Mesa Verde and Cliff Palace: Ancestral Puebloan Cliff Dwellings

Cliff Palace is the largest cliff dwelling in North America, a village of sandstone rooms and towers built by Ancestral Puebloans into an alcove of a canyon wall at Mesa Verde in southwestern Colorado between about 1190 and 1280. It is the best-known of roughly 600 cliff dwellings in Mesa Verde National Park. Only a few generations after it was finished, the people who built it left the region for good, and the reasons for that departure are one of the central questions of North American archaeology.

Background: six centuries on the mesa

Mesa Verde (“green table” in Spanish) is a high plateau cut by deep canyons, rising above the Montezuma Valley near the Four Corners, where Colorado, Utah, Arizona and New Mexico meet. Farmers first settled on its flat tops around AD 550. Archaeologists call this early phase Basketmaker III: families lived in pithouses, partly sunk into the ground, grew maize, beans and squash and made fine baskets and their first pottery.

Over the following centuries the way people lived changed in stages. From about 750 they built rows of connected rooms above ground, the beginning of the pueblo (Spanish for “village”) style. Between about 900 and 1150 masonry villages spread across the mesa tops, and the region came into the orbit of the great houses of Chaco Canyon, some 150 kilometres to the south. Pottery painted black-on-white, round ceremonial rooms called kivas, and reservoirs for storing rainwater all appeared during this long period.

The people who lived here are called Ancestral Puebloans. The older name, Anasazi, comes from the Navajo language and is usually translated as “ancestors of the enemies” or “ancient ones”; many Pueblo people prefer not to use it. Modern Pueblo nations, including the Hopi, Zuni, Acoma and the Tewa-speaking villages of the Rio Grande, regard Mesa Verde as part of their ancestral homeland.

Moving into the cliffs

Around 1190 many families began to build homes inside the shallow caves and overhangs, called alcoves, that line the canyon walls just below the mesa rim. This was a striking change. For more than six centuries people had lived on the mesa tops near their fields; now a large part of the population moved into places reached by toeholds cut in the rock, ladders and narrow paths.

Most of the cliff dwellings were small, with one to five rooms, and many were probably storage sites. A few were much larger. Cliff Palace, Long House, Spruce Tree House, Square Tower House and Balcony House are the best-known, and each served as a community for dozens of people. Farming continued on the mesa tops, so residents climbed up and down the cliffs every day.

Why people made this move is still debated. Alcoves offered shelter from snow and summer sun, and the south- and west-facing ones caught low winter light. They also freed level ground for farming. Many archaeologists think defence played a part as well, because the move coincided with growing tension and violence in the region, but the cliff dwellings were not designed as forts in any simple sense.

Building Cliff Palace

Cliff Palace sits in a large alcove in Cliff Canyon, on the eastern side of Chapin Mesa. Tree-ring dating of its beams shows that building and remodelling went on from about 1190 until roughly 1260 or somewhat later, although the National Park Service notes that the major part of the work was done within a span of about 20 years. The site was left only a few decades later, when the whole region was abandoned.

The builders shaped sandstone blocks with harder hammerstones, laid them in a mortar of soil, water and ash, and filled the gaps with small stone chinks. Walls were finished with plaster, some of it painted. Wooden beams brought from the mesa top supported floors and roofs. The rooms rise in places to three and four storeys, and a tall square tower at one end still shows traces of painted designs on its inner walls.

The site contains about 150 rooms and 23 kivas. Kivas were round rooms set into the ground and entered through the roof by a ladder. They had a central hearth, a ventilator shaft, and often a small hole in the floor known by its Hopi name, sipapu, symbolising the place where people emerged into this world. Kivas were used for ceremonies but probably also for everyday work and gatherings, especially in winter.

Daily life in a cliff village

The National Park Service estimates that about 100 people lived in Cliff Palace. That is a modest number for so many rooms: many small chambers at the back of the alcove were granaries, kept dry by the overhang, where maize and other food could be stored for a year or more against crop failure.

Daily life centred on farming. Families grew maize, beans and squash in small fields on the mesa top and on terraces behind check dams, low stone walls that trapped soil and runoff in drainages. Water came from springs and seeps at the back of alcoves, and from reservoirs; the large stone-lined basin now called Mummy Lake is usually interpreted as one, though its purpose is debated. People kept domesticated turkeys, used for their feathers to make warm blankets as well as for meat, and hunted deer, rabbits and bighorn sheep.

Women ground maize on stone slabs called metates, often in rooms set aside for the purpose. Potters made the distinctive Mesa Verde black-on-white ware, with bold geometric designs. Living so close together, residents faced problems of sanitation and disease, and skeletons from the period show signs of nutritional stress, worn teeth from grit in the flour, and arthritis from hard physical work.

Cliff Palace also seems to have had a special role. Its unusual number of kivas, its tower and its open plazas suggest it may have been an administrative or ceremonial centre for smaller settlements nearby, though the details of how the community was organised are unknown.

Why the people left

By around 1300 the entire Mesa Verde region, which archaeologists estimate held some 20,000–30,000 people in its central area in the mid-1200s, had been emptied of farmers. The last tree-ring cutting dates from the region fall around 1280, and Cliff Palace was left within a generation of its final remodelling.

No single cause explains the departure. The Great Drought of 1276, identified from tree rings, lasted until 1299 and came after decades of unreliable rainfall and cool growing seasons. A large population had depleted wood, game and good farmland. Violence increased: at sites such as Castle Rock Pueblo and Sand Canyon Pueblo, archaeologists have found evidence of attacks and killings around 1280. At the same time, growing communities and new religious practices to the south, in the Rio Grande valley and around the Hopi and Zuni areas, offered places to go.

The migration was probably a gradual process lasting several decades, organised by families and clans rather than a sudden flight. Pueblo oral traditions describe ancestors moving through many places before settling, and treat Mesa Verde as one stage on that journey.

Rediscovery, excavation and protection

Ute people, who lived in the area later, knew the ruins well. The first recorded sighting of Cliff Palace by Anglo-Americans was on 18 December 1888, when the local ranchers Richard Wetherill and Charlie Mason saw it while looking for stray cattle in a snowstorm. They named it and began collecting artefacts.

In 1891 the young Swedish scientist Gustaf Nordenskiöld excavated at Mesa Verde, mapped and photographed the sites carefully, and shipped a large collection to Europe. It later passed to the National Museum of Finland in Helsinki. After long discussions, ancestral remains and grave goods from that collection were returned to the associated tribes in 2020 and reburied.

Concern about looting helped lead to the creation of Mesa Verde National Park on 29 June 1906, the first US national park set aside to protect the works of people rather than natural scenery. In 1909 the archaeologist Jesse Walter Fewkes of the Smithsonian Institution excavated and stabilised Cliff Palace. In 1978 Mesa Verde became one of the first sites inscribed on UNESCO’s World Heritage List.

By the numbers

Myths and facts

Myth: the Anasazi vanished mysteriously. The people of Mesa Verde did not vanish. They migrated, and their descendants live in Pueblo communities in Arizona and New Mexico, where many traditions link them to Mesa Verde.

Myth: people lived in the cliffs for most of Mesa Verde’s history. In fact the cliff dwellings were occupied for less than a century, at the very end of about 700 years of settlement on the mesa.

Myth: Cliff Palace was a city of thousands. Its 150 rooms housed about 100 people; many rooms were for storage.

Timeline

• c. 550: First farming families build pithouses on the Mesa Verde plateau.
• c. 750–1150: Above-ground pueblos, kivas and reservoirs spread across the mesa tops.
• c. 1190: Families begin building homes in the canyon alcoves; work on Cliff Palace starts.
• c. 1260: Building and remodelling at Cliff Palace has largely been completed.
• 1276–1299: The Great Drought, recorded in tree rings, grips the Four Corners.
• c. 1300: The Mesa Verde region has been abandoned by its farming population.
• 18 December 1888: Richard Wetherill and Charlie Mason see Cliff Palace.
• 1891: Gustaf Nordenskiöld excavates and documents the cliff dwellings.
• 29 June 1906: Mesa Verde National Park is created.
• 1978: Mesa Verde is inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Why it matters

Cliff Palace is among the best-preserved settlements of pre-Columbian North America and a direct link between the medieval Southwest and living Pueblo nations. Its brief occupation and rapid abandonment make it a key case for understanding how farming societies respond to drought, conflict and social change, a story continued in later episodes such as the Pueblo Revolt of 1680.