Mesa Verde National Park
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How it came to be
Mesa Verde is Spanish for green table. Here the Basketmaker culture grew out of the local Archaic population and in time developed into the culture of the Ancestral Puebloans. They lived by hunting, gathering and growing corn, beans and squash, and built their first pueblos on the mesa sometime after 650.
From the late 12th century they began to build large dwellings of sandstone and mud mortar in alcoves in the canyon walls. UNESCO counts about 600 cliff dwellings, with villages of 50 to 200 rooms. In the late 13th century, after severe droughts and a period of social instability, the people moved south to Arizona and New Mexico.
On 18 December 1888 the rancher Richard Wetherill and the cowboy Charlie Mason spotted the ruins from the top of the mesa, and Wetherill named the largest one Cliff Palace. In 1891 the Swede Gustaf Nordenskiöld surveyed the sites and shipped many artefacts abroad. Congress and President Theodore Roosevelt established the national park in 1906, and it was inscribed as a World Heritage site in 1978.
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