The Ancestral Puebloans and the Cliff Palaces at Mesa Verde

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The Ancestral Puebloans and the Cliff Palaces at Mesa Verde

Overview

Eight hundred years ago in the American Southwest, a group of indigenous peoples almost literally carved out a home in rock walls of the mesas and canyons. The Anasazi Indians built villages in seemingly inaccessible alcoves of cliff walls. The imposing sandstone structures in the villages themselves are perhaps the work of the most advanced pre-Columbian culture in North America.

The Anasazi had abandoned the spectacular cliff houses 200 years before the first European explorers, who gave Mesa Verde (Spanish for "green table") its name, would visit the region. The area was largely unknown to modern scholars until the American push for western expansion in the mid-nineteenth century. A group of cowboys rediscovered the cliff dwelling villages of Mesa Verde in the 1880s. Almost immediately, the described "cliff palaces" fascinated archaeologists, but despite a century of research, excavation, and discovery, relatively little is known about the Anasazi who built them.

Background

The first inhabitants of Mesa Verde arrived in the region about 550. At first primarily nomadic hunter-gatherer bands, they lived in pithouses on the mesa tops or in shallow caves and rock shelters. These kinds of rock shelters were common in the early inhabitation periods in other regions of North America. Over the next few centuries, the groups became more sedentary and developed horticultural skills.

The environs that surrounded Mesa Verde were diverse, but far from lush. In the heart of plateau and canyon lands, the indigenous peoples of Mesa Verde had to be constantly concerned with the variable local water supply. The semi-arid climate limited building materials. Despite these possible obstacles, the Anasazi built successful agricultural settlements, primarily raising maize. By the seventh century, agriculture was the main means of sustenance for the people of Mesa Verde. As their agricultural practices grew more sophisticated, so did their social patterns. The Anasazi began to cluster greater groups of houses into small villages. They built row houses above ground, using local building materials such as wood and mud.

Sometime before 1000, dwellings had advanced from the mud row and pit houses to larger adobe structures. The Adobe structures were often multistoried and had dozens of rooms. This advancement allowed for the village structure to expand to include even more families. Additional families meant that farming practices became even more collective and systematized. This was the predominant village physical and social structure until emergence of Mesa Verde's classical period around 1100.

In the classical period, the character of Anasazi village structure altered dramatically. The villages became more enclosed and the expertise of Anasazi masonry transformed the village from architecturally functional, to aesthetically interesting. Straight-coursed walls and round towers adorned structures that were now being soundly constructed with double-coursed, carefully quarried sandstone. However, the Anasazi did not inhabit these stone villages atop the mesas for more than a few generations.

A shift in population patterns, for which archaeologists have yet to fully account, again altered the architectural design of Anasazi communities. The villages on the plateaus were largely abandoned, and people returned to the rock shelters in the cliff walls. Some scholars believe this move was for defense or religious reasons; others theorize that villages returned to the rock shelters because of the abundance of water running off of and seeping through the rock in these areas. South-facing alcoves were possibly sought to provide shelter from the elements and heat in the winter. Regardless of the reasons, the Anasazi reconstructed their villages on inset ledges of the mesa cliffs. These are the expertly constructed stone "cliff dwellings" for which the Mesa Verde region is famed.

The cliff dwellings were constructed out of single courses of stone designed to fit the alcoves in which they were built. Though there were several examples of poorer masonry than the village dwellings on the mesa top, the organization and scale of the cliff villages far surpassed those of its predecessor. There were separate structures for living, cooking, storage, and ceremonial uses. Many of the rooms had plastered walls that were intricately painted with bright pigments. Several series of wooden ladders and rope bridges, as well as natural tunnels, provided access to the mesa top or valley below. The village was kept amazingly clean and free of debris. Refuse (including the dead) was dumped down the cliff slope. In the remnants of these refuse piles, archaeologists have learned the most about the Anasazi.

A little over a century later, by 1300, these elaborate cliff dwellings and most of the Mesa Verde area were abandoned. There is evidence at that time of drought, so a possible explanation of the sudden abandonment of the cliff villages was massive crop failure and subsequent starvation.

Impact

Though the common name for the indigenous peoples of Mesa Verde is the Anasazi, meaning "ancient ancestors" in Navajo, many Native Americans and anthropologists now refer to them as the ancestral Puebloan. This change in name reflects an ongoing debate over the which modern peoples are most closely related to the inhabitants of Mesa Verde.

Obviously, without the aid of written documents, what we do know about the ancestral Puebloan was garnered from archaeological research. Archaeologists and anthropologists have no way of knowing exactly how their society was structured. Relying on comparative models from modern Pueblo peoples in the American Southwest, scholars can approximate how ancestral Puebloan society, religious traditions, and political institutions might have paralleled. Most likely, extended families lived together in one home. Members of such clans worked the same agricultural plots and perhaps even had their own family ceremonial rooms, or kivas. Modern Pueblo society is matrilineal (descent is determined through female ancestry) and most anthropologists believe the ancestral Puebloans were also, although it is likely that only men participated in the political aspects of society.

Technologically, the ancestral Puebloans were a lithic, or stone tool, culture. No evidence of metalworking or metal tools have been found among the classical period remains at Mesa Verde. Like most other indigenous cultures, the ancestral Puebloans used stone projectile points and knives. Though their tool assemblage is fairly typical, the ancestral Puebloans were expert basket-makers. This craft was a signature of the region until the introduction of ceramic pottery in the middle periods sent basket-making into decline. Pottery was easier to make, durable, and simplified cooking, thus it swiftly gained popularity. Before the abandonment of the region, several ceramic styles distinctive to Mesa Verde emerged, most featuring painted designs.

Like many other indigenous groups, the ancestral Puebloans established an elaborate trade network. They traded agricultural surplus with local neighbors, as well as specialty craft items such as baskets, leather goods, stone tools, and textiles. These specialty items were also used as trade goods on a far grander scale between communities that were geographically much further away. Remains of seashells, turquoise, and cotton—all indicative of trade from village to village, over hundreds of miles—have been excavated at Mesa Verde.

However unremarkable the daily material cultural of the peoples of classical Mesa Verde may seem, the architectural achievements of the last 200 years of their habitation in the area are outstanding in scale, technique, and appearance. The largest site at Mesa Verde, "Cliff Palace" has 217 rooms, several storage spaces, and 23 kivas. The population of this village alone could have ranged from 200 to nearly 1000. Several smaller cliff dwelling villages are found in the area, all well-planned and organized communities similar in structure to the village at Cliff Palace. Architecture and civic planning was perhaps the greatest legacy of the ancestral Puebloans' short golden age at Mesa Verde.

In 1906, Mesa Verde was declared a National Park. The park occupies nearly 80 square miles of plateau land above the Mancos and Montezuma Valleys and contains hundreds of individual archaeological sites which span the 750 years of settled occupation in the region. In 1978, it was added to the list of World Heritage Sties, granting further protection to its abundant cultural resources. It is the only U.S. National Park created solely to protect man-made works.

ADRIENNE WILMOTH LERNER