The year was 1888 and the month was December. Two cowboys, Charlie Mason and Richard Wetherill, rode through the falling snow of southwest Colorado looking for stray cattle. They soon came to the edge of a rocky canyon. Looking down into it they made an amazing discovery. On the other side of the canyon was an immense cave cut into the cliff wall, and inside that cave was what looked like a palace. It was the lost city of Mesa Verde we now call Cliff Palace.
Mesa Verde means "Green Table" in Spanish and it is an appropriate name. This part of Colorado is a flat tableland some 20 miles long and 18 miles wide. The top is some 2,000 feet higher than the surrounding land. To the south the Mesa is cut by some 20 canyons which contain over 500 hundred Indian ruins, of which Cliff Palace is the largest.Archaeologists estimate that the native Americans who built Cliff Palace arrived in Mesa Verde as early as 1 A.D. They apparently lived a quiet and peaceful life on the Mesa tops until about 1200 A.D. when suddenly they abandoned their towns and built new ones in caves on the cliff faces. Why? Probably for security. The caves were large (the cave at Cliff Palace is one-hundred feet deep and three-hundred feet wide) and gave protection from the sun, rain, snow and human enemies.
Cliff Palace has over two-hundred rooms and some parts are three stories high. It probably housed around 400 people. Though the residents lived in the cave, they commuted to the Mesa top to work their agricultural fields.Around 1280, though, the Indians suddenly abandoned their cliff dwellings and moved away. There is no sign that they were forced out by war, so what could have made the residents leave their new cities barely 80 years after they had been built?
In this case scientists think they have found the answer in the trees of the Mesa. When a tree is cut down, the cross section shows a series of concentric rings. One new ring is laid down each year. By counting the rings it is possible to tell the age of the tree. By looking at the width of the ring it is possible to tell how much a tree grew in any particular year.By examining trees, scientists have been able to determine that a severe drought hit the Mesa around 1276 and lasted 24 years. This affected the residents food supply and they were forced to move. They apparently went south and mixed with the Pueblo Indians that live there even to this day. Many items were still in the rooms at Cliff Palace and it is likely that the residents intended to return at the end of the drought. They never came back, though, and all that is left of their culture is the silent cities in the Mesa Verde cliffs.
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