Cliff Palace Mesa Verde

by Debby Pueschel

Title

Cliff Palace Mesa Verde

Artist

Debby Pueschel

Medium

Photograph - Photography

Description

Discovered by chance by two cattlemen who were looking for their cattle around 1896 in the lower corner of Colorado, this immense dwelling was nothing less than amazing to these men. Eventually, archeologists came and cleaned up the decaying buildings that once housed many families. Today, we are able to visit this beautiful and mystifying place, called Cliff Palace.

Recent studies reveal that Cliff Palace contained 150 rooms and 23 kivas and had a population of approximately 100 people. Out of the nearly 600 cliff dwellings concentrated within the boundaries of the park, 75% contain only 1-5 rooms each, and many are single room storage units. If you visit Cliff Palace you will enter an exceptionally large dwelling which may have had special significance to the original occupants. It is thought that Cliff Palace was a social, administrative site with high ceremonial usage.

Sandstone, mortar and wooden beams were the three primary construction materials for the cliff dwellings. The Ancestral Pueblo people shaped each sandstone block using harder stones collected from nearby river beds. The mortar between the blocks is a mixture of local soil, water and ash. Fitted in the mortar are tiny pieces of stone called "chinking." Chinking stones filled the gaps within the mortar and added structural stability to the walls. Over the surface of many walls, the people decorated with earthen plasters of pink, brown, red, yellow, or white -- the first things to erode with time. The buildings were 2-4 stories high, depending on the surface of the rock in which they were building.

Today, the theory, that with the growing population of the Cliff Dwellers, the lack of natural resources for food dwindled, therefore the People relocated to a more favorable region to sustain life.

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*SPECIAL FEATURE - 1000 VIEWS ON ONE IMAGE 10-13-22

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Uploaded

June 6th, 2016

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