Mesa Verde Cliff Dwellings
Why the cliff dwellings were built where they were, and how five of them were laid out. This reading leaves out the information about tours, the closing of Spruce Tree House, and the links to other pages.
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Room with a View
Mesa Verde National Park has some of the largest and best preserved cliff dwellings in North America. The ancestors of Pueblo people built most of the cliff dwellings from 1180 CE to 1300 CE. This makes them some of the last buildings built in the Mesa Verde Region. The people living in them were among the last to move south.
Many people compare cliff dwellings to forts or castles when they first see them. The stone masonry is impressive, and the dwellings sit in imposing spots. You can tell which rooms were living rooms by their hearths and by mealing bins for grinding corn. Granaries had narrow spaces built into them to store dried food. Some spaces, such as kivas, were set aside for community and ceremonial use. The dwellings were used for only a century. But they were built to last. The people who lived in them cherished them as homes.
Water Is Life
“Why would they build here?” is a question many visitors ask about the cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde. Archeologists worked for many, many years to solve it. Most scholars conclude that the answer is one thing that no one can live without: water.
Cliff dwellings seem like unfriendly places to live. But most were built near seep springs, some of the only permanent water sources in Mesa Verde. These cliffside springs became more and more important to Ancestral Pueblo people during the time the cliff dwellings were built. Wood samples show evidence of long droughts. Reservoirs on the mesa tops were likely becoming less reliable. Faced with shrinking water supplies, people chose to move their homes to places with easier access.
Pueblo Profiles
Cliff dwellings had limited space and were built in many different kinds of rock faces. So each one had to be built differently. Sloped cliff faces often needed a flat foundation before building could even start. Some dwellings are narrow, single-story roomblocks. These likely were home to a single extended family. Others are large complexes with space for public gatherings.
Balcony House
Balcony House is a mid-sized cliff dwelling. It has 38 rooms and two kivas. It would have been home to over 30 people. It gets its English name from its well-preserved balconies. Balconies were common in Ancestral Pueblo buildings, but they rarely survived because they were made of plaster and timber.
Balcony House is divided mostly into two main plazas. A narrow passageway connects them. This leads archeologists to believe it may have been home to two different social groups, perhaps extended families. The alcove faces northeast, so it is a fairly chilly place in the winter. But it gives easy access to two nearby springs, which must have made it an attractive place to live!
Cliff Palace
Cliff Palace is perhaps the most well-known site in Mesa Verde. It is the largest cliff dwelling in North America. It has 150 rooms and 23 kivas. It was likely a lively, busy neighborhood with over 100 people. Cliff Palace was no palace. It was a village like any other, except for its size. The large alcove gave people room for public spaces as well as living areas.
One example is the number of kivas. Most villages have one kiva for every six rooms. Cliff Palace has one for every three! This likely means that the village grew to become a public center for the other dwellings in the canyon, because of its size. The tops of the kivas could work as small plazas and courtyards. Private chambers lay below them, reached by a ladder.
Long House
Long House is the second largest cliff dwelling in Mesa Verde. It is only slightly smaller than Cliff Palace. It has 150 rooms, 21 kivas, and a large kiva-plaza at its center. Like other large cliff dwellings, Long House was home to well over 100 people. It probably worked as a community center for the villages and farms around it on Wetherill Mesa.
Its village plaza-kiva was a place for community and ceremonial gatherings. It is an example of forward-thinking architecture. Large central plazas were rare in 1200 CE. But they would become the centerpieces of almost every Pueblo village in the centuries to come. Long House is one of the best places in the park to see the springs that made cliff dwellings an attractive place to live. There are carved basins and drains along nearly the entire back of the alcove.
Spruce Tree House
Spruce Tree House is the third-largest cliff dwelling in the park. It is one of the best-preserved Ancestral Pueblo sites in the Mesa Verde region. About 90% of what you see from the overlook is original material. This includes three-story homes, plaster-covered walls, and 700-year-old wooden roofs. In all, the village has about 130 rooms and eight kivas. It was home to about 60 to 80 people. They relied on the large spring nearby for their water.
Step House
Step House shows how much time the Ancestral Pueblo people spent living at Mesa Verde. People lived in Step House in two different time periods. This is shown by two different building styles. There are pithouses built around 700 CE. There are also masonry cliff dwellings built around 1200 CE. That is five centuries between when people moved from their alcove home to the mesa top and when people (possibly their descendants) chose to return!
The later people of Step House knew about the earlier homes in the alcove. Some of the early pithouses were reused as parts of villages, but most were left alone. The later cliff dwelling grew to 27 rooms and 3 kivas. It was likely home to a dozen to two dozen people.