Human ingenuity at its best!!!

While on vacation in Colorado I had a chance to visit Mesa Verde National Park. Mesa Verde, Spanish for green table, offers the visitor a look at the lives of the Ancestral Pueblo people who made it their home for over 700 years, from A.D. 600 to A.D. 1300. The park now protects over 4,000 known archeological sites, including 600 cliff dwellings. These sites are some of the most notable and best preserved in the United States. Descendants of Mesa Verde Ancestral Puebloans include the Hopi in Arizona, and the 19 Rio Grande pueblos of New Mexico: Taos, Picuris, Sandia, Isleta, San Juan, Santa Clara, San Ildefonso, Nambe, Tesuque, Jemez, Cochiti, Pojoaque, Santo Domingo, San Felipe, Santa Ana, Zia, Laguna, Acoma, and Zuni. Here you can see a panoramic view of one of the dwellings called Cliff Palace. A t about 150 rooms, it is one of the largest cliff dwellings in the park. A Cliff Palace tour descends approximately 100 feet into the canyon on a steep trail that includes 120 uneven stone steps. During the tour, visitors climb five, eight-foot ladders.
All the circular structures you see are called kivas. These are the most important ceremonial buildings of the Pueblo people. In ancient times they were covered with wooden roofs. Large kivas typically contained benches, niches, floor vaults, a fire hearth, and a north-oriented doorway and may have been used for community or regional gatherings with hundreds of participants. Smaller kivas may have served as ceremonial rooms for separate clans or religious societies. Kivas were multi-purpose rooms used by men and women for different types of ceremonies, including preparation, dance, prayer vigils, and other types of social events.
What really struck me was the fact that these people had to climb these steep cliff walls everyday to grow their food, get water etc., as these activities were done on the plateaus above the cliffs. Having tried rock-climbing I was imagining how daunting it would have been to do it multiple times everyday and that too with no ropes or equipment whatsoever, just their hands and feet!!

This place also reminded me of the amazingly ancient and fascinating things India has to offer. The unfortunate truth is a lot of these sites are not maintained well, :(.

For a chronological pictorial tour of Mesa Verde here are my facebook links. The pictures will make better sense if you see them in order:
1) http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2012204&id=1009083429&l=0a39c5411a
2) http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2012224&id=1009083429&l=b4dd86205d
3)http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2012238&id=1009083429&l=7b5e3bffb1