Mesa Verde National Park was the home of the Ancestral Pueblo people for over seven hundred years from A.D. 600 to A.D. 1300. In June of 1906, President Theodore Roosevelt established the Mesa Verde National Park to “Preserve the work of man”. Mesa Verde contains four-thousand known archeological sites with six-hundred cliff dwellings that represent the best preserved sites of this kind in the United States. For the first six centuries the Pueblo people lived on the top of the mesa and it was not until the last seventy-five to one -hundred years when they began to build and live in the cliff dwellings. To the archeologists they were known as Anazsi from the Navajo word meaning “the ancient ones”. They had been a nomadic tribe but began to farm and were well known for their basket weaving skills. They planted corn, beans and squash as well as supplementing their diet with wild plants, deer and other game in the area. By A.D. 1300 the dwellings were empty as the Ancestral Pueblo migrated into New Mexico and Arizona. There are approximately twenty-four tribes that are descendents of these “ancient ones”: The nineteen Pueblo tribes in New Mexico, Hopi Tribe in Arizona, Ysleta del Sur Pueblo in Texas, Ute Mountain Ute Tribe in Colorado, Southern Ute in Colorado, and the Navajo Nation in Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico. |
