My video pans across the ruins of Cliff Palace in the early morning shadows at Mesa Verde National Park, CO. It’s the largest known cliff dwelling in North America and the most famous at the park, which is in the southwest part of the state. The sprawling structure had 150 rooms, 23 kivas, and likely housed approximately 100 residents.
While the remnants of Cliff Palace show that it was impressive, cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde were only inhabited for a few generations. Ancestral Puebloans settled the area during the 5th century CE, but they didn’t begin building in the canyon alcoves until sometime around the 13th century. Less than a century later, Mesa Verde was suddenly and inexplicably abandoned, leaving behind one of the great unsolved mysteries of pre-Columbian North America: Who or what caused the Ancestral Puebloans to flee their homeland?
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