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salvador
PHOTOGRAPHY
PHOTOGRAPHY
Mesa Verde, Spanish for green table, offers a spectacular look into the lives of the Ancestral Pueblo people who made it their home for over 700 years, from A.D. 600 to A.D. 1300. Today, the park protects over 4,000 known archeological sites, including 600 cliff dwellings. These sites are some of the most notable and best preserved in the United States.
To explore Mesa verde is to travel back through time. Crumbled villages on wide plains and tiny vulnerable homes perched high on rocky ledges intrique and stun us. Step into a room a smell centuries old soot. Look out the window and appreciate the same views the original dwellers enjoyed. Small handprints seem to wave at us from high canyon walls. We want to connect and wave back.
Mesa Verde national Park is truly America's premier archeological wonder. National Geographic Traveler named Mesa Verde as one of the fifty "must see" places of a lifetime. It is America's First World Heritage Site. hundreds of homes and villages have existed here for more than eight centuries, preserved and protected by overhanging cliff ledges. Their beauty and complexity speak eloquently of the ancient people who built them. No visitor can walk away untouched untouched by the buildings, the art, the people.
Mesa Verde is best known for a large number of well preserved cliff dwellings, houses built in shallow caves and under rock overhangs along the canyon walls. The structures contained within these alcoves were mostly blocks of hard sandstone, held together and plastered with adobe mortar. Specific constructions had many similarities, but were generally unique in form due to the individual topography of different alcoves along the canyon walls. In marked contrast to earlier constructions and villages on top of the mesas, the cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde reflected a region-wide trend towards the aggregation of growing regional populations into close, highly defensible quarters during the 1200s.
Information on the above description and on some captions are from http://www.nps.gov/meve/; Mesa Verde Travel literature; national Park Literature; http://www.kidscantravel.com and Wikipedia.
To explore Mesa verde is to travel back through time. Crumbled villages on wide plains and tiny vulnerable homes perched high on rocky ledges intrique and stun us. Step into a room a smell centuries old soot. Look out the window and appreciate the same views the original dwellers enjoyed. Small handprints seem to wave at us from high canyon walls. We want to connect and wave back.
Mesa Verde national Park is truly America's premier archeological wonder. National Geographic Traveler named Mesa Verde as one of the fifty "must see" places of a lifetime. It is America's First World Heritage Site. hundreds of homes and villages have existed here for more than eight centuries, preserved and protected by overhanging cliff ledges. Their beauty and complexity speak eloquently of the ancient people who built them. No visitor can walk away untouched untouched by the buildings, the art, the people.
Mesa Verde is best known for a large number of well preserved cliff dwellings, houses built in shallow caves and under rock overhangs along the canyon walls. The structures contained within these alcoves were mostly blocks of hard sandstone, held together and plastered with adobe mortar. Specific constructions had many similarities, but were generally unique in form due to the individual topography of different alcoves along the canyon walls. In marked contrast to earlier constructions and villages on top of the mesas, the cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde reflected a region-wide trend towards the aggregation of growing regional populations into close, highly defensible quarters during the 1200s.
Information on the above description and on some captions are from http://www.nps.gov/meve/; Mesa Verde Travel literature; national Park Literature; http://www.kidscantravel.com and Wikipedia.
