Mesa Verde National Park (MVNP) in what is today southwestern Colorado is a UNESCO World Heritage site dedicated to the preservation and presentation of the amazing cliff dwellings and other structures built and used by Ancestral Puebloans from roughly A.D. 600 until the end of the 13th century.
Visitors to spectacularly beautiful sites such as Cliff Palace and Spruce Tree House find them mesmerizing, unforgettable, and thought-provoking. These and other cliff structures were handmade with millions of sandstone blocks, thousands of wooden beams for roofing elements, and copious amounts of adobe mortar, branches, and grasses. Even more remarkable, however, is that Ancestral Puebloans built these structures high up from the valley floor and below the mesa tops, in dry rockshelters that formed naturally in the region’s sandstone cliffs.