59 Fun Facts About Mesa Verde National Park

Nineteenth-century settlers wrongly credited which civilisation with building Mesa Verde's cliff dwellings?

The Aztecs got the credit, and the map still shows it: Mesa Verde's county was named Montezuma for their emperor, and a great Puebloan site to the south is still called Aztec Ruins.

What does Mesa Verde mean in Spanish?

Green table is how Spanish explorers saw it, though no true mesa tilts as this one does: its gentle slope to the south was essential to forming the alcoves that shelter the cliff dwellings.

What kind of home did Mesa Verde's first farming families build, centuries before the cliff dwellings?

Pithouses, sunk partly into the earth, came first, around 550 CE; the kiva, the round ceremonial room of the later villages, grew out of them.

Roughly how many cliff dwellings does Mesa Verde National Park protect?

600 cliff dwellings are only a fraction of the story: the park protects thousands of other archaeological sites, most of them far less famous than the alcove villages.

Which president signed the act creating Mesa Verde National Park?

Theodore Roosevelt signed it three weeks after the Antiquities Act of 1906; both laws answered the same alarm, as collectors and pot hunters stripped the Southwest's ancient sites.

For roughly how long did people actually live in Mesa Verde's famous cliff dwellings before moving away?

About 100 years is all: families farmed the mesa tops for some six centuries, moved down into the alcoves only around 1200, and had left for good before 1300.

Cliff Palace, the largest cliff dwelling in North America, was built mainly from blocks of which rock?

Sandstone blocks were shaped with harder stones carried up from river beds, and geologists later named the rock layer Cliff House Sandstone after the homes built in it.

At some Mesa Verde villages, what linked a stone tower to the round ceremonial room built beside it?

An underground passage let people slip unseen between tower and chamber, one sign among several, with walled villages and lookouts, that the 1200s were anxious years.

What were Richard Wetherill and Charlie Mason searching for when they came upon Cliff Palace in December 1888?

Stray cattle drew the two ranchers to the canyon rim; Richard's brother Al said he had glimpsed the ruin earlier but never entered, so the credit for finding it went to the pair who climbed in.

Which Swedish scientist brought scientific method to Mesa Verde in 1891 and shipped artefacts to Europe?

Gustaf Nordenskiöld, 23 and ill with tuberculosis, photographed, sketched and recorded the sites he dug, and the ranchers who worked for him adopted his careful methods in their own later excavations.

Which museum held the Mesa Verde artefacts shipped to Sweden in 1891 for more than a century?

The National Museum of Finland in Helsinki ended up with hundreds of pieces, and the outcry over their export strengthened the campaign for laws to protect such sites.

Which newspaper correspondent founded the Colorado Cliff Dwellings Association in 1900 to save Mesa Verde's ruins from looters?

Virginia McClurg first saw the ruins in 1882 on assignment for the New York Daily Graphic, and as collectors plundered the cliff dwellings she spent two decades lecturing and lobbying for their protection.

Which Hayden Survey photographer took the first pictures of a Mesa Verde cliff dwelling in 1874?

William Henry Jackson was guided through a canyon at the foot of the mesa by a local prospector, and his pictures and his account in the survey's report helped call attention to the cliff dwellings.

Which two Franciscan friars skirted Mesa Verde in 1776 while seeking a route to California, never seeing its cliff dwellings?

Domínguez and Escalante never reached California: early snow in Utah made them cast lots and turn back for Santa Fe, but the map their party drew of the unknown country proved widely influential.

After leaving Mesa Verde in the late 1200s, most Ancestral Puebloans resettled in which two present-day states?

Arizona and New Mexico are where the migrants founded new villages or joined ones already standing, and their descendants, among them the Hopi, Zuni and Rio Grande Pueblo peoples, call those states home.

What do archaeologists call the dry spell of 1276 to 1299 that helped empty the Mesa Verde region?

The Great Drought was one cause among several: colder weather in the same decades and growing conflict across the region also pushed families to leave for the south.

Which dating method lets archaeologists name the exact year a Mesa Verde roof beam was cut?

Tree-ring dating matches a beam's pattern of wide and narrow rings to a master sequence; at Mesa Verde the latest cutting dates fall around 1280, just before the people left.

Which bird did Mesa Verde's farmers raise in their villages, weaving its feathers into warm blankets?

Turkey was at first kept for its feathers and bones, not its meat; only in the 1200s, as deer grew scarce, did it become a staple meat.

Which three crops, known as the Three Sisters, fed the farmers of Mesa Verde?

Corn, beans and squash made up most of the diet, and the first two eaten together form a complete protein, which eased the need for hunted meat.

What is a sipapu, found in Mesa Verde kivas?

A hole symbolising emergence from the underworld, the sipapu recalls the Pueblo story of the first people climbing up into this world, and rooms that hold one are still used in Pueblo communities today.

Which innovation first let Mesa Verde's Basketmaker people boil food directly over a fire?

Clay pots could sit on the flames for hours; before them, cooks dropped fire-heated stones into pitch-lined baskets, the craft that gave the culture its name.

By what name, borrowed from a Hopi kachina, is the hunchbacked flute player of Southwestern rock art known?

Kokopelli is linked with fertility; the name belongs to a hunchbacked Hopi kachina and was only later applied by anthropologists to the flute players pecked into rock.

What starts more than nine in ten of the wildfires recorded at Mesa Verde?

Lightning from dry summer storms sparked the big fires of 1996 to 2003, which between them burned more than half the park.

What covered the Mesa Verde area in the age of the dinosaurs, leaving the rock its cliffs are cut from?

A shallow inland sea once split North America in two, advancing and retreating over this spot many times, and the layers it laid down near its shore hardened into the cliffs that now hold the alcoves.

Which mesa-top great house at Mesa Verde is considered an outlier of the Chaco Canyon world?

Far View's farming community had lived on the mesa top for at least two centuries before the cliff dwellings rose, and many stayed there even after their neighbours had moved down into the alcoves.

How do visitors enter Balcony House on a ranger tour?

Its 45 rooms and two kivas face east on a high ledge; toe-holds in a cliff cleft were the only original way in and out.

Which Wetherill Mesa cliff dwelling is Mesa Verde's second largest, with about 150 rooms?

Long House has a formal plaza larger than most, with benches and a raised firebox that suggest people from across the mesa gathered there to dance and trade.

Which cliff dwelling, Mesa Verde's third largest, lies a short walk from the Chapin Mesa museum?

Spruce Tree House was named for a tree its finders took for a spruce, in fact a Douglas fir; a rockfall from the alcove arch closed it to visitors in 2015.

What distinction does the tower at Square Tower House hold?

Tallest structure in Mesa Verde, the tower was reached by the two men who found Cliff Palace on the very next day of their 1888 ride.

Sandals, baskets and cord found in Mesa Verde's cliff dwellings were woven from which spiky desert plant?

Yucca leaves gave the fibre for sandals, baskets and cord, things that rot away at open sites but lasted 700 years in the dry shelter of the alcoves.

Which organisation joined the Park Service in 1958 to fund the vast Wetherill Mesa archaeological project?

The National Geographic Society shared the cost of the largest dig the park had seen in decades, and some years after it ended a second mesa of cliff dwellings was opened to visitors.

What did the wildfires of 1996 to 2003 lay bare in large numbers across Mesa Verde's burned slopes?

Check dams, low stone walls built across slopes and gullies to hold soil and water for crops, turned up in large numbers, and they showed archaeologists that the mesa's farmers were more successful than once believed.

Which philanthropist's donations helped build the museum on Chapin Mesa and pay for winter digs in the 1920s?

John D. Rockefeller Jr. toured the cliff dwellings in 1924; the museum his gifts helped finish grew out of a log cabin that had earlier become the first museum in any national park.

Which Native nation's reservation land was taken into Mesa Verde National Park in an exchange it long disputed?

Ute leaders gave up the land around the great ruins for a tract on a nearby mountain, and a park superintendent later conceded that most of that tract had been theirs all along.

Who performed the Indian dances staged for Mesa Verde's tourists in the 1920s?

Navajo day labourers, who made up most of the park's workforce, sang and danced at the evening campfire, though the rites belonged neither to the cliff dwellers nor to the mesa's own tribe.

Feathers of which tropical bird, carried north along trade routes, brightened the clothing of Mesa Verde's people?

Macaw feathers, like seashells and turquoise, are foreign to the region, so every one of them reached the mesa through long-distance trade.

Which other American park joined Mesa Verde on UNESCO's first World Heritage list in 1978?

Yellowstone was chosen for nature and Mesa Verde for culture, the only two American places on that first list; the title brings prestige but no outside say in how a park is run.

What is unusual about the wilderness area set aside inside Mesa Verde in 1976?

Visitors are banned from it entirely: its three strips of steep canyon country buffer the park's edges, and the whole backcountry is closed to protect the fragile sites scattered through it.

What is the highest spot in Mesa Verde, at about 8,570 feet?

Park Point became in the 1930s the shared fire lookout for all the federal lands around the mesa.

Mesa Verde's entrance lies on US 160 between which two towns?

Cortez and Mancos sit only a few miles either side of the gate, but the cliff dwellings lie some 20 miles up a steep, winding road, so rangers advise allowing two hours for the drive in and out.

Which water-saving structures, some 90 feet across, did Mesa Verde's farmers build on the mesa top and in canyon bottoms?

Reservoirs caught summer storms and snowmelt, though the best known of them may never have held much water: a 2014 study read it as a ceremonial space instead.

Mesa Verde's finest painted pottery, including its distinctive mugs, comes in which colour scheme?

Black-on-white ware peaked in the 1200s just as outside trade dried up, so nearly every pot found in the cliff dwellings was made close to home.

What is the geologically correct term for Mesa Verde, which slopes south rather than lying flat?

The park is really several smaller tilted blocks separated by canyons cut through the hard sandstone.

Which two conifers make up the low forest that gave Mesa Verde its name?

Piñon pine and juniper were a larder and a woodpile for the villagers, who gathered the pines' nuts for food and burned both woods for fuel.

Which New Deal programme's young enrollees built trails, roads and museum exhibits at Mesa Verde from 1933?

Civilian Conservation Corps enrollees also dug alongside the archaeologists and, after a disastrous blaze in 1934, kept watch from the park's fire lookouts.

Most of Mesa Verde's cliff dwellings were built beside which natural supply of water, often at the back of the alcove?

Seep springs form where rain and snowmelt, sinking through porous rock, meet a band of shale and trickle out sideways, and with no lasting streams on the mesa they were worth building beside.

Which national monument west of Mesa Verde protects multistorey stone towers that the same people perched on canyon rims and boulders?

Hovenweep's six clusters of towers rose between 1200 and 1300, the same decades as the cliff dwellings, and were emptied in the same great migration south.

In which Colorado railroad town was the Swedish collector of Mesa Verde relics arrested in 1891 as he shipped them home?

Durango townsfolk had him charged with devastating the ruins, but no law forbade what he had done, so the court freed him and released his crates a month later.

What name is given to the dark streaks that stain the cliff faces above Mesa Verde's alcoves?

Desert varnish is easily mistaken for old smoke, but it is a thin mineral skin rich in manganese that bacteria are thought to fix to the rock; the soot of cooking fires blackened the alcove ceilings instead.

What term do the Hopi use for the Ancestral Puebloans, meaning 'ancient people'?

Hisatsinom is the Hopi people's own word for their forebears; they and other Pueblo peoples dislike the name outsiders long used, which is why the park's own pages speak of Ancestral Pueblo people instead.

Which Smithsonian ethnologist excavated and repaired Mesa Verde's great cliff dwellings between 1908 and 1922?

Jesse Walter Fewkes found Cliff Palace almost completely rifled by curio seekers, who had broken openings through its walls and burned its roof beams for firewood.

The arrival of which crop from the south slowly turned the wandering foragers around Mesa Verde into settled farmers?

Corn took centuries to become the staple, but once it did, families had to stay beside their fields, and they built the region's first lasting houses in order to do so.

What held the stone blocks of Cliff Palace together?

A mortar of soil, water and ash was packed with tiny chinking stones to fill the gaps and steady the wall, then hidden under earthen plaster painted pink, red, yellow or white.

At its peak in the early 1200s, roughly how many people lived across the wider Mesa Verde region?

About 20,000 is the usual estimate, most of them in big villages on the plains west of the mesa, yet by 1300 the whole region stood empty.

Which distinctive doorway shape do Mesa Verde's dwellings share with the great houses of Chaco Canyon?

T-shaped doorways frame entrances at Chaco as well, one reason some archaeologists believe Chaco's influence lingered on the mesa long after its great houses had emptied.

Which feature tells archaeologists that a room at Cliff Palace was lived in?

A hearth marks only a small share of the 150 rooms as living quarters, which is why the great building is thought to have slept little more than a hundred people.

What weapon did the early Archaic people near Mesa Verde use before the bow and arrow?

The atlatl is a hooked throwing stick that lengthens the arm and hurls a light spear with far more force; hunters here gave it up only when the bow proved more accurate and easier to carry.

What daily task was done at the metate bins, rows of sloping stone slabs set into the floors of Mesa Verde's rooms?

Grinding grain into meal meant working a two-handed stone back and forth across the slab, and some rooms held several bins side by side and were used for nothing else.

The Navajo word Anaasází is an exonym usually translated as what?

Ancestors of our enemies is how the dictionaries read the Navajo words; early archaeologists adopted the name all the same, and Pueblo objections have since led scholars to say Ancestral Pueblo instead.