2015 USA - Analogue Pictures 3

General

The third album is the archaeological section of the journey, with detours into the rock country that surrounds it. Its subjects are weathered stone masonry, sweeping views over a valley from a mountain overlook, layered canyon cliffs with an autumn tree in the foreground, autumn scrub framing a wide plain, forested mesas under dramatic clouds, gnarled bare trees on dry ridges, and red sandstone spires and walls further west. The two halves of the album belong to different landscapes, but they share one thing: they are both places where people have lived for a long time, and the evidence of that is written on the surface.

Mesa Verde National Park lies in Montezuma County in south western Colorado, near the Four Corners region where Colorado, Utah, Arizona and New Mexico meet. It is the only World Heritage Site in Colorado and the largest archaeological preserve in the United States, with more than 5,000 known sites including about 600 cliff dwellings. It was established by Congress and President Theodore Roosevelt in 1906, largely in response to what had been found in its alcoves in the preceding twenty years, and it covers a plateau of pinyon and juniper woodland cut by a deep canyon system. The name means green table in Spanish, which describes the high flat mesa exactly.

The builders were the Ancestral Puebloans, also called the Basketmaker Pueblo culture, an ancient Native American culture of the Pueblo peoples that spanned the present day Four Corners region: south eastern Utah, north eastern Arizona, north western New Mexico and south western Colorado. They are thought to have developed at least in part from the Oshara tradition, and over the centuries they lived in small family pit houses, in larger buildings for clans, in grand pueblos, and finally in cliff sited dwellings built for defence. The population on the mesa was never large: estimates put it at around 1,000 to 1,500 people in the early period, and by 860 at approximately 8,000.

The landscape that contains these places is high and dry. Rainfall is low and falls mostly in summer storms, the growing season is short, and the vegetation is sparse except in the sheltered valleys. That scarcity is the reason the settlements were so precisely placed, and it is the reason the archaeology is so legible: with so little soil and so few trees, field systems, check dams, paths and the ruins themselves stand out clearly on the ground. Walking across the mesa, the visitor is reading a map of scarcity rather than of abundance.

History

The story of the cliff dwellings begins with centuries of building. Small pit houses and small villages came first, and over a long stretch of time settlements consisted of only one to three residences, which suggests a countryside of scattered households rather than towns. Droughts in the late ninth century made dry land farming unreliable and pushed the population towards the drainages where some moisture could be counted on. By the thirteenth century, pressure and conflict had concentrated people into close, highly defensible quarters, and the great alcove villages were the result.

The architecture itself records the change. Pueblo buildings were made of stone, with windows facing south, and arranged in U, E and L shapes around open spaces; towers were built near the kivas, and the religious life of the community deepened visibly in the archaeological record. Where space was constrained, as in the alcoves, the density of occupation was far higher than on the open mesa: Mug House, a typical cliff dwelling of the period, was home to around a hundred people who shared 94 small rooms and eight kivas built against one another and sharing many of their walls.

The end of the occupation is dated and debated. The alcove villages were built and lived in during the thirteenth century, and the mesa was abandoned by about 1300; a series of megadroughts that broke the food production system is the most common explanation, though warfare and social collapse are also argued. Cliff Palace, the largest cliff dwelling in North America, was abandoned by 1300 as part of the same movement. The people did not disappear: their descendants are among the Pueblo nations of Arizona and New Mexico, and the abandonment is best understood as a relocation of communities rather than the end of a culture.

European and American history came much later and left its own marks. The Domínguez and Escalante expedition passed through the region in 1776 seeking a route between Santa Fe and California, and Mexican and American settlers followed. The ruins were rediscovered by ranchers and travellers in the 1880s and 1890s, among them a journalist who reached Echo Cliff House, Three Tier House and Balcony House in 1885, and the Wetherill family, who came upon Cliff Palace, Spruce Tree House and Square Tower House. Collecting and looting on a large scale followed, and the creation of the park in 1906 was the response. From 1958 to 1965 the Wetherill Mesa Archaeological Project excavated, stabilised and surveyed eleven sites on that side of the park in what is still one of the largest archaeological efforts carried out in the United States.

The wider Puebloan world was connected by more than trade. Archaeologists have identified eight main roads running out from the great pueblo of Pueblo Bonito in Chaco Canyon, together more than 180 miles long and more than thirty feet wide, built on a scale that implies organised labour and a purpose beyond farming. Room 33 in the same building held the richest burial ever excavated in the Southwest and served as a crypt for one powerful lineage traced through the female line for about 330 years. Mesa Verde belongs to that network, and its population moved within it rather than in isolation, which is why the abandonment of the alcoves has to be read against a wider map of settlement and drought.

Geology

The alcoves that hold the cliff dwellings are made by the rock itself. Mesa Verde is a plateau of layered sedimentary rock, capped by a resistant sandstone beneath which lie softer shales and weaker sandstones. Groundwater moving along the contact between the hard cap and the softer beds undermines the lower layers, and they are hollowed out faster than the cap above, leaving the deep overhangs that the builders used. Where the process continues, blocks of the cap break away and the alcove grows, so the ruins are protected from rain but not from the slow failure of the rock behind them.

The wider setting is the Colorado Plateau, a large block of uplifted sedimentary rock lying across the Four Corners states and cut by the canyons of the Colorado, the San Juan and the Little Colorado rivers. Because the plateau was lifted rather than folded, its layers remain close to horizontal, and the landscape consists of flat topped mesas, deep canyons and stepped benches where harder and softer beds weather at different rates. Seen from a rim, the geology reads as a series of level lines interrupted by vertical cuts, which is exactly what it is.

Water and soil complete the picture. Most of the rain arrives in summer thunderstorms and runs off quickly, so what matters for farming is the water that soaks into the upper soil and stays there. The mesa top carries soil formed from weathered rock, and the farmers of the classic period worked small fields near the heads of canyons, building check dams and terraces to hold both soil and water. Rocks of volcanic origin occur in and around the park as well, remnants of a period of eruption that left harder material standing above the sedimentary layers.

The same processes are visible in the red rock country further west, which appears in the last part of the album. There the sandstone is exposed in cliffs, spires and ledges, with joints widened into corridors and softer beds hollowed into alcoves, and the roads run at the base of walls that were once continuous and are now cut into separate masses. Juniper and sagebrush grow in the shelter of the rock, red soil shows between the plants, and the trails cross ground that is bare rock in one place and deep sand in the next.

Volcanic rock adds a harder element to the layered country. The Four Corners region has been volcanically active at intervals, and the results are visible in the form of dark flows, cones and resistant masses that stand above the softer sedimentary beds; some of the higher ground near the park is made of such material. Where the volcanic rock caps a softer layer, the same two step profile appears as in the sandstone country, with a hard top and an undermined base. The contrast between the black rock and the pale sediment around it is one of the ways the region’s geological history can be read from a moving car.

Things to See

The alcove sites are the reason for coming, and the largest of them is best seen from the overlook opposite. Cliff Palace fills its cave with towers, round rooms and walls, and the masonry is laid in careful courses of shaped stone with mud mortar; the original timber roof beams survive in some of the upper rooms, and the kivas stand partly sunk below the level of the plaza. Ranger led walks enter the building on a steep path with ladders, and they are limited in number, so the tickets need to be arranged in advance.

The other sites along the rim road fill in the picture. Spruce Tree House and Square Tower House have their own overlooks, and the smaller dwellings and storage rooms in the cliffs show how the population spread itself along the canyon rather than concentrating in two or three showpieces. At several stops the original access routes can still be made out: hand and foot holds cut into the rock, small steps and narrow ledges, which is the whole reason the sites survived being abandoned.

The land above the alcoves is worth a walk of its own. The mesa top holds pinyon and juniper woodland, dry grass and the fibrous plants that were used for cordage and sandals, and the trails along the rim and into the shallow valleys cross ground that was farmed, planted and then left. In autumn the scrub and the canyon trees turn colour against the sandstone, which is when the views from the overlooks are at their best: walls of layered cliff with a single bright tree in front of them, and a plain running away to the mountains.

From the west side of the park the country opens into the rock landscape of Utah. Layered canyon cliffs, forested mesas, scattered juniper, bare gnarled trees on dry ridges and red sandstone spires line the roads, and the trails lead between towers of stone towards distant mesas. It is a different geology from the alcoves and a different archaeology, without the stone rooms, but the two belong to the same journey: a plateau that has been lifted, cut and occupied for thousands of years, and a traveller moving across it from one kind of evidence to another.

References

1. Birdsall, W. R. (1891). The Cliff Dwellings of the Cañons of the Mesa Verde. Journal of the American Geographical Society of New York 23, 584-604. doi.org/10.2307/196602
2. Dumitru, T. A. & others (1994). Mesozoic-Cenozoic burial, uplift, and erosion history of the west-central Colorado Plateau. Geology 22, 499-502. doi.org/10.1130/0091-7613(1994)022<0499:mcbuae>2.3.co;2
3. Kohler, T. A. & others (2019). The Study Area and the Ancestral Pueblo Occupation. Emergence and Collapse of Early Villages: Models of Central Mesa Verde Archaeology. doi.org/10.1525/9780520951990-004
4. Wikipedia contributors (2026). Ancestral Puebloans. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancestral_Puebloans
5. Wikipedia contributors (2026). Basketmaker culture. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basketmaker_culture
6. Wikipedia contributors (2026). Chaco Culture National Historical Park. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaco_Culture_National_Historical_Park
7. Wikipedia contributors (2026). Cliff Palace. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cliff_Palace
8. Wikipedia contributors (2026). Colorado Plateau. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorado_Plateau
9. Wikipedia contributors (2026). Domínguez-Escalante Expedition. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domínguez-Escalante_Expedition
10. Wikipedia contributors (2026). Four Corners. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Corners
11. Wikipedia contributors (2026). Kiva. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiva
12. Wikipedia contributors (2026). Mesa Verde National Park. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesa_Verde_National_Park
13. Wikipedia contributors (2026). Pit house. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pit_house
14. Wikipedia contributors (2026). Pueblo Bonito. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pueblo_Bonito