Ancient Cliff Dwellers

The Pueblos occupied the Four Corners area (where the present-day states of Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Utah meet) from approximately 1 to 1300 c.e. They developed extensive irrigation works and apartment complexes in the arid Southwest. The remains of one of their settlements, in southwestern Colorado’s Mesa Verde National Park, feature an amazing array of architectural styles. First, pit houses were dug into the hilltop mesas; as the population increased, two- and three-story houses followed. Around 1200, for reasons not entirely known, “cliff houses”—large, multistory housing complexes fashioned of sandstone blocks—were built in alcoves on the canyon walls. More than six hundred cliff houses exist in Mesa Verde today. Residents left the settlements during an extended drought in the late thirteenth century.

Source: Horace Swartley Poley, "Ruin in Cliff Cañon from the north," 1901—The Denver Public Library, Western History Collection, Call #P-612.