Question

The setting is unique, as are the houses. So, what made the people leave?

The multistoried houses built in the canyons of southwestern Colorado’s Mesa Verde are among the most spectacular, and best preserved, ancient sites in the Americas. In 1906, President Theodore Roosevelt designated the area Mesa Verde National Park (the name comes from the Spanish mesa, or “table,” and verde, or “green”).

There are some 4,000 known sites in the park, from pithouses dating from the 500s CE to the amazing cliff dwellings of the 1200s, of which there are 600. The largest is Cliff Palace, with 150 rooms and 23 kivas (circular underground ceremonial rooms). Its population may have been around 100 people. Most of the cliff dwellings, however, have just one to five rooms.

‘Tabletop’ Houses
When these “cliff dwellings” were first found more than a century ago, people thought they had been built by outsiders, such as the Phoenicians or Aztecs. Today, we know that the people who built these structures were the Ancestral Puebloan Peoples (APP).

APP origins can be traced to the people known as the Basket Maker culture (1–400 CE), farmers who produced excellent baskets but had no pottery. In the succeeding Modified Basket Maker culture (400–750 CE), people lived in pithouses, partly dug into the ground on the mesa tops, and began using pottery. After 750 CE, in what is known as the Developmental Pueblo culture, people still had their houses on the mesa tops for the most part but built them clustered together in compact villages, or pueblos, around open courts. They used myriad construction methods: adobe (sun-dried bricks of clay and straw) and wooden poles, stone slabs topped with adobe, adobe and stones, and, finally, layered stone masonry.

Home, Sweet Home
Around 1200 CE, the APP began building their apartment-like dwellings in the natural “alcoves” in the cliffs below the mesa tops. These alcoves were formed when moisture seeped downward through the sandstone until it reached a lower layer of slate, through which it could not pass. In winter, the freezing and thawing waterlogged sandstone would crumble and erode, leaving a deep shelter in the base of the cliff — the perfect place for a home.

How did the APP build the cliff dwellings? The walls are sandstone blocks (carefully shaped using harder stones) laid in courses and held together with mortar (mixed from soil, water, and ash). The floors and roofs were made using wooden beams.

Life in the cliff dwellings was not easy. Resources were limited and many of the dwellings’ inhabitants died young. And the food? Corn, beans, and squash were the main crops raised by the APP at Mesa Verde. Because of the region’s scarce rainfall, they farmed terraces built in places where runoff water would pass and constructed dams and catch basins to conserve water.

Why Did They Leave?
After occupying the cliff dwellings for 75 to 100 years, the people deserted this region. Where did they go? Archaeologists have been able to track them by their pottery. They have found pottery derived from the characteristic black-on-white type from Mesa Verde at sites far to the south and east of it.

Why they left is not known, although many possibilities have been suggested. Growth rings in trees offer some clues. There was a drought around 1276 to 1300 CE, but was it severe enough to make everybody leave the region? Other environmental factors might have been colder winters and shortened growing seasons (perhaps caused by dust in the atmosphere from volcano eruptions) and irregular rainfall patterns after 1250 CE. There is evidence of increased violence at this time also, but that could have been a result of stress rather than a cause for moving.

Today, 24 tribes claim an ancestral connection to the amazing builders of Mesa Verde, including Pueblo tribes in New Mexico; the Zuni, Acoma, and Hopi in Arizona; some Navajo; and the Ute.

How does paragraph 8 contribute to the development of ideas in the text?



A. by providing examples of different farming techniques used in the cliff dwellings

B. by providing examples of meals the AAP cooked in the cliff dwellings

C. by questioning why the APP chose to live in cliff dwellings

D. by highlighting the challenges of life in the cliff dwellings

Answer 1

D. Paragraph 8 discusses environmental stress (drought, colder winters, irregular rainfall) and increased violence as possible reasons they left, highlighting the challenges that affected life in the cliff dwellings.