Overview

Eight hundred years ago in the American Southwest, a group of indigenous peoples almost literally carved out a home in rock walls of the mesas and canyons. The Anasazi Indians built villages in seemingly inaccessible alcoves of cliff walls. The imposing sandstone structures in the villages themselves are perhaps the work of the most advanced pre-Columbian culture in North America.

The Anasazi had abandoned the spectacular cliff houses 200 years before the first European explorers, who gave Mesa Verde (Spanish for "green table") its name, would visit the region. The area was largely unknown to modern scholars until the American push for western expansion in the mid-nineteenth century. A group of cowboys rediscovered the cliff dwelling villages of Mesa Verde in the 1880s. Almost immediately, the described "cliff palaces" fascinated...