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Mesa Verde National Park
Ancestral Puebloan cliff dwellings, the first park created to protect human works
For about 700 years, Ancestral Pueblo people farmed the mesa tops of southwestern Colorado, and in the late 1100s and 1200s many families moved into alcoves beneath the canyon rims, building homes of shaped sandstone, wooden beams and mortar. Cliff Palace, the largest, holds about 150 rooms and 23 kivas. The park protects nearly 5,000 known archaeological sites, including more than 600 cliff dwellings, from pithouses of the 500s to multistory villages. By about 1300 the people had migrated south, toward the Rio Grande and the Hopi mesas, after a long drought and growing social strain.
Those migrations are not an ending. Twenty-six tribes, among them the 19 Pueblos of New Mexico, the Hopi Tribe, Ysleta del Sur Pueblo, the Ute Mountain Ute, Southern Ute and Northern Ute, the Navajo Nation and the Jicarilla Apache Nation, maintain a recognized relationship with Mesa Verde, and many Pueblo people regard these sites as ancestral homes still inhabited by the spirits of those who lived there. Visitors are asked to treat the dwellings with corresponding respect.
Ranchers Richard Wetherill and Charlie Mason, guided by knowledge shared by Ute neighbors, publicized Cliff Palace in 1888, and looting followed. In response, Theodore Roosevelt signed the park into law on June 29, 1906, the first national park set aside for cultural rather than natural treasures. It became a World Heritage Site in 1978.