Petroglyphs and Cliff Dwellings

Cliff Palace, Mesa Verde National Park

I visited Mesa Verde National Park, and the Ute Tribal Mountain Park near Cortez, Colorado. while Mesa Verde contains the larger and more impressive sites, the Ute Tribal Mountain Park’s sites are more pristine. Everything is in its place, untouched or excavated by archaeologists. There are kivas, appearing as ringed earthen mounds, covered in rocks and stone tools where the structures had once collapsed. Petroglyphs also dot the canyons, at the places where you can pick a path up the steep scree slopes that bound the canyon floors to the sheer cliff walls. 

Though the petroglyphs and pictographs date from thousands of years ago to as young as fifty years old, the peoples whose shadows still hang heaviest over this landscape are the Hisatsinom, or the Ancestral Puebloans. They lived in the famous cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde, and across the Colorado Plateau for more than a thousand years, reaching their height around A.D. 900-1150 before migrating south in the face of climate change and pressures from Numic speaking peoples.