Learn about the Ancestral Pueblo people who lived at Mesa Verde over 700 years ago. Places Cultural information on Mesa Verde's cliff dwellings and mesa top sites. Stories A Mesa Verde National Park Timeline. Collections Information on the park's artifact and archival collections. Preservation Mesa Verde preserves nearly 5,000 archeological sites.

Archeological Techniques Used at Mesa Verde National Park (Gilbert R. Wenger, ©Mesa Verde Museum Association, Inc., 1982, digital edition by permission of Mesa Verde Museum Association, all rights reserved)

About 1,400 years ago, long before Europeans explored North America, a group of people living in the Four Corners region chose Mesa Verde for their home. For more than 700 years they and their descendants lived and flourished here, eventually building elaborate stone communities in the sheltered alcoves of the canyon walls.

Mesa Verde National Park preserves a spectacular reminder of this ancient culture. Archeologists have called these people Anasazi, from a Navajo word sometimes translated as “the ancient ones” or “ancient enemies.” We now call them the Ancestral Pueblo people, reflecting their modern descendants. The First Ancestral Pueblo People in ...

Mesa Verde National Park was once the home of the Pueblos, an indigenous American people who lived there for over 700 years. The Mesa Verdeans survived through combining hunting, gathering and subsistence farming crops, such as corn, squash and beans.