The “Four Corners” area, including southwest Colorado includes extended areas of dry terrain covered with scrub vegetation. “Mesa Verde National Park” is located in this area and includes cultural and archaeological sites of the ancestors of the Pueblo People who still live in America’s southwest. Human presence began about 10,000 years ago with nomadic hunter-gatherers who gave way to early farmers who grew corn and wove baskets.
About a thousand years ago, the residents of this area began to build houses and other buildings above the ground. About 800 years ago complex interconnected structures were constructed within protective openings in cliff walls. Mesa Verde park includes a number of these “cliff dwellings”. The photo below shows a smallish series of buildings in the cliff. Actually, this is the same cliff shown in the panoramic first photo of this post. If you click on that photo to enlarge it, you can see this site in an opening of the cliff at the right side of the image.
One of the most famous complex of cliff buildings is called “Cliff Palace”. Our daughter Mindy had arranged tickets for Rhonda, Kaden, and me to participate in a brief tour of that site, led by a park ranger.
As we began our descent from the rim of the canyon, we got our first glimpse of Cliff Palace.
Our guide had previously worked as a field archaeologist, and was very knowledgeable about Mesa Verde and the people who had lived there. During her explanations, she spoke about the way in which the entire community, including growing children, had participated in the responsibilities of the settlements. Kaden was fascinated to learn that young boys his age would help with the care and feeding of the domestic turkeys. (Much like the way Kaden helps with the chickens and ducks at his house!)
Visitors are fascinated by the buildings and stonework.
(But where was Jack! He and his mom spent the day paddle-boarding on a lake near Durango. Jack had already visited Mesa Verde in 2018 along with Rhonda and our daughter Mindy.
The photo below is from that 2018 trip.)
A few years ago, “Voice of America” (VoA) produced an audio piece explaining Mesa Verde. I have include an adaptation that you can listen to by using the controls below:
A PDF document that includes the same narration can be downloaded using the link below.
Note: Although in my youth, VoA had been rather notorious for its propaganda broadcasts over shortwave radio beamed to various corners of the world, today they offer a much broader content, including materials designed for English language learners. I have used a variety of their materials in my ESL classes and in many cases reconfigured the content to be most useful to fit into lesson plans. Some of these are published on the Open-ESL.org web site.