Of the many ruins in Mesa Verde National Park the most famous, and also the largest, is Cliff Palace.[125] With its many rooms and great stone towers it does give the impression of a palace, but this is of course a misnomer. Far from being the palace of a ruler, it was the home of hundreds of farmers and their families. Cliff Palace is a terraced building reaching to four stories in height in some places and containing over two hundred rooms and twenty-three kivas. The rooms were small, often irregularly shaped, and had low ceilings. Not all of them were used as living quarters. Some were used for storage. Storage must have been of great importance, since grain designed for winter food, as well as seed corn, had to be preserved. Also, it is probable that these ancient farmers accumulated large reserves to tide them over years when the crops failed, as do their present-day descendants. Other rooms contained boxlike structures of stone slabs which held metates, and these are thought to have been milling rooms in which the corn was ground. The living rooms, each one occupied by one family, were small and probably none too comfortable. Some rooms were entered through the roofs but others had doors and windows. Even when doors were present, they were small and high above the floor and were probably reached by ladders. Few of the rooms contained fireplaces. The smoke from a fire in a small room with inadequate ventilation would present a definite problem, but life in the winter in an unheated room in a high canyon would not seem particularly appealing to present-day Americans. The walls of the houses were neatly plastered, sometimes colored and sometimes embellished by well painted designs. The small size of the rooms has often given rise to a belief that the inhabitants were abnormally small. Actually the people were of normal size, but they probably did not spend much time in the rooms. Much of the life of the great house must have centered about the open courts and terraced roofs. When the men were not working in the fields or hunting on the mesa tops, they must have spent much time in their kivas, which may have served as habitations for the unmarried men and general meeting places, as well as providing a setting for the religious rites. While we cannot be sure what these ceremonies were, it seems certain that they were concerned with the well-being of the crops, which must be the first concern of all farmers, and that their form and content must have been greatly influenced by the ever present need of water which has always dominated life in the Southwest.