Mesa Verde [Colorado] National ParkUnited States. Department of the Interior
History
Mesa Verde [Colorado] National Park
United States. Department of the Interior
Mesa Verde National Park (Colo.)
Then followed a long development in house structure, differing
materially from this earlier type. Horizontal masonry replaced the
cruder attempts of house-wall construction; rectangular or squarish
forms replaced the somewhat circular earlier type; and gradually the
single-room structures were grouped into ever-enlarging units which
assumed varying forms of arrangement as the development progressed.
The art of pottery making improved concurrently with the more complex
house structure. This later period represents the intermediate era of
development from the crude Late Basket Maker dwellings to the
remarkable structures of the "Cliff House Culture."
During this period of transition new people penetrated the area. The
Basket Makers throughout the course of their development were
consistently a long-headed group. The appearance of an alien group is
recorded through the finding of skeletons with broad or round skulls
and a deformed occiput. These new people, the Pueblos, took over,
changed, and adapted to their own needs the material culture of the
earlier inhabitants.
The Pueblos were not content with the crude buildings and earth lodges
that sufficed as homes during the earlier periods. For their
habitations they shaped stones into regular forms, sometimes
ornamenting them with designs, and laid them in mud mortar, one on
another. Their masonry has resisted the destructive forces of the
elements for centuries.
The arrangement of houses in a cliff dwelling the size of Cliff Palace
is characteristic and is intimately associated with the distribution
of the social divisions of its former inhabitants.
The population was composed of a number of units, possibly clans, each
of which had its more or less distinct social organization, as
indicated in the arrangement of the rooms. The rooms occupied by a
clan were not necessarily connected, and generally neighboring rooms
were distinguished from one another by their uses. Thus, each clan had
its men's room, which is called the "kiva." Each clan had also a
number of rooms, which may be styled the living rooms, and other
enclosures for granaries. The corn was ground into meal in another
room containing the metate set in a stone bin or trough. Sometimes the
rooms had fireplaces, although these were generally in the plazas or
on the housetops. All these different rooms, taken together,
constituted the houses that belonged to one clan.
The conviction that each kiva denotes a distinct social unit, as a
clan or a family, is supported by a general similarity in the masonry
of the kiva walls and that of adjacent houses ascribed to the same
clan. From the number of these rooms it would appear that there were
at least 23 social units or clans in Cliff Palace.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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