Mesa Verde - Cliff Palace #3
by Richard Krebs
Title
Mesa Verde - Cliff Palace #3
Artist
Richard Krebs
Medium
Photograph - Photograph
Description
Cliff Palace is the largest cliff dwelling in North America. It was constructed primarily out of sandstone, mortar and wooden beams. Cliff Palace contains 23 kivas (round ceremonial rooms) and 150 rooms and housed about 100 people.
This interior photograph was taken on 10/14/19 at 6:23 p.m. Please see a similar photograph taken on 10/14/19 at 4:43 p.m. Note how the position of the sun creates an entirely different appearance of the image.
Mesa Verde is an American National Park located near Cortez, in extreme southwestern Colorado. It was established in 1906 by President Theodore Roosevelt. It contains some of the best-preserved ancestral puebloan archaeological sites in the United States. The park has also been designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
The park occupies some 52,000 acres with more than 5000 archaeological sites including 600 cliff dwellings.
Starting in 7500 BCE Mesa Verde was seasonally occupied by a group of nomadic Paleo-Indians. Later Archaic people established semi-permanent rock shelters in and around the mesa. The Mesa Verdeans survived using a combination of hunting, gathering and subsistence farming of crops such as corn, beans and squash. By the end of the 12th century they began constructing the massive cliff dwellings for which the park is best known. By 1285 they had abandoned the area following a period of social instability and severe droughts.
The cliff dwellings are a series of structures built inside rock alcoves. The interiors were mostly sandstone block held together with an adobe mortar. These structures are amazingly well-preserved and fascinating to tour.
Uploaded
December 29th, 2019
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