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From Primedia Publications
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Colorado's Mesa Verde
Mystery of the Ancient Ones
By Judy P. Sopronyi


Colorado holds an ancient mystery. The trail is cold and 700 years old. Archaeologists are the detectives. Some of the clues remain inscrutable, but others give us a glimpse of a civilization that flourished for 700 years in the southwest corner of Colorado and then vanished.

To follow that cold trail, I traveled to Mesa Verde in southwest Colorado, fully expecting stunning scenery to go with the mystery. But then I walked around a little outcropping in Mesa Verde National Park and saw my first cliff dwelling, Cliff Palace. Astonished, I stopped dead in my tracks. Here, improbably, was a beautiful city built into rugged cliffs in the middle of nowhere, looking remarkably like a 20th-century cityscape fading into the hollow of the same-color cliff.



I had plenty of company in my quest. About 800,000 visitors a year travel from all over the world to see Mesa Verde National Park. Because of its "outstanding archaeological remains and importance in preserving the global heritage of mankind," it was named a World Heritage Site in 1978 by UNESCO—the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization. Doing our part to reach the 800,000 number were six other travel writers and me. We'd all been to plenty of scenic, historic places, but this was way out of the ordinary, and somehow disquieting. "I feel like I'm in a time warp," said one, and I knew what she meant.

These mysterious ancients had been building stone dwellings here at least since A.D. 750, and before that were digging pit houses and even earlier, about 350 B.C., were probably living in Colorado caves.
This particular time warp isn't limited to Mesa Verde. The Four Corners area—where Colorado, Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico meet at a single point—has pockets of abandoned cliff dwellings and ancient pueblos all over. Next to Mesa Verde is the Ute Mountain Tribal Park with its own cliff dwellings. At the tribal park, Boyd Lopez, brother of our guide, told me, perhaps teasing, that he never came to the area of the cliff dwellings in the park except on business. "Strange things happen here," he said. "Something could push you, and you'd never see anything."

The people who lived here and built these wonders—ruins that give pause to Native Americans living here now—were once called the Anasazi, a Navajo word meaning "the ancient ones" or "the ancient enemy," but are now refered to as the more PC-friendly Ancestral Puebloans. These mysterious ancients had been building stone dwellings here at least since A.D. 750, and before that were digging pit houses and even earlier, about 350 B.C., were probably living in Colorado caves.

Why they began building in inaccessible cliff cavities in the 1200s is anyone's guess. Maybe they wanted to leave the land on top of the mesa free for farming, or they wanted to keep rain and snow off the mud that sheathed and grouted their buildings. Defense against enemies is another obvious reason to build there. In fact, a battle site dated about 1250 was recently discovered in nearby Crow Canyon. Archaeologist Doug Bowman, director of Colorado University's museum and cultural park in nearby Cortez, backs this up by saying the local Ute tribe has a story of an ancient battle, but there's no hard evidence the Utes were here then. Whatever the reasons, they built thousands of cliff dwellings throughout the Four Corners area. Though many have been ransacked for artifacts, only a few have been cleared of rubble, stabilized and studied by archaeologists. They come in all sizes, from "cities" like Cliff Palace to tiny storage caches tucked into crannies in remote cliffs.

In Mesa Verde National Park, there are five you can tour and 11 other major ruins you can see from park roads. Touring the open ones is fascinating. You can look into rooms and guess at daily life there 700 years ago or climb down a ladder into a circular kiva—dim, quiet and cool, with a stone bench around the edge. Kivas were religious spaces and probably social centers. You can examine the construction close up and think about how long it took to chip a sandstone rock into a beautifully finished building block and admire the way they fitted their buildings to the hollow of the cliff.

The doorways, a foot or two off the floor, seem strange until you think about them. If you were accustomed to having an entrance in the roof—the only way you could get into a pit house or an early pueblo—it wouldn't seem odd to have one high on a wall, and if you were raising small children and lived in the side of the cliff, you'd want to keep the little ones from running out the door by themselves. You'd also want to keep the domesticated turkeys and dogs outside, I imagine.


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