Utaventure

Mesa Verde As I mentioned in my previous post,  on the last day of August  we headed to Mesa Verde National Park in Colorado. Mesa Verde, Spanish for green table, offers a spectacular look into the lives of the Ancestral Pueblo people who made it their home for over 700 years, from A.D. 600 to A.D. 1300. The first 600 years  they lived on the mesa top, but  sometime during the late 1190s, they built dwellings beneath the overhanging cliffs, probably to be closer to their source of water. The structures ranged in size from one-room storage units to villages of more than 150 rooms. While still farming the mesa tops, they continued to reside in the alcoves, repairing, remodeling, and constructing new rooms for nearly a century. By the late 1270s, the population began migrating south into present-day New Mexico and Arizona. By 1300, the Ancestral Puebloan occupation of Mesa Verde ended. Today, Mesa Verde National Park protects over 4,000 known archeological sites, including 600 cliff