Mesa Verde National Park

Mesa Verde National Park is in Montezuma County, near Cortez, in the Four Corners region of the American Southwest. Congress and President Theodore Roosevelt established it in 1906. It covers 52,485 acres and is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the only one in Colorado. It protects some of the best-preserved Ancestral Puebloan sites in the United States.

With more than 5,000 sites, including 600 cliff dwellings, it is the largest archaeological preserve in the country. Mesa Verde means green table in Spanish, and the park is best known for structures such as Cliff Palace, one of the largest cliff dwellings in North America.

Starting around 7500 BCE, Mesa Verde was visited seasonally by nomadic Paleo-Indians. Later, Archaic people made semi-permanent rock shelters in and around the mesa. By 1000 BCE the Basketmaker culture had emerged from the local Archaic population, and by 750 CE the Ancestral Puebloans had developed from it. They lived by hunting, gathering and farming corn, beans and squash, the Three Sisters.

The Ancestral Puebloans built the mesa's first pueblos sometime after 650, and by the end of the 12th century they began to construct the massive cliff dwellings for which the park is best known. By 1285, after a period of social and environmental instability driven by severe and prolonged droughts, they migrated south to places in Arizona and New Mexico, including the Rio Chama, the Albuquerque Basin, the Pajarito Plateau and the foot of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains.