There are pithouses, pueblos and cliff dwellings to be seen on Mesa Top Loop. Square Tower House was the most atmospheric of the three cliff dwellings in Mesa Verde we were privileged to go into.
Cedar Tree Tower, Far View Sites, Park Point Overlook
Cliff Palace, Cliff Palace Loop
Mesa Top Loop, Square Tower House
Soda Canyon Overlook Trail, Balcony House
Spruce Tree House, Petroglyph Point
A six mile loop with an awful lot to see. It's a one-way system with pull-offs to park and view the various sites built by the Ancestral Pueblo people over the 700 years that they lived here.
The first stop on the loop is a pithouse, one of the earliest homes built around 595 AD. Pit houses, as the name implies, were built partially underground, helping to keep them cool in summer and warm in winter. The roof and walls were made from adobe covering a timber framework. This particular pithouse was part of a small community, with at least seven more pithouses nearby. They planted corn, beans and squash, hunted animals and gathered wild plants and fruits.
Typically each pithouse would have a central fire, backed by a stone slab deflector which prevented draughts and allowed smoke to rise straight up to the hole in the roof. A ladder through a separate hole in the roof was used for access.
There is a fine viewpoint over Navajo Canyon before arriving at the overlook for Square Tower House. This is an amazing place, and we were lucky to get tickets to visit it - there are only ten on a single tour each day. There is a separate section for Square Tower House below.
Further on around the loop is the site of a village dating from 700-950 AD with more pithouses and early pueblos. The original village had both pithouses and above-ground rooms constructed from jacal - a wooden lattice plastered with mud and supported along the base with stone slabs.
Later much sturdier and more resilient stone walls were built, making for larger rooms. Though these above-ground structures became the favoured living spaces, pithouses continued to be built. They were dug deeper and were probably the beginnings of kivas which are so central to pueblo life. These are communal spaces often associated with ceremonial activities and gatherings.
During this period plain grey ceramics were replaced with black and white pottery and stronger corrugated vessels which could be placed if fires.
Then two villages located close together. The first, dating from around 850 AD, consisted of a single storey block of five rooms and a deep, square pit structure.
The second village was constructed adjacent to the first around 950 AD by Ancestral Pueblo families returning to the site several generations after the first village had fallen into disuse. This second village used the new technique of building with stone masonry walls, though it also had a pit structure, this time circular, and identified as a kiva.
Kivas were distinct from pithouses in being bigger, deeper, and more nearly circular. They still had a ventilation shaft, fire pit and deflectors. A bench encircled the wall with intermittent stone columns supporting the flat roof. They also had a small depression in the floor, called a sipapu, which represented the portal through which the ancestors of the village first entered the world.
At Mesa Top SItes, 900-1100 AD, there are remains of three villages built one on top of the other. The first village was constructed of jacal, the second was built with single-stone-wide sandstone masonry walls. The third village, dating from around 1075, is quite different to anything seen here before. It uses double-walled masonry infilled with rubble. This makes for a very solid building and for the first time multi-storeyed constructions can be built. Here there were three cylindrical towers, possibly signalling stations, observatories, or watchtowers. Because some towers were connected by tunnels to kivas, it's also possible they had a ceremonial purpose. Over 105 towers were built on Mesa Verde.
Each of the villages had its essential kiva which gradually evolved into a type now known as the Mesa Verde style kiva.
Sun Point Pueblo was one of the last mesa-top pueblos to be built at Mesa Verde sometime between 1100s and 1200s. No timbers or other dateable building material has been found with which to more accurately date the site. Pottery has led archaeologists to believe that this 30 room village was only occupied for about ten years. This pueblo has a tower which is connected to a large kiva via a tunnel. By this time the kiva was entirely underground.
Further around the loop is Sun Point View, a wide view of a junction between Cliff and Fewkes canyons with many cliff dwellings in the canyon walls. The Ancestral Pueblo peoples began creating cliff dwellings towards the end of the twelfth century. They occupy natural caves in the canyon sides and can have many rooms, multiple kivas and towers. The people continued with their agricultural activities on the mesa top, descending to the cliff dwellings to live.
The largest cliff dwelling here, and in the whole of North America, is Cliff Palace.
On top of the mesa, at the junction between the two canyons, Sun Temple's four foot thick walls can be seen. There is an even better view of it at the next stop, Oak Tree House.
Oak Tree House, dating from the 1200s, is one of the larger cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde. It was surrounded by a thriving community of cliff dwellings.
At its peak, in the 1200s, the Mesa Verde region was home to around 40,000 people.
Most cliff dwellings faced south or south west where low winter sun would cast some warmth. Oak Tree House is no exception, tucked just below the canyon rim it was protected from the harsher winter weather and also benefitted from a nearby active seep spring.
The people built retaining walls at the front edge of the alcove then levelled the floor behind. At least 60 rooms have been discovered, some multi-storeyed. It had six kivas, each surrounded by rooms which may all have belonged to an extended family.
Above the main buildings of Oak Tree House there is a second narrow alcove where a building has been created for storage. It was probably reached from the roofs of adjacent, tall buildings.
The dwelling had both rectangular and T-shaped doorways. The T shape is something of a mystery. We came across T-shaped windows and apertures at Mayan sites in Mexico, for instance at Palenque. There they were symbolic of the wind god. At mesa verde perhaps they were this shape to minimise the area through which cold or hot air could enter the buildings.
Not far from Oak Tree House are Fire Temple and New Fire House, also from the 1200s.
The large space at the front of Fire Temple was likely a plaza used for public ceremonial activities, perhaps not just for the local community but attracting visitors from much further away. There is little evidence of domestic activities here.
The plaza is set around a raised fire pit flanked by rectangular floor vaults. These floor vaults might have been covered to serve as foot drums. The site is decorated with painted rain clouds, corn, cactus, people and animals. Some walls have red and white bands of plaster.
New Fire House has 22 rooms, three household kivas and abundant evidence of domestic activity. Perhaps the people who lived here were the caretakers of Fire Temple.
Final stop on the loop is Sun Temple itself, built around 1250. This D-shaped structure was probably a communal building but may also have had an astronomical role in events such as the winter solstice. 24 rooms have been excavated as well as three circular structures within the four foot wide walls. Outside there is a further circular structure. No roof beams or domestic items have been discovered. Perhaps it was unroofed, for celestial observation, or maybe it was never finished.
There are fine views of Cliff Palace from here.
With 150 rooms Cliff Palace was exceptionally large and may have functioned as some kind of centre for the many communities living in the vicinity.
Many footpaths and toe-and-hand-hold "ladders" were used by the Ancestral Pueblo peoples to move between villages and to communal buildings and centres such as Sun Temple and Cliff Palace.
In the late 1200s the Ancestral Pueblo People began to move south out of the Mesa Verde region. They settled in new regions where they still live today, the Hopi mesa settlements of Arizona and into the Rio Grande valley.
The most atmospheric of the cliff dwellings that we were able to visit. Helped by the fact that only ten people are allowed to visit each day, on a single ranger-guided tour early in the morning. Competition for tickets is intense.
Square Tower House is set into a south west-facing cliff face of Navajo Canyon. Low winter sun would have warmed it while the overhang protected it from the worst of the winter weather. It would probably be quite hot on summer afternoons though.
A steep descent down two ladders and toe-and-hand-holds carved into the near-vertical rock - literally following the footsteps of the Ancestral Pueblo People. A fairly level track then led along the cliff face to the ruins.
Square Tower House is a very atmospheric place, everyone on our tour was very respectful of the fact that this place, as all of the cliff dwellings, still holds great significance for the descendants of those who once lived here.
The four storey tower, from which the cliff dwelling gets its name, is 8m high, the tallest building in Mesa Verde and a testament to the skills of the architects and builders. It has two T-shaped doorways and is all that remains of a stair-stepped, multi-storey complex built between 1244 and 1249 AD. The surrounding two and three-storey structures have all collapsed.
We saw three kivas in the dwelling. One on the lower, outer edge, one in the middle, and one further up which still has part of its roof. From the overlook two more seem to be visible.
The roof of the kiva that still remains shows how it was made from tree trunks thickly mortared with mud reinforced with juniper bark which solidifies when dry to a stable structure. Unlike the other two kivas we saw it is completely below ground
At the top end of the dwelling, tucked tight into a cleft below the rim, are a couple of gravity-defying structures called the "crow's nest" thought to be a lookout post. Quite an amazing feat to build these.
There are even some petroglyphs here, though they are quite difficult to make out.
There were two or three more petroglyphs that we spotted, one but very difficult to photograph.
We spent about 45 minutes in the ruins, feeling very privileged to be here. The Puebloans revisit their ancestral homes from time to time, they still mean a great deal to them as the places where their ancestors remain.