Mesa Verde National Park

  In Colorado we went to the Mesa Verde National Park to see the ancient cave dwellings where the Pueblo Indians once lived.  There were approximately 40 to 50 thousand Pueblo Indians that lived and flourished in the cave dwellings all along the canyon in Mesa Verde.  Each settlement housed between 50 to 60 people at a time.  The Spruce Tree House is open in winter so we were able to explore it with a Park Ranger who knew a lot about the Pueblo Indians and how they lived.  The  national park is 7000 feet above sea level and the cave dwellings are located all along the canyon.  Most of the cave dwellings were built from 1150 AD to 1300 AD and are all original (apart from one wooden roof over a kiva that was added to show what it was like inside over 800 years ago).  

  The word kiva comes from the Hopi Indian language and means round chambers usually underground.  Kivas were built in nearly every villiage or homesite used by the Pueblo Indians.  The kiva had many uses such as a gathering place, ceremonial purposes and food storage.  Most kivas have similar features like stone walls, a fire pit, an opening in the ceiling with a ladder for entry and a sipapu.  A sipapu is a small hole in the ground that represents the doorway into the underworld.  Pueblo people consider the sipapu a simbolic entrance into a former world.  They kept the sipapu closed to stop bad spirits entering from the underworld and believe that the new world will be through a spiritual doorway somewhere above.

  The park ranger was a really funny guy, he kept acting out scenes of how the Pueblo lived. He'd pretend he was climbing up the canyon walls, dodging rocks, or that he was a real estate agent auctioning off the different sections of the cave He almost fainted from the smell of waste that was just tipped right outside the front houses doorstep, he thought those houses should be the cheapest.  The ranger was very interested in Pueblo technology, he was amazed at how advanced they were.  They many tools made out of bone, stone and timber.  They had bows and arrows, knives, spears, drills, pots, bowls, cups and would weave baskets out of willow.  

One Pueblo invention was the ventillation system that was used in the kiva.  In the centre of the kiva would be a fire pit directly infront of a small stone wall deflector.  A ventilation shaft would pull fresh air from outside and circulate the air around the kiva. The deflector would stop the air from being drawn directly into the fire, preventing drafts and helping smoke rise through the entry hole in the roof.  Another example of Pueblo technology was prayer sticks.  Because the Pueblo built their homes in canyons there was danger from above due to large rocks that could crush them when they fell.  The  Pueblo would jam the prayer sticks tightly in between the cracks in the canyon walls and knew that when a prayer stick fell out a rock was likely to follow.

  A question that puzzles visitors to Mesa Verde national park is why did the Pueblo leave such an amazing  settlement?  They had survived many things over their 800 years of living in the valley including drought, predators, fires and extreme weather conditions.  Historians assume that the Pueblo left because they had exhausted all of the surrounding environments resources.  The soil was lacking nutrients after hundreds of years of farming (mainly corn and squash), animals had been hunted out and water could be scarce.  The Pueblo moved and settled elsewhere leaving all of these wonderful historic buildings behind for us to visit centuries later.  Drew