Mesa Verde

Mesa Verde, in southwestern Colorado, preserves hundreds of dwellings built by the Ancestral Puebloan people into natural sandstone alcoves along the walls of its canyons, most constructed during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries AD. Its largest and best known structure, Cliff Palace, contains well over one hundred rooms and more than twenty kivas, circular ceremonial chambers, and is the largest cliff dwelling in North America. The Ancestral Puebloans built these alcove settlements using shaped sandstone blocks set in mortar, fitting multi-story room blocks into the constrained, irregular space of the rock shelters, an adaptation of masonry construction to a defensible natural setting. The population is believed to have left the area by the end of the thirteenth century, for reasons researchers connect to prolonged drought and resource pressure. Mesa Verde was established as a United States National Park in 1906, among the first in the world created specifically to preserve human-built structures rather than natural scenery, and was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1978.