The Cuesra -- Mesa Verde II

   The descent in the cliff dwellings is a bit less dramatic than one would think, a feat likely necessary due to the variety of people wanting to make the journey.  One has to take into account that people overweight or physically out of shape fare equally well with children (not babies) and some who are quite elderly, a far cry from the original inhabitants who had only small carved-out holes in which to place their hands and feet as they climbed or descended into these areas; picture yourself gazing over a steep ledge and then lowering yourself slowly over it while you felt for that first foothold.  One slip (which must have happened) and your fall would be tragic (for you and the community) or lethal.  Now picture yourself not as a young warrior or farmer, but a child or a mother carrying a baby.  Gazing at the plush and sturdy log ladders set up by the Park Service, the ancients would have likely scoffed at as well as envied the new access routing; or perhaps would have simply discarded it entirely since it made for an easier attack by an enemy.  But here we were, the sturdy pipe railings giving us an added sense of security as we descended steep stairs, carved in the rock not by the dwellers but by the Civilian Conservation Corps nearly 100 years earlier.

   It was a time of entering a new world, a world where historians now question whether Spanish explorers ever reached this far, despite being credited for giving this area its name of Mesa Verde.  But trade did occur, as natives from Mexico brought cotton and corn, both of which proved instrumental in developing the cliff dwellers lifestyle.  We would also discover that what we think of as gender roles would be reversed in this society.  It would be the men of the ancestral Pueblo who would become the weavers and makers of textiles on looms, while the women would own the home and the contents therein.  It was what is termed a matrilineal society* with the line of descent being based on the mother's side and not the paternal side as was the pattern begun in European societies.  So it is felt that the men searched for their only escape and that was to religion; circular structures called "kivas" were built in most dwellings, some smaller and meant only for that dwelling's population, but some quite large (40-50 feet in diameter) and used more for group ceremonies by many.**  But kivas were for men only, the women rarely, if ever, allowed to enter (they did become the artistic makers of clay pottery, creating a style of intricate designs with white/black colors incorporated into the vessels  and a design still seen today in many Pueblo artifacts).  I could only think of the parallels of today's world, such control and progression being driven underground or hidden from view and the hierarchy of religion and power switching away from the female (the late Joseph Campbell wrote in detail about the dissolution of goddesses and females and the shift to male dominance in religious history in his book The Power of Myth).

   As we rounded the corner we could glimpse the earlier ranger-led group just ahead of us, their voices and movements just visible through the leaves as if we were discovering a rare tribe in a jungle.  And then the group moved on and it was our turn, our turn to step back in time onto ground that was once a thriving city and gathering place, a place that held 120 or more people.  We were entering the largest cliff dwelling in North America, the Cliff Palace.   Considered unique even among other structures in Mesa Verde, this building site seems to mark a change in construction and function to both archeologists and historians who did further research in the late 1990s (to our untrained eyes, the buildings for the most part appeared virtually identical to other such structures we saw from far).  But the Cliff Palace ended up with what one park brochure described this way: ...its cave is 324 feet long, 89 feet deep, and it is 59 feet from floor to ceiling at its highest point.  There were more than 217 rooms and 23 kivas in the dwelling.   Stepping out of the shadowy world we could now see the elaborate brick work, some of the structures now buttressed and additionally supported with modern cement; but today's cement was not as strong or as efficient as the soil/clay mixture the Ancestral Pueblo used, said our ranger, the ancient formula being something that today's scientists are still trying to duplicate.

A diorama creating what is thought to have been their lifestyle.

  The buildings reached to the tops of the cliff's roofs, some being round, mixed among the square shaped rooms, the doors mostly formed into a T form to allow both support and ease of entrance for the small frames of the occupants.  As with many people of the time (those of you who have been to a historical home in England will relate to this), the people were small, averaging what is estimated to be just over 5 feet in height.  Their living conditions and activities had evolved off of the cliff tops and earthen pits to supported structures in the alcoves of cliffs.  Corn was introduced from Mexico and was ground with their metates and with that, diseases such as worn teeth were entering the fold (archeologists feel that this was likely due to chewing the roughly milled grit of the corn); granaries and storage for the tough winter months were placed high above the buildings.  As we stared from below we could only wonder and marvel at the complexity of the buildings, each brick and block designed with little more than hands and other rocks.  How did they know the right form for ventilation (many of the structures once had roofs and getting rid of the smoke from the warming fires inside was necessary).  But engineers praise the designs, designs noticeable in the kivas and likely incorporated in part into the living areas.

A small "clan" Kiva structure; the right picture shows one of the grainary areas perched high above..

    To stand here imagining it all, it seemed easy to disappear.  From the cliff tops there was little to see, and that was after reaching the top of the mesa from the canyon far below.  And even after being there, one had to have rather sharp eyes to peer through the trees and wonder if there was life or activity in that next canyon.  Many fires had ravaged this area in the past 50 years, and likely such fires happened in earlier times, wiping out vast sections of the forest.  But the trees would grow back and before long, the ancients were once again secure in their homes, visible only to a few, their traces just that, traces (if they used burial grounds, they have yet to be uncovered by today's archeologists, perhaps a final testimony to the ancients' belief in the sanctity of the spirits; each kiva held a spiritual "hole" as well to allow the spirits to both enter and exit).

Views from the road of  one of the canyons atop the mesa; the dwellings hidden from the casual looker..

   We had visited a piece of history, a glimpse of an unsolved mystery that lay undiscovered for hundreds of years and yet was once a thriving source of life for longer than it had lain dormant.  The pyramids, the temples, the colossal structures now in ruins, the cliff dwellings.  Our best minds and scientists could still only guess at the actual lives of these peoples that had roamed the earth long before us and had built their altars and structures and homes, the tree rings providing just a peek into the dates that they lived here (as it turns out, far from the pulling of a small plug from a single tree, at least 50 tree rings are usually needed for a proper dating analysis, a field of science termed dendrochronology).  And just as the study of Mesa Verde has branched off into archaeomagnetic (iron), palynologic (pollen) and ethnographic explorations, the fields continued to reveal new discoveries.  Trying to absorb it all was indeed futile, as futile as naming a specific beetle or flower as just that, simply a flower or a bug and not its Latin or biological name, or even its kingdom, genus or species and on and on (it gets complicated but there are many free courses on

the classification systems used in biology).  We condense and combine and encapsulate our histories and our experiences, simplifying our understanding as much as possible, as I've done here.  The Pecos class becomes too complex and is reduced to the Robert's class (in studying cultures of this period); and so to those of you who are well-versed in your scientific fields, and those of you who may be related to members of ancient cultures,  my hope is that you will forgive my ultra-compact presentation of thousands of years of this particular Ancient Pueblo culture.   It must have been a grand period of invention and insight, a resilience of facing sheer rock and deciding to make it a home, to find and capture water, to build shelter, to raise families, to create areas to mingle socially with others.  It was not only history, but it was cultural evolution and a display of human need, a need to keep advancing and to both hide and reveal.  And as has been witnessed by so many ancient cultures, to perhaps also decide that it was time to just leave, to vanish with few clues, to let the next culture some hundreds of years later try to put the pieces together.  Maybe only by doing that we would future generations come to realize what had been lost...and one would hope, to also discover how to learn from that so that they could move forward. 

*For an interesting update on a new outlook on Alzheimer's, take a peek at the research being done by at the Wyoming lab headed by Dr. Paul Fox, ethnobotanist.  In a piece which appeared in Fortune, Dr Fox is studying the positive benefits of  L-serine, an amino acid that appears to slow the development of Alzheimer's in the brain by several years.  Fox traveled to Ogimi, Japan, a city known for its residents living far more years (often passing a hundred or so years) than most places.  Scientists have studied the diets and habits of the peoples of Ogimi for decades but Fox was the first to discover that the seaweed the residents collected offshore had high levels of L-serine; Ogimi also is, and has apparently always been, a matrilineal society.

**Two additional side notes: 1) the flat heads which became a distinct feature of the ancestral Pueblos was caused more from laying their babies on a hard cradle board, and not carrying them with a board backing as I had originally written; sorry about that but I've since corrected the post.  And 2) there was a bit of commotion about my mention of Columbus and his not landing on "American" soil but rather on a series of Jamaican islands.  As historians are now noting, Columbus never did set foot on U.S. shores, his "discovery" of America being relegated only to those distant islands and the shores of Central & South America; but Columbus actually discovering the U.S., well, no.  Native Americans were already there, and it is assumed that Phoenicians and Vikings also arrived hundreds if not thousands of years ahead of Columbus.  Still, Columbus Day remains a federal holiday in the United States and more than a few grade schools still consider this native-born Italian (although he wrote and spoke in Spanish) the discoverer of America and thus, the U.S.  Many cities and states are taking steps to correct the error by renaming the holiday, dropping the Columbus name in favor of Indigenous Peoples Day or Native Americans Day.