September 3: Beginnings and Endings

Everyone thinks of the spectacular cliff dwellings.  That's Mesa Verde.  In fact, the cliff dwellings were only inhabited for about 75 years.  For the previous 500 years, thousands of Mesa Verdeans lived on the Mesa tops.  What drove them into the cliffs is the mystery that archaeologists are trying to decipher.  And what drove them out so quickly is the bookend of the mystery.  But there is another issue, I think.  Why did they expend such extraordinary skill and effort on dwellings they would soon abandon?

The National Park actually does a fine job in presenting the various stages of Pueblo life and architecture.  Were these the same people, who simply "evolved" new styles of culture?  Or were new cultural groups, with similar "Puebloan" ways of thinking, immigrating to Mesa Verde and introducing innovations?  (Most archaeologists now take the latter view.)

The Park Service has not just preserved the archaeological remains of the cliff palaces, but also of the much earlier "pithouses,"

These were lined with upright stone slabs

 and the earth itself moderated the temperature of the living space.  Geo-thermal.  Pithouses had storage areas, work areas, and living areas.

They were the predecessor of the later kiva structures.

During Pueblo I times (750-900 A.D.), ancestral Puebloans began building simple above ground masonry units for their households.

During Pueblo II times (900-1100 A.D.) these households began to congregate into larger settlement units.  Coyote Village was one of these on Mesa Verde.

Each kiva was probably the living space of a family or clan, but they now began to cooperate.

The future outline of historic pueblos took shape.

For years, archaeologists characterized them as dry farmers, with little technical interest in water control.  Wrong.  This reservoir, called Mummy Lake,

would have made a good football stadium and could hold a half million gallons of water.  It captured water from a canal that began a few miles higher up and channeled it in such a way that silt and debris was trapped before entering the reservoir.

Steps led down into it, because the water was for domestic use.  (For the first several decades, this was the same technology that the Park Service used to make water available to park visitors.)  The reservoir recently received national recognition for its engineering genius.

The thing is, very little is known about what is really in Mesa Verde.  When the fires struck in the 1990s, the Park Service had an opportunity to explore the Mesa Top for ancient sites for the first time, in essence.  All the money and effort had gone into stabilizing the famous sites that visitors want to see.  Archaeologist looking at the area destroyed in the Chapin 5 fire in 1996, for example, found over 4,000 unexplored sites.  Over 1,000 of these sites were water control sites--check dams, reservoirs, terraces, etc.  This is one large terraced area, for example,

 that Pueblo II farmers carefully crafted to take advantage of what little rain there was.  The fire revealed it.

The real shame is that the history of the ancestral Puebloans is still underground, waiting to be excavated.  This is another site

--in view of the Visitor's Center--that once held a Great Kiva

and was the center of a large village surrounding what is called "Battleship Rock."

The Cliff Dwellers get the publicity and fame.  But they were the only the end-game.