Places

Mesa Verde National Park is over 81 square miles (210 square kilometers) of mesas, canyons, hills, and valleys. People have used that entire area to support their livelihoods, leaving traces behind wherever they went.

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History in Every Inch

Ancestral Pueblo people inhabited this land from c. 550-1300 CE. Mesa Verde National Park currently protects and preserves over 52,000 acres including the most extensive concentration of well-preserved prehistoric cliff dwellings in the United States. There are more than 5,000 archeological sites including 600 alcove dwellings and enormous farming villages inhabited.

Ancestral Pueblo people, whose habitats make up the majority in the park, changed the way they built their homes dramatically over 800 years. The eartliest known are single-family pithouses built in small communities mostly on the mesa. Later, large masonry structures on were built and expanded over generations on the mesas and in canyon alcoves. The village infrastructure, included water reservoirs, terraces for farming, towers used for many reasons, and carved trails for everyday travel.

Nomadic peoples, such as Ute, Navajo, and Apache, built temporary structures such as tents, tipis, wickiups, and lean-tos. These don't leave much of a footprint, but are much easier to carry on a seasonal migration!
There is more information on the People page about the different people who have lived on these.

 

The Far View Sites were some of the longest-occupied villages in Mesa Verde, centrally located in the middle of Chapin Mesa with excellent surrounding farmland.

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Mesa Top Sites

The vast majority of Ancestral homes in Mesa Verde are located on the mesa top where people lived for longer periods of time. The Far View Sites were the most densely populated areas of Mesa Verde. Mesa top habitats offered people easy access to flat land farming fields, with abundant sunlight, rich soils, and rain. Reservoirs were built to capture rainwater and snowmelt for household use, and roads traced from village to village.

Mesa top sites include some of the earliest structures found in the park. These are pithouses built in c.550 CE as seasonal homes for individual family, half above-ground and half below-ground. Construction on the mesa top continued well into the 1200's, such as Sun Temple - a large D-shaped roomblock that may have never been finished before the people building it began to move out of the area.

There is much more to learn about living on the mesas on the Mesa Top Sites webpage.

 

Cliff dwellings are largely similar to any other village from the period - groups of buildings divided into living areas, storage rooms, and community spaces.

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Cliff Dwellings

Cliff dwellings were among the last structures to be built by the Ancestral Pueblo people in Mesa Verde. Some pithouses were built in the cliffs hundreds of years before the renown cliff dwellings appeared. Most cliffside villages were constructed between 1180 and 1280 CE.

The canyon alcoves where stone structures were built, were carved by natural springs which would be extremely important to people during dry conditions. Alcoves have protected all sizes of cliff dwellings for centuries and largely contribute to their spectacular preservation.
For more information on individual sites, check out the Cliff Dwellings page.

 

This is the only reconstructed wall at Yucca House National Monument which is situated in the present day Montezuma Valley. Other sites are often only partially visible or buried under windblow soil and brush.

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Valley Sites

Valley sites are among some of the largest in the Mesa Verde region. Lower, flat areas within the canyons offered easy access to fertile farmland. Ancestral Pueblo people living in valleys were able to efficiently travel to other villages for trade, family, and cultural gatherings. Studies of valley sites often find more trade goods and public spaces as a result.

One drawback of valley sites is that some were dependent on the downfall and collection of precipitation, unless of course a spring or a river flowed nearby. With the lack of water, many valley sites were vacated earlier than cliff dwellings.

While there are not valley sites that can be visited in Mesa Verde, Yucca House National Monument (also administered by Mesa Verde National Park) offers visitors a chance to visit a large, unexcavated valley pueblo.