Mesa Verde

About 1,400 years ago, long before Europeans explored North America, a group of people living in the Four Corners region chose Mesa Verde for their home. For more than 700 years they and their descendants lived and flourished here, eventually building elaborate stone communities in the sheltered alcoves of canyon walls. Then in the late 1200's, in the span of a generation or two, they left their homes and moved away.

Mesa Verde National Park preserves a spectacular reminder of this ancient culture. Archeologists have called these people Anasazi from a Navajo word sometimes translated as "The ancient foreigners". We now call them Ancestral Puebloans, reflecting their modern descendants.

We will never know the whole story, they left no written records and much that was important in their lives has perished.

I hope the pictures I took will give you some idea of what these people built and how impressive they are.