Mesa Verde: The Museum

Because we had only a day to see Mesa Verde, we awoke early to make the most of it, beginning with the park museum. It's located deeper in the park, about five miles south of the Far View lodgings on Chapin Mesa next to Spruce Tree House, the most easily accessible cliff dwelling in the park.  

The museum details the history of the inhabitants of the Mesa Verde area beginning with the Basket Maker and proto-Pueblo cultures that first settled there around 400 AD. The earliest sites were small villages on top of the mesas comprised of small, individual pit houses. By 600-700 AD, the houses were often built contiguously, and the famed black-on-white pottery the Ancestral Puebloans (Anasazi) are so well known for began to replace the woven ware that gave the Basket Maker culture its name. Around 1100 AD, the people of Mesa Verde moved off the mesa tops and into the canyons, building their homes in hard to reach places tucked up under the canyon rims. The move to these more easily defensible cliff dwellings is thought to have been precipitated by a centuries-long drought that may have turned the once peaceful pueblo dwellers against each other in their quest for food and water. The move may also have been predicated by an influx of outsiders to the area. Whatever the case, evidence of violence and warfare is present in the archaeological record from this period across the region.

By 1300 AD, the Mesa Verde cliff dwellings had been abandoned. Contrary to popular belief, however, the Ancestral Puebloan people did not vanish mysteriously. Instead, they moved further south into what is now Arizona and New Mexico to find more reliable sources of water. They survive today as the Hopi, Zuni, Acoma, San Ildefonso, Santa Clara, Jemez, and Zia tribes, and many more besides.

The Mesa Verde area was for the most part uninhabited until the 19th century. It was not until the 1870s that the cliff dwellings were first photographed and publicized, and Cliff Palace was not discovered by whites until 1888. For the next twenty years, various sites at Mesa Verde were pot-hunted by amateurs and vandalized by tourists and curio-seekers. In the 1890s, Gustaf Nordenskiöld, a minerologist from Finland, excavated a number of sites scientifically, but he shipped all of his finds home to the Museum of Cultures in Helsinki. This scientific looting of some of the best finds at Mesa Verde as well as the continued desecration of the sites by tourists led to the area being declared a National Park in 1906. It also spawned the Federal Antiquities Act of 1906 to protect ancient American sites from further pillaging. With that history in mind, the treasures in the Mesa Verde museum are still a treat to see, but to this student of archaeology, the lack of provenance for many of the pieces displayed was somewhat frustrating.

For those not familiar with the history of the region, the museum offers an excellent short film about the cliff dwellings and the park. The exhibits begin with the earliest inhabitants and proceed through the various occupation stages, providing a variety of visuals that show how (we think) they lived.

Basket Maker pithouse circa 550 to 750 AD

 

Early pueblos circa 750 to 1100 AD

 

Cliff dwellings circa 1100 to 1300 AD

 

Early basket

 

An iconic black-on-white pottery effigy

 

 

 

 

And some of the extraordinary pottery

 

 

 

 

 

A case showing the areas where the various Ancestral Puebloan people (Anasazi, Mogollon, Hohokam, Salado, etc) lived and examples of their pottery

A Mimbres-style (Mogollon) bowl from the Tularosa area in New Mexico

 

Avian wildlife of Mesa Verde

 

My sneaky sister got a shot of me admiring the pottery

The museum includes some art from modern tribes in the area as well including Navajo rugs, a Navajo sandpainting, and some exquisite Plains tribes beadwork

 

 

 

 

 

Next post---Spruce Tree House and Cliff Palace!