The scene is conjectural but entirely plausible.

[ Painting Is for NPS Use Only ]

About 1400 years ago, long before any European exploration of the New World, a group of people living in the Four Corners region chose Mesa Verde for their home. For over 700 years their descendants lived and flourished here, eventually building elaborate stone cities in the sheltered recesses of the canyon walls. Then in the late 1200s, within the span of one or two generations, they left their homes and moved away.

Mesa Verde National Park, which occupies part of a large plateau rising high above the Montezuma and Mancos Valleys, preserves a spectacular remnant of their thousand-year-old culture. We call these people the Ancestral Puebloans. Ever since local cowboys rediscovered the cliff dwellings a century ago, archeologists have been trying to understand the life of these people. With each new era of excavation, analysis, classification, and comparison our knowledge continues to grow. Unfortunately, we will never know the whole story of their existence, for they left no written records. Yet for all their silence, these sites speak with a certain eloquence. They tell of a people adept at building, artistic in their crafts, and skillful at wresting a living from a difficult land. They are evidence of a society that accumulated skills and traditions and passed them from one generation to another. By classic times (AD 1100 to 1300), the people of Mesa Verde were the heirs of a vigorous civilization, with accomplishments in community living and the arts. These accomplishments rank among the finest expressions of human culture in ancient America.

Taking advantage of the natural landscape, the Ancestral Puebloan people of Mesa Verde built their dwellings under overhanging cliffs. They used sandstone, shaped into rectangular blocks about the size of a loaf of bread to build their villages. The mortar between the blocks was a mix of mud, water and ash. Wooden beams were used as floors and also made into roofs. Rooms averaged about 5 feet by 5 feet by 6 feet; space enough for two or three persons. Isolated rooms in the rear and on the upper levels were generally used for storing crops.

Much of the daily routine most likely took place in the open courtyards in front of the rooms. It was probably the women who fashioned pottery there, while the men made various tools: knives, axes, awls, and scrapers, out of stone and bone. The fires built in summer were mainly for cooking. In winter when the alcove rooms were damp and uncomfortable, fires probably burned throughout the village. Smoke-blackened walls and ceilings are reminders of the biting cold these people lived with for half of every year.

Clothing closely followed the seasons. In summer, the adults wore basic loincloths and sandals. In winter, they dressed in hides and skins and wrapped themselves against the cold in blankets made of turkey feathers and robes of rabbit fur.

Getting food was a continuous process, even in the best of years. Farming was the main business of these people, but they supplemented their crops of corn, beans, and squash by gathering wild plants and hunting deer, rabbits, squirrels, and other game. Their only domestic animals were dogs and turkeys.

Fortunately for us, the Ancestral Puebloans tossed their trash close by. Scraps of food, broken pottery and tools, anything unwanted went down the slope in front of their houses. Much of what we know about daily life here comes from these refuse heaps.

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