The most famous cliff dwellings in North America: stone villages built into the canyon alcoves of a high forested mesa in southwestern Colorado, raised by Ancestral Puebloan builders in the 1200s and lived in for only a few generations before the whole region emptied. Found and stripped of its contents in the 1880s, then made the first U.S. national park created to protect human-built heritage in 1906, Mesa Verde remains an ancestral place for the living Pueblo nations who descend from its builders.
You reach Cliff Palace by climbing down into a canyon, then up into its far wall, into a vaulted sandstone alcove. A village of pale stone rooms has stood there, sheltered from rain and sun, for more than seven hundred years. It has towers three stories tall, round chambers sunk into the floor for ceremony, and doorways shaped to a body turning sideways. The people who built it farmed the mesa overhead and climbed home each evening on footholds pecked into the rock. They finished it late in the 1200s and, within a generation or two, left the whole region for good. The cliff houses sat in their alcoves, dry and nearly intact, for the next six hundred years. What was done to them once outsiders arrived is as much a part of Mesa Verde's story as how they were built. The people themselves were no mystery: they moved south, and the Pueblo nations of the Southwest are their descendants. The real questions are why anyone built into these cliffs at all, and what the rest of us made of the city they left.