The Abandoned Lands...A Journey Through the Colorado Plateau: In death and the end of all things, there is beauty?

Spruce Tree House

Living in harmony with nature...

One sometimes hears such statements about some pastoral time when humans lived off the land, living in peace with their neighbors, and as such there was this Eden-like quality to existence. A moment's thought will probably lead one to realize that such situations in the human sojourn on this planet have been exceedingly rare. 

At the most cynical level, living in harmony with nature means that a society or culture is living within the strict constraints of resources, imposed by marginal agricultural lands or limited water sources. If the population grows too much, starvation ensues, and harmony is restored only when part of the population dies off. Very Malthusian....

We were continuing with our journey through the Abandoned Lands, the world of the Colorado Plateau. In the last post, we were taking stock of the landscape that surrounds the famous cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde National Park.

Square Tower House

In a sense, the Ancestral Pueblo people did live a rather harmonious existence at Mesa Verde. The available evidence suggests that people lived on the flat divides of the mesa for more than 600 years with little violence or warfare. How many parts of the world can claim such a record?

That isn't to say that life was in any way easy. In some ways life was brutal and short; the average lifespan was less than thirty years, and elders who reached their fifties were rare. Many burials show evidence of disease, and the gritty corn meal wore teeth away at a horrific rate. Women often died in childbirth.

Cliff Palace

And then there are the incredible stone cities that lie in the alcoves of Cliff House Sandstone that made Mesa Verde so famous. They are so striking in their architectural grace that one can look at them and sense that the Ancestral Puebloans had reached the pinnacle of their technological development when they built these dwellings. The truth is, as always, complicated.

Cliff Palace

They didn't live in these cities for very long...

Most of them were constructed at the beginning of the 1200s and they were mostly abandoned before 1300. For more than 600 years, the Ancestral Puebloans were content to live in small villages and family pithouses on the mesa tops. The alcoves containing the stone cities were cold and drafty in winter, they were practically inaccessible, and often far from water sources (a few alcoves had springs that emerged in the rear). For all their architectural grandeur, they were not comfortable places to live.

Cliff Palace

One could just as easily ask why Europeans built unassailable castles. They didn't want to be assailed. The stone cities of Mesa Verde, plain and simple, were fortresses. Despite their beauty, the cliff dwellings were the harbingers of the end of human occupation of Mesa Verde, an omen that foretold the abandonment of a place that a people called home for 600 mostly peaceful years.

Spruce Tree House

What went wrong? Anthropologists are not in complete agreement. But something they do agree on is that the archaeological record shows more evidence of violence and warfare at this time than in any comparable period in Ancestral Puebloan history. Some of the dwellings contained butchered bodies that were never given burials. The pathology was obvious: their skulls were bashed in and the structures purposely burned. I wrote of the tragedy of one of these villages, Castle Rock Pueblo, which can be found west of Mesa Verde. The villagers came to a sudden violent end about 1280, and the pueblo was never again occupied.

Geotripper contemplates Spruce Tree House

What events transpired that led a culture to live in fear for upwards of a century? What precipitated their final abandonment of the entire region? There have been stories of invaders from the north, but archaeological evidence for outside intervention is sparse at best. Was the violence fratricidal? There were intense multi-decade droughts that could have brought about crop failures and soil loss from erosion. Food stores may have run short. Faced with starvation, what would you do?

There is mystery about the reasons for the disappearance of the Ancestral Pueblo people, but there is no mystery about where they ended up. We have been exploring the lands of their descendants on this blog journey, at the pueblos along the Rio Grande River, and at the Hopi mesas. They have weathered many turbulent events and upheavals, but have persisted in this hard landscape when many others gave up.

As I pointed out in the previous post, this was a most extraordinary day: I left my camera in camp. All of these wonderful photographs are courtesy of my own Mrs. Geotripper.

The Abandoned Lands...A Journey Through the Colorado Plateau: 700 years in the Fertile Cresent

It's been a bit of time since we checked in on our journey through the Abandoned Lands, my theme for our summer field studies in the geology and archaeology of the Colorado Plateau. In the previous post of the series we were looking into the abandonment of Chaco Canyon after 300 years of cultural dominance. The reasons may have been meteorological and geological: the land was worn out and droughts had intensified by 1150 AD. On this day, we had traveled a hundred miles north to Durango, and over a series of foothills of the San Juan Mountains to arrive at Mesa Verde National Park. It was our first look at the 'fertile crescent' of the Ancestral Pueblo people. And a place that held out more than a century after the influence of Chaco Canyon had faded away.

World history taught us about a different fertile crescent, the one that spawned human civilization in the Middle East. In the case of the Colorado Plateau, it was a landscape that supported humans for 700 years or more, before being abandoned in the late 1200s. The land lying between Mesa Verde on the east and Cedar Mesa to the west was the sweet spot for agricultural development: it was a critical thousand or feet higher than the hot dry desert around Chaco Canyon, but it was not so high as to be buried by snow for too much of the year. The lands between Cortez, Colorado and Blanding, Utah were covered by the Dakota Sandstone and an overlying weathering unit called the Dove Creek Soil. It was ideal for growing corn and beans centuries ago, and continues to produce pinto beans today.

We are in one of our nation's premier national parks, famous for the spectacular cliff dwellings, but today's post doesn't have any pictures of them. Instead, I am showcasing the land on which the Ancestral Pueblo people lived. And what could be more boring, really? The plateau of the "Green Mesa" is mostly a gently-sloping pinyon-juniper woodland that has been scarred by a series of disastrous wildfires in the last few years. In a bizarre kind of way, it reminded me of home, back in the Central Valley of California. But this barren burned landscape probably looks more like the ancestral landscape of the Pueblo people right now than it has in hundreds of years. Why? Because this barren surface was their farmland, cleared of trees and shrubs in favor of corn and beans. For 600 of their 700 years on this mesa, it was the location of their village sites as well. The famous cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde were occupied for barely a century!

Mesa Verde has something like 5,000 archaeological sites, and yet only a dozen or so cliff dwellings are the objective of the majority of visitors. The older mesa-top structures garner a great deal less attention by visitors in a hurry, but they are a fascinating record of an occupation that lasted three times as long as the United States has existed. The pit houses, small villages, and the Sun Temple are interesting and more intimate places to visit than many of the cliff houses which often can only be seen from across canyons. There is even a reservoir and terraces that were constructed to expand arable farmlands.

The canyons are for the most part dangerously inaccessible, and I imagine they were utilized mostly as a source of water. Until that last century, that is. Then the inaccessible alcoves became home. Which leaves us with the big questions: why did the Ancestral Pueblo move into these dangerous canyons, and why did they abandon this land only a century later?

A programming note: Our exploration of Mesa Verde had one little quirk that I don't think has ever happened in all my journeys in the digital age...I left my camera sitting in my tent back at camp! These pictures were kindly provided by Mrs. Geotripper.

The Cretaceous Parks of the Colorado Plateau: The Green Table

The Mancos Shale of the previous post is also an important component of the geology at one of the nation's premier national parks, Mesa Verde (tr: "green table"). The park is tucked away in the far southwest corner of Colorado adjacent to the Ute Reservation and the towns of Cortez and Mancos (from which the shale takes its name). The high mesa (8,000 feet +) slopes south towards the desert region of Four Corners and the Navajo Reservation, and is dissected by a series of deep canyons which also drain towards the desert.

The mesa lies at the east end of the "fertile crescent" mentioned previously here and here, where conditions were ideal for growing squash, beans and corn. At Hovenweep and Canyons of the Ancients, the soils formed on the surface of the Dakota Sandstone. At Mesa Verde, the Mancos covers the Dakota, and is in turn covered by three formations that represent the receding shorelines and river floodplains that lined the Western Cretaceous Seaway, the Cliff House Sandstone, the Menefee Formation, and the Point Lookout Sandstone. The formations are found elsewhere, with different names, but the three together are usually referred to as the Mesa Verde Group. The sandstones are resistant to erosion and form prominent cliffs wherever canyons have been carved. Water moves freely through the sands until it reaches a clay rich layer (like the Mancos) and then moves sideways until it can drain into the canyons as springs. The cement holding the sands together is easily dissolved at such sites, and as the sand washes away, prominent alcoves have developed (the National Park Service has a nice review of the geology here).

Although the region is steeped in beautiful scenery, Mesa Verde was established as a national park in 1906 for the purpose of protected the spectacular cliff dwellings of the Ancestral Pueblo people. The mesa, as mentioned before, was a good site for agriculture. It was sort of a compromise; low enough to have a long growing season, but high enough to receive sufficent moisture in most years.

Nomadic peoples had moved through the area over thousands of years hunting and foraging, but the region was not settled in a permanent way until about 550AD (see here for a nice NPS review of the archaeology). It is not usually recognized, but for 500 years the Puebloan people did not live in cliff dwellings at all. They first lived in pit houses on the mesa surface, and later built small villages, also on the mesa surface. Looking at the semiarid forest of pinon and juniper that covers the surface of the plateau today, it is hard to believe that at one time, most of the park area was under cultivation. The farmers built reservoirs and check dams to prevent soil erosion, and most of the land was being used to support the population. The cliff dwellings for which the park is most famous were generally built during the final century of habitation, from around 1190 to 1270 AD. The dwellings certainly look defensive in nature, and when they were abandoned, so was the entire region. The reasons are not clearly known, but drought, resource depletion, warfare, or disease may have played a part. The survivors moved south and west to Arizona (the Hopi) and New Mexico (the Pueblo people) where they live today.

Something like 4,700 archaeological sites have been identified in the park, of which 600 are the popular cliff dwellings. Many sites were exposed in the last decade or so when something like two-thirds of the park burned in a series of intense fires. Although the fires severely damaged many sites, others were found for the first time. Many of the sites were severely vandalized by pot-hunters before the park was established, and the park service is vigilant about protecting what remains. Most of the dwellings and village sites are closed to visitation, but numerous pullouts on park roads allow visitors to look down into the alcoves. A number of the mesa-top sites can be accessed from the park roads. Spruce Tree, Cliff Palace, Long House and Balcony House are four of the larger alcove villages that can be toured (reservations required for the last three). Speaking from personal experience, Balcony House is one of the best tours, as you get a real sense of the inaccessibility of the villages: you must climb several tall ladders to get into the alcove, and must crawl through a few passageways to see the entire village.

If you visit the area with a geology crew, the park has a nice campground which is rarely crowded, with showers and a grocery store nearby. Motels and supplies are available in Cortez, Mancos or Durango. Oh, and try the Navajo Tacos at the Farview Lodge!