Who lived in the Mesa Verde cliff houses?
High in the cliffs of southwestern Colorado, tucked under stone overhangs like swallows' nests under a bridge, sit the most astonishing apartment buildings you've ever seen. Stone rooms. Tall towers. Plazas where families cooked and worked and gossiped, seven hundred years ago. Who built these sky-high cities? Who woke up every morning in a bedroom carved into a cliff?
The answer: the Ancestral Pueblo people, farmers and builders who'd lived in the Four Corners region for over a thousand years before they ever climbed into those cliffs. For centuries, they lived on the mesa tops—the flat tablelands above—in villages made of stone and timber. They grew corn, beans, and squash in the valleys. They made black-on-white pottery so beautiful it still takes your breath away. Then, around 1190 CE, they did something unexpected. They moved into the cliffs.
