This was probably the best experience on the whole tour: Mesa Verde National Park. Never seen such a phantastic landscape: mesas with cliff dwellings of the prehistoric indians (Anasazi) and snow-covered Rocky Mountain peaks forming the background. The cliff dwellings itselves are unique: the indians built their houses into caves in the cliffs, 600 of them are known of, five can be visited in Mesa Verde: Balcony House, Cliff Palace, Long House, Step House and Spruce Tree House - the only one, open in winter.
We started at the Visitor & Research Center (see pic) at the park entrance , a spectacular modern building with an instructive exhibition and archives and met with our guide from Aramark (the concessionaire of the park), "Cowboy Mike" who joined us in the bus and was a higly knowledgeable source of information. Winding up steep slopes and narrow curves we stopped at a couple of outlooks and got at least a good view of Cliff Palace (see pic), the largest and best-known of the cliff dwellings. It contained 150 rooms and 23 kivas and had a population of approximately 100 people.
Besides the cliff dwellings there are other archeological sites in abbundance, including petroglyphs, the mesa top sites of pithouses, pueblos, masonry towers, kivas and farming structures. First mostly living in pithouses in the valleys, in the 12th century many Ancestral Puebloans (as the "Anazasi" are also called) began living in pueblos they built beneath overhanging cliffs, while they farmed the mesa tops. The cliff dwellings in Mesa Verde are some of the most notable and best preserved in North America and ranged in size from 1-room storage units to villages of more than 150 rooms.
Mesa Verde was the place where the Ancestral Pueblo people lived for over 700 years, from approximately 600 to 1300. 1906, President Theodore Roosevelt established Mesa Verde NP to "preserve the works of man" and in 1888 the dwellings were first discovered by two local ranchers searching for stray cattle. It’s still one of the great mysteries, what happened in the late 13th century when the Ancestral Pueblo population "disappeared". Nowadays, the Hopi Indians consider themselves as descendants.
Spruce Tree House (see below) – the one we visited with a ranger – is the third largest cliff dwelling (Cliff Palace and Long House are larger). It contains about 130 rooms and 8 kivas (ceremonial round structures), built with wooden beams, sandstone and mortar into a natural alcove, 216 ft. (66 m) wide, 89 ft. (27 m) deep. It's estimated that about 60 to 80 people lived here.
Unfortunately we had just a couple of hours to spend in Mesa Verde because part of the tour group had to be back at Durango Airport at 1 pm. Well, that was in any case too short for us and we'll have to be back. Would have loved to talk a little longer with Mike, our guide, or David, the park ranger. Sometimes we can't hide our "roots" - being archeologists from education and interested in indian culture. Back to Durango, having picked up our rental car (or rather "bus"), we drove up to Fort Lewis College to see the (small) Center of Southwest Studies - again, presenting great Navajo rugs. Later, we explored Durango's main street a little more and had a final beer at Steamworks Brewery before we retired in the historic Strater Hotel (pic).
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