Days 34-37: In Search of Ancestral Puebloans

Saturday, May 29th - Tuesday, June 1st

• We spent Memorial Day weekend visiting Mesa Verde National Park in Colorado - we also stopped by the Navajo National Monument on our way there and the Chaco Culture National Historical Park on our way out. So, yeah - we've seen about 200 kivas.

• We learned that the term "Anasazi" is way out of fashion now. Apparently it's a Navajo word, and there are other descendants of the people in question were not happy using a Navajo word to describe their ancestors. So now everyone calls the people that inhabited the area "Ancestral Puebloans". They built cliff dwellings in Mesa Verde from about 1100 - 1200 A.D. and great houses at Chaco during roughly the same period.
  

• One interesting part of our learnings about the Ancestral Puebloans was the extent of their trade - artifacts like Macaw feathers and cacao show that they had trade routes extending to South America.

• We pondered on the fact that the absence of a written record means that much knowledge about the Ancestral Puebloans has been lost for good...there are many more questions than answers.
  

Four Corners Monument really isn't worth the trip right now:

There's actually a whole bunch of cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde, you can only tour 4 of them:

I think there's a picture of me in the family photo album circa 1992 climbing up this ladder out of Cliff Palace:

Really cool Petroglyphs at Chaco, and huge great houses - though we don't really know what they used them for...