Ancient Civilization

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At first glance, the Southwestern deserts seem like the worst place on the continent to settle: hot in summer, cold in winter, and incredibly dry.

In reality, several ancient tribes set up remarkably sophisticated civilizations here.

They developed the large scale social organizations needed to build large scale irrigation works, plus remarkable stone settlements.

Their remains now cover the region, haunting reminders of ancient humanity.

The dry environment ensures that all is remarkably well preserved.

I plan to see many of these sites over the next month.

Cortez sits near one of the most famous.

Mesa Verde

A long low sandstone mesa rises south and west of town.

It’s covered in pine trees.

From a distance, the mesa appears green.

Spanish explorers called it Mesa Verde.

Dozens of sandstone canyons cut into the southern edge.

Starting fourteen centuries ago, those canyons became home to a remarkable civilization, culminating in cave pueblos that first made the mesa famous.

The area is now protected by Mesa Verde National Park.





The highway into the park climbs the mesa east of Cortez.

It twists through a number of narrow gullies.

As the road climbs, it passes some overlooks with a view of the valley below, and an impressive range of peaks on the horizon.

Those peaks are the San Juan Mountains, the southwestern-most portion of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado.

Finally, the road reaches the top of the mesa and becomes nearly flat.





After a while, the road reaches the Far View Visitors Center, the entrance to the park.

The center sells tickets for tours of the main ruins.

It has the name ‘Far View’ because it used to have one, a multiple hundreds of miles view that stretched all the way to central Arizona.

Thanks to pollution from area coal power plants, it now has less than a quarter of that.





Past the visitors’ center, the road runs across the mesa to the ruins.

It then forks.

One branch goes to the main ruins and the other to sites on top of the mesa.

The ruins are hard to see without tour tickets, so the latter branch is actually more scenic.

The ruin tours only run at particular times, so I went to those first.

Cliff

Palace

Cliff Palace is the largest ruin in Mesa Verde.

The road goes to a large parking lot.

From it, a trail quickly leads to a cliff with a perfect view of the ruin, sitting in a huge alcove.

A big sign warns to take drinking water for the tour.

A remarkable amount of people forget they are hiking in a high desert and become dehydrated.

Going any further requires a tour ticket.





Our guide first described the history of the area.

The first inhabitants lived in pits on the surface of the mesa and farmed corn.

Their numbers grew.

They developed more sophisticated buildings formed of adobe blocks and rocks.

Their numbers grew some more.

The large number of people ultimately had a big impact on the environment, by reducing the amount of game and cutting down most of the trees.

Then, Mesa Verde was hit by a drought in the late 1200s.

Groups started building huge complexes in the caves along the canyons.

Many people see these ruins as the civilization’s greatest accomplishment, but they were actually its last gasp.

Less than a hundred years later, the entire area was abandoned.





After that talk, we passed through the gate and down a steep rocky trail.

It dropped down a narrow ravine next to the cliff and then followed a sandstone shelf to the ruin.

From this perspective the ruin appears as a large collection of stone walls and rooms.

The rocks are precisely aligned.

The buildings have multiple stories, with the ceilings held up by truly ancient wooden timbers.

We did not go in any buildings but could peer through the doorways.

All doorways have a distinctive T shape that forced the inhabitants to duck passing through.

The rooms themselves are small and incredibly dark.

Most have black ceilings from fires for cooking and warmth.





The most important buildings are found right in the middle of the ruin, two kivas.

These are circular rooms dug into the sandstone.

Cliff Palace has 21 of them.

Remains of rooms like these, with a nearly identical layout, are found throughout the southwest.





These rooms are ceremonial chambers.

People entered the chamber through a hole in the roof, down a wooden ladder.

A fire also blazed under the central hole.

An air vent sits in the kiva wall to the side, always next to a low stone wall to spread air through the kiva.

Next to the fire sits a hole in the floor, the sipapu.

Many southwestern tribes believe they emerged into this world from one below the surface through a hole, and the kiva hole symbolizes this passage.

Exactly where humanity emerged varies by tribe, and current pueblo Indians do not reveal it.

Anthropologists believe many locate the hole in the Grand Canyon.





Mesa Verde residents chose these alcoves for their pueblos because each contained a seep spring for water.

The water initially eroded the cave.

The tour goes to the spring for Cliff House, which is dry this time of year.

Ironically, the seep spring erodes the ruin just as well as the sandstone, so the Park Service had to construct a diversion channel.





Our guide discussed the archeology of the site.

Scientists analyze Southwestern cultures through pots and other artifacts, the architecture and building techniques, and stories from descendents.

They also found a treasure trove on the canyon floor, ancient trash.

When something wasn’t useful any longer in the pueblo, inhabitants threw it over the edge.





Why did people abandon the mesa, and where did they go?

Drought is the normal answer, but people stayed through previous ones.

The valley floor has evidence of warfare between competing tribes, but the mesa itself has none.

The consensus opinion is that people left due to a combination of drought and resource depletion.

Whatever their reasons, they planned to come back.

They buried pots filled with seeds and other supplies, and took very little with them.

Where they ended up has been traced through tribal legends.

They headed southeast, to the more reliable water of the Rio Grande River.

Their descendents merged with other tribes to form the pueblos of New Mexico.





Inhabitants of the pueblo had quite a climb to get to their fields on the mesa top.

We got to see it on the way out.

A sandstone shelf led to a narrow and very steep crack.

The original inhabitants chipped steps into the rock, which are still visible in many places.

We climbed the crack along narrow wooden ladders.

Much of it is quite claustrophobic.

The climb ends near the parking lot.

Balcony House

Balcony House is the other ruin tour along the highway.

This pueblo was clearly sited for defensive purposes.

It is not reachable from the floor of the canyon and not visible from any point above it.

The only way in was to walk a long rock shelf and then squeeze through a narrow crack next to the alcove.

Unfortunately, this inaccessibility means that current visitors also have quite an ordeal to reach the place.

Some guides call it the “Indiana Jones” pueblo for this reason, and play up the effort as an adventure.

Anyone with a fear of heights or tight spaces should stay away.





Past the entrance gate, the trail reaches a long ladder down.

This one is bolted to the side of the canyon, with long views.

It reaches a sandstone shelf and follows it to a seep spring.

Although it is not the main spring used by the pueblo, it is one of the few in the park that runs year round.





Just beyond the spring sits a nearly vertical wooden ladder with two hundred steps.

It climbs to the alcove containing the pueblo.

The climb feels dangerous thanks to the footing, where each step is almost directly over the previous one.

Use hands for balance and move carefully.

Most people can make it as long as they look straight at the canyon wall instead of up or down.

Doing either of those will trigger vertigo.





The ladder ends at a rocky alcove containing a number of small rooms.

These were used to hold grain.

The original passages into these rooms were very tight, so the Park Service removed some walls in the 1930s.

From there, the trail passes larger rooms used as living quarters.

The overall complex is much smaller than Cliff House.

A set of well worn sandstone steps climbs the alcove behind the buildings to the seep spring, which was dry.





We then saw another pair of stone kivas, including one right on the edge of the alcove.

The layout of the kivas is identical to Cliff Palace, except that the air vents are in a different place.

Careful study of the masonry shows that the air vent originally had the same layout and was then moved.

It was likely moved due to the wind direction in the canyon.





After the kivas, we had to get out of the pueblo.

Like Cliff Palace, we used the route of the original inhabitants.

It led directly into a narrow slot two feet wide, and then things got worse.

Just before the area was abandoned, the inhabitants built a tunnel by laying down rocks held together with adobe cement, and then filling the crack above it.

This tunnel is three feet high and a foot and a half wide.

Like the original inhabitants, I had to get through it by crawling on my side, pushing with my hands and feet.

I barely resisted humming the theme to Indiana Jones while doing so.





Past the crack, the original rock shelf is now too eroded to be safe.

Instead, we climbed a steep and narrow ladder along the canyon wall.

Like the other one, the views are long and can trigger vertigo.

That ended on a series of steps carved into the sandstone with a railing and safety fence.

The steps are smooth, so they feel dangerous even with the fence.

The climb ends at the parking lot.





A visitor’s complex sits near the junction of the two mesa roads, the Chapin Mesa Museum.

The complex contains a deli with overpriced food and a museum on the pueblos.

I ate the food because the alternative was a long drive back to Cortez.

Richard Wetherill, the Antiquities Act, and Mesa Verde

The museum covers the known history of Mesa Verde.

It’s worth seeing before driving to the mesa top sites.

Like the Cliff Palace tour, it describes how the pueblos are merely the last phase of civilization on the mesa.

The museum contains a number of diorama showing how inhabitants lived at different points.

It also has a selection of artifacts, including pottery, stone bowls, and ancient tools.





Oddly enough, the museum does NOT talk about how the park came into existence.

This is unfortunate, because those events did more than anything else to change land preservation policies in the United States.

The pueblos of Mesa Verde were rediscovered by rancher Richard Wetherill in 1888.

He was enraptured by them.

While the sense of history was surely part of it, the opportunity to make money played a bigger part.

Many westerners thought this way at the time.

He came back with mining tools and started to dig.

Wetherill soon found pots and other artifacts, which he sold.

He also started guiding visitors to the site.





His activities attracted the attention of Gustaf Nordenskiold, a Finnish baron and archeologist.

He offered to finance Richard Wetherill’s activities and teach him archeology techniques, in return for most of the finds.

Wetherill agreed.

Over the next few years his group found hundreds of artifacts, all of which he documented in notebooks.

Nearly all of them were then shipped to Finland.





The shipments drew the attention of some US Congressmen.

The removal of important historic artifacts did not concern them much, but passing those artifacts to a foreign power did.

They ultimately passed the landmark Antiquities Act in 1906.

It banned the export of ancient artifacts from the US without a permit, and created Mesa Verde National Park.





The law also contained a little noticed provision that ultimately changed the history of the west.

This provision allowed the President to declare any existing federal land with important historic sites to be a National Monument, which would prevent commercial exploitation.

The goal was to prevent men like Richard Wetherill from raping other ancient sites.

President Theodore Roosevelt quickly worked out how to use this law to also preserve sites with high scenic or environmental merits, in effect allowing the president to unilaterally create new national parks in all but name.

He proceeded to do so throughout the west.

These monuments included areas that are now quite famous, such as the Grand Canyon.

The law is still in force, and has resulted in more land preservation than all others combined.





Richard Wetherill wasn’t done after he was kicked out of Mesa Verde.

He searched for other ancient pueblo ruins to explore and exploit.

He ultimately found hundreds, including many of the largest ever discovered.

For better and worse, modern archeology in the southwest would not exist without his long shadow.

Spruce Tree House

Spruce Tree House sits in an alcove on a canyon near the center.

It’s the smallest of the pueblos open to the public.

It’s also the easiest to access, with a floor close to the canyon floor.

It’s the only one that can be toured without a guide, although a ranger is on sight to answer questions.





The trail to the pueblo starts by dropping down the side of the canyon.

It switchbacks through open sandstone slabs with bushes growing on them.

The slabs have a great view of the pueblo on the other side of the canyon.

This leads into even steeper switchbacks, down the canyon wall.

The trail reaches a dry creek in pine trees at the bottom, and briefly follows it.

It then climbs into the alcove.





The alcove containing Spruce Tree House is low and deep.

Very little precipitation gets in, so the pueblo is remarkably well preserved.

Visitors are restricted to a trail at the front of the alcove.

The highlight is a reconstructed kiva.

The roof was constructed of multiple layers of mud, sticks, and straw, held up by wooden cross beams.

A ladder drops from the center hole.

Inside, the kiva is incredibly dark, and very cramped by modern standards.

It has the same layout as those in Cliff Palace.

Pre-pueblo Sites

The other road from the museum covers sites on the mesa top, the residents’ original living quarters.

A number are marked by plaques.

Some are covered with roofs to better preserve the ruins.

The first is little more than a big pit in the ground, an original house.

This pit house has two rooms, and is over eight hundred years old.

I had an unexpected lump in my throat seeing a human built structure that ancient.





The next sites covered what followed, small structures.

Only the foundations remain.

New structures were built on top of the foundations of old ones, so the buildings now overlap.

The first kivas appeared in this period, first as little more than holes in the ground.

One site has the remains of one kiva built on top of the foundation of an older kiva.





Near the end, the road passes an important ruin called the Sun Temple.

Archeologists don’t know what it was for, but many believe it was built as an appeal to the gods who had withheld the rains during the late 1200s.

It was one of the last structures built on the mesa, and left unfinished when people left.

It sits right at the point where two canyons join, with views of many different pueblos.

Cliff Palace is directly across the canyon.

Here, I got a better sense of how Mesa Verde was like a small city than anywhere else in the park.





The temple itself is shaped like the letter D.

The outer walls surround two round open courtyards.

The walls themselves are all masonry, about six feet high.

The architecture is unlike anything else in the park.

It does have a fascinating resemblance to that of other southwestern ruins, including the amazing pueblos of Chaco Canyon to the south.





Those mountains I saw on the drive in sing a siren song to all who visit this area.

After having my fill of Mesa Verde, I eagerly answered it.

The first part of the drive was flat desert scrub.

Hills then rose, ultimately forming a narrow river canyon.

Night fell, so I didn’t see much beyond the canyon itself.

I then reached the little town of Rico, one of the last mining towns in Colorado.

It contains the Rico Hotel, an old and atmospheric Victorian lodging.

Signs warn to remove scented items from cars thanks to bears.

The inn contains a restaurant, which served pretty good food for such a small town.

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Photos

Cliff Palace
Cliff Palance, the largest ruin at Mesa Verde. Note the tour group on the far right

San Juan Mountains
The San Juan Mountains from a pullout on the road to Mesa Verde

Cliff Palace kiva
One of the kivas at Cliff Palace, The fire was in the ring of stones at the center

Cliff Palance dwelling
Inside the remians of a dwelling at Cliff Palace. Note the black ceiling from a century of fires.

Cliff Palace climb
Part of the original route to and from Cliff Palace. The ladders are modern.

Balcony House adventure
The ladder climb into Balcony House

Balcony House
The main plaza of Balcony House, with two kivas

Ancient steps
Eight hundred year old sandstone steps leading to the spring for Balcony House

Balcony House exit
The only way out of Balcony House, two feet wide and three feet high

Spruce Tree House
Spruce Tree House, the best preserved pueblo in Mesa Verde

Reconstructed kiva
Inside the reconstructed kiva at Spruce Tree House

Mesa Verde doorway
One of the characteristic doorways found throughout Mesa Verde, at Spruce Tree House

Pithouse
One of the original settlers' houses at Mesa Verde. This site is over a thousand years old!

Mesa top pueblo
Early pueblo on Mesa Verde. Two kivas are off to the right

Sun Temple
Part of the unfinished Sun Temple at Mesa Verde

Canyon
Part of Mesa Verde canyon from the Sun Temple. Note Cliff Palace on the upper right