Probably the most famous of the ancient Puebloan sites is Mesa Verde in southwest Colorado. There are over 1,000 archeological sites on the Mesa Verde plateaus, about 600 of them are cliff houses. Most are unexcavated and not accessible to visitors, and most that are accessible are only through a guided tour. We visited one cliff dwelling that didn’t require a guided tour although there was a ranger at the site, and Jeff visited two others with a guided tour. Based on the steep steps and ladders (my hip has been bothering me when climbing up) and on the very small tunnels visitors have to crawl through I decided to stay home.

Cliff Palace is the ‘crown jewel’ of all the sites at Mesa Verde. It really is a palace! The site was excavated to recover artifacts, and the rubble removed and many walls rebuilt so that visitors can see how the ancient puebloans lived here. The Balcony House is also very large and fabulous.

We also walked around some of the pueblo style structures.

We had a great time visiting Mesa Verde – here are some pictures:

There are so many ancient puebloan sites in the southwest Colorado area and we could only visit a few of them. One of the most interesting is Hovenweep which is actually just across the border in Utah. We visited some structures built right along the edges of a canyon which would seem a very strange place to want to live when there is so much flat land around the canyon. One theory of why they built right on the edges of the canyon is to preserve the flat land for farming.

Another unusual feature of many of the structures along the canyon is that they are small but built very tall, resembling towers. Some are round and some are square.

Here are some pictures:

Also in the southwest part of Colorado is a national park called “Canyons of the Ancients”. It’s a large and spread out park containing several areas where ancient Puebloans built structures and lived. Much of the area is only accessible by 4-wheel drive, but we visited one spot called Lowry Pueblo where there is a great house with over 100 rooms and it’s estimated that several hundred people lived there at one time. Like most of the other ancient puebloan sites, it was occupied in the 1100-1200s and was abandoned in the late 1200s. It was previously thought that the abandonment of all the ancient puebloan sites in such a short timeframe had extra-terrestrial roots (ET came and took them) or that there were wars among the native tribes, it is now thought that they simply felt it was time to move along to a new area. There could have been a drought and the resources may have been used up. Modern natives who can trace their ancestry, through oral history, to these sites feel that’s what happened – they decided to move along. Modern natives still visit many of these sites to speak to their ancestors and hold ceremonies.

At Lowry Pueblo some of the walls were reconstructed and some were dug out partially. The interior section of the great house where all the rooms are connected and at least 2 stories high, is protected by a modern roof against further wind and rain erosion. The pueblo is built on a small hill with great 360 degree views!

Here are some pictures we took: