WEBVTT
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If you're looking for a more adventurous
tour,
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I would definitely go with Long House.
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It's actually as big as Cliff Palace.
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It's 150 rooms and 21 kivas.
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Long House is the most in-depth tour.
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It's a hiking tour, as well, so we are
going to hike 2 and a quarter miles
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round trip.
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You're going to descend down into a
canyon about 150 feet,
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so there is some elevation change,
but you'll get to
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actually tour through Long House,
climb some ladders,
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see the main water source for the
Ancestral Puebloan people
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which is a seep spring.
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It's a litlte bit more of a challenge to
get there because
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you do have to walk a mile in order to
get into the site.
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And you walk that mile with a ranger.
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You get to go beyond just the basics,
you get to talk a little bit more about
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what life was like even before the
cliff dwellings.
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Some of the highlights of the Long House
tour, would number 1, be
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the size of the site.
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Another thing that's really great about
this site is you can really see
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how agriculture affected these people
here.
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How it allowed them to live together
in such large numbers.
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The views, coming in and out of Long
House
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just the trail getting in and out is just
amazing.
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You get great views down canyon,
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and also you can see a lot of where the
fires came through.
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And we continue with the group down
into the site.
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We climb up the ladders and we gather
around the seep spring.
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The seep spring is very central to the
story of the cliff dwellings.
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We now believe that it's those seep
springs that
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bring people down from the mesa tops
into the cliffs
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to be closer to those water sources.
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It's one of these incredible points of
ingenuity
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where you can see the carved little
basins in the spring,
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where water would collect, and even
from there,
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Ancestral Pueblo folks carved little
channels in the bedrock
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to direct the flow of water into what we
call "cupules"
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these little depressions, just big enough
for a gourd or a clay dipper
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where you can fill your water jug.
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And we continue on through the site.
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We go down a ladder and down a series
of steps
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and at the very end, we gather in a large
plaza.
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We see, probably by the dance plaza
that's there,
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that this would have been a community
that did accept
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some of the migration coming up from the
southern areas.
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In some cases, people say that this is
possible to be a Great Kiva.
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If it is, there's a lot of change going
on at once,
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and that would have come with those
migrants.
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It's above ground, rather than
underground.
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It's square, it's not round.
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And it may have been open-air, rather
than roofed.
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And it's community-oriented.
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There with my group, I love to construct
an image of what life
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would have looked like 800 years
ago.
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When the walls were twice as high.
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When they were all plastered on the
inside and out.
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When they all had their flat roofs.
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And hundreds of people from across the
canyons have
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come to gather to watch the celebration
that was taking place
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inside of that courtyard.
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It would have been magical. There would
have been a fire going in the middle,
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it would have been reflecting off of all
the walls and the people's faces
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who have gathered to watch the event.
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And the sound would have gone down
canyon for miles.
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[GROUP SHOUTING DOWN CANYON/ECHOES]
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And you can imagine that sound
probably makes its way
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all the way down to Cliff Palace.
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It provides a better sense, again, of what
life was like here.
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A lot of people, they simply look at this
architecture and they say it's
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strictly defensive, but I think there's
more to the story.
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Because when you're standing inside
those courtyards,
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and there's a large event happening,
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and the sound is issuing down-canyon,
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they're not hiding.
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It actually seems like a very visible
space.