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Mesa Verde

By Anonymous

Photo: National Park Foundation

Mesa Verde, an area in what is now Southwestern Colorado, was home to the Ancestral Pueblo peoples from around 450 CE to 1300 CE. They left behind a number of artifacts, including pottery, murals, and a large system of cliff dwellings that remain intact after nearly a thousand years.

Despite living in the largely barren Colorado Plateau region, the Puebloans innovated ways to keep themselves fed, housed, and entertained using only what was accessible nearby. Their art and design conformed to available resources, social needs, and other cultural factors in a way that is rarely seen today.

Pottery

Photo: Mark Montgomery

To address their need for food storage and cookware, Puebloans used what was on hand to produce sophisticated ceramics. While settlements throughout the region did trade with each other, materials were still generally limited to the vegetation, clay, and rocks that could be found in the desert.

Puebloans used coiled lengths of clay to construct basic containers, smoothed them with a watery clay mixture, and then dried the final product. More advanced pottery had a reddish color, an indication that they had invented a way of "firing" their ceramics.

Some pottery was also decorated. Ink, usually made with crushed berries, was applied using brushes made of yucca, another local plant. Many of the pots recovered from Mesa Verde seem to have been stone-polished as well.

Architecture


Photo: National Park Foundation

Ancestral Puebloan communities took on many forms throughout their long history. Early settlements were built in the open desert, with several farmsteads scattered around a central village. Later on, some Puebloans relocated to the cliff outcroppings of Mesa Verde, building their homes into the canyon walls. This afforded them protection from the desert's harsh weather.

The cliff houses were constructed using different techniques than earlier Puebloan buildings. Rather than using traditional adobe bricks, they used stone blocks from the surrounding area that were then bonded with a type of mortar. This advancement allowed the Puebloans to create multi-story buildings that remain mostly intact today.

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