Cliff Palace is the biggest of the cliff dwellings in Mesa Verde, quite an amazing place to walk through.
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
Terraces were built with retaining walls so that floor and flat ground could be created.
Cliff Palace is the first stop on the six mile Cliff Palace Loop, the largest cliff dwelling in the park and, indeed, the whole of North America.
Around 1200 AD the Ancestral Pueblo people began to move down from their cliff top homes to carefully constructed stone villages in cliff alcoves. It's not clear why they did this. Perhaps they needed as much fertile ground as they could get on top of the mesas to support a growing population. Maybe it was for extra protection, but from what? Intruders, a harsher climate, other mesa top pueblo people?
Whatever the reason, they embarked on construction which included living spaces, towers, kivas, storage rooms, courtyards and work areas.
Of about 5000 Ancestral Puebloan sites identified at Mesa Verde only about 600 are cliff dwellings. But the people occupied these for less than a hundred years. By 1300 AD most of them had migrated away to the Hopi villages of northern Arizona and pueblos such as Acoma in New Mexico. Why they moved is unknown, but there was a long drought at the end of the 1200s which was probably at least a part of the reason. With a rising population it is possible resources such as wild animals were being depleted and the land exhausted. Coupled with a disappearing water supply they may have had no choice but to move away.
The dwelling is immense. It has about 150 rooms plus nearly 75 open spaces and 21 kivas. Around 100 people would have lived here. Because of its size it is thought it could have been an administrative or community centre.
It was mostly constructed between 1260 and 1280, though some construction began around 1190. The buildings were made of stone, shaped by hand with harder quartzite hammers, mortared with a mixture of water, sand, clay and ash. Many of the rock walls were coated with a thin coat of plaster, both inside and out. The technique thus uses a lot of water so it could be concluded that this was not in short supply.
We had a tour of Cliff Palace with a ranger who explained its history and architecture. It's an incredible place, much revered by today's pueblo people, as the homes of their ancestors.
Most of the structures are well-tucked under the upper ledge of the alcove which is 25 feet wide, about 90 feet deep and 60 feet high.
Timber poles were used to create the framework for floors of upper levels, or the roofs of underground kivas. They can be seen protruding outside of many walls in buildings at Cliff Palace.
Sometimes immovable rocks were incorporated into structures. When Cliff Palace was stabilised in 1934 the workers discovered a huge crack in a boulder supporting a wall. while working to reinforce it with steel and concrete they discovered that the original builders had also tried to stabilise the boulder, obviously concerned about its structural integrity.
Kivas in modern-day pueblos are generally used for ceremonial purposes. Though they may also have had this purpose here, there are a lot more at Cliff Palace than other sites given the relatively low number of residents.
Hemenway House, for instance, has 26 rooms but only one kiva compared to Cliff Palace's 75 rooms and 21 kivas.
It has been suggested at Cliff Palace they could also have been used as living or work space. They all have fire pits and would have been warm and protected from the wind. Or Cliff Palace may have been an administrative centre like the forum of ancient Rome with its multiple temples.
Continuing around the loop from Cliff Palace the next stop is Cliff Canyon with a great view. In fact the stops on this loop, apart from being able to visit Cliff Palace and Balcony House, are views of canyons and cliff dwellings.
It's fun to see how many cliff dwellings you can spot in the canyon walls.
House of Many Windows is visible from the Cliff Canyon viewpoint and is the next stop on the loop.
Mummy House, below Sun Temple at the junction of Fewkes Canyon and Cliff Canyon, can be seen from the House of Many Windows viewpoint, though you need a long lens to get a reasonable photograph. Only low parts of walls remain of most of the buildings but the multi-storey granary, perched above these and tucked under the overhang, is intact.
Final stop before Balcony House is Hemenway House overlook on Soda Canyon. This is the only cliff dwelling named after a woman, Mary Tileston Hemenway, who funded the first scientific archaeological expedition in the south west.
Occupied in the 1200s, Hemenway House has 26 rooms and one kiva.
