Mesa Verde National Park
U.S. national park in Colorado / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Mesa Verde National Park is a United States National Park and UNESCO World Heritage Site. It is in Montezuma County, Colorado, United States. The park was created in 1906 to protect some of the best preserved cliff dwellings in the world. It is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.[2]
Mesa Verde=northeast | |
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IUCN category II (national park) | |
Location | Montezuma County, Colorado, United States, North America |
Nearest city | Mancos, Colorado |
Coordinates | 37°11′02″N 108°29′19″W |
Area | 52,485 acres (212.40 km2) |
Established | June 29, 1906 (1906-06-29) |
Visitors | 613,788 (in 2017)[1] |
Governing body | National Park Service |
Website | Mesa Verde National Park |
Type | Cultural |
Criteria | iii |
Designated | 1978 (2nd session) |
Reference no. | 27 |
State Party | United States |
Region | Europe and North America |
Designated | October 15, 1966 |
Reference no. | 66000251 |
The park occupies 81.4 square miles (211 square kilometers) near the Four Corners and features ruins of homes and villages built by the ancestral Puebloan people, sometimes called the Anasazi. The ancestral Puebloans made these stone villages their home in the 13th century. However, the first ancestral Puebloans had settled in Mesa Verde over 600 years before the cliff dwellings were ever built.
These first people are known as the Basketmakers and they lived in pithouses clustered into small villages usually built on mesa tops but sometimes in the overhangs of the cliffs. These hunter-gatherer people settled and began farming and using the bow and arrow, a weapon that was more efficient and accurate than the atlatl. By 750 AD, the people were building mesa-top villages made of adobe. By the late 12th century they began to build the cliff dwellings for which Mesa Verde is famous.
Mesa Verde is best known for cliff dwellings, which are structures built within caves and under outcropping in cliffs — including Cliff Palace, which is thought to be the largest cliff dwelling in North America. The Spanish term Mesa Verde translates into English as "green table". Approximately 600 of the over 4700 archeological sites found in Mesa Verde National Park are cliff dwellings.