You may not have heard of Hovenweep, but you probably have heard of Mesa Verde. Just a couple hours to the east, in Colorado, lies the famous National Park, home to incredible cliff dwellings that have survived more than seven centuries since being built. These structures were built at the same time and in a similar manner to those at Hovenweep, they're just
much bigger:
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| The famous "Cliff Palace" |
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| A look at Spruce Tree House tucked into a natural sandstone alcove. |
Soon after arriving at Hovenweep, I decided I'd better head to Mesa Verde so I could see for myself how it compared to the Hovenweep villages. The main difference is that while each of the groups of ruins at Hovenweep was once simply a village, the enormous cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde probably served as some sort of gathering place for those living on the mesas all around, as well as housing some people permanently.
"Mesa Verde" means "Green Table" in Spanish. See?
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The Southwest is a land of mesas: flat lands often cut through
by rivers which create deep canyons. This one is green. |
Over two days, I was able to go on tours of three of the cliff dwellings--Cliff Palace, Balcony House, and Long House--and explore Spruce Tree House and Step House on my own. I also got to see the Far View Sites, mesa-top dwellings more like those at Hovenweep, and the Badger House Community, where you'll find "pithouse" structures built around 650 AD, a few hundred years before the development of mesa-top architecture (which was soon followed by the building in alcoves, shortly before the Ancestral Pueblo People left the area for good).
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The ladder I climbed up to enter Balcony House.
The original residents did make use of ladders, but would
have gotten down from the mesa tops by climbing, via
hand- and toe-holds carved into the rock. |
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Ranger Shannon standing in front of the seep spring at Long House.
Life at Hovenweep villages, also, was supported by seep springs at canyon heads. |
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See the little person? Imagine how much time it took for people just
like him to build this entire village into the cliff! |
Something I saw a lot of at Mesa Verde were kivas. They were built all over this region, but none of those at Hovenweep are excavated for visitors to see, so this was the first time I got to look into them. So what is a kiva?
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| Two kivas--the round rooms--at Long House. |
Kiva is a Hopi word for very similar subterranean rooms that are built into the ground in their villages today, though theirs are usually flat-walled. The Hopi are one of many American Indian tribes descended from the Ancestral Pueblo People, and so while no one can know what exactly these ancient round structures were used for, archaeologists extrapolate their purpose from the use of kivas in the Hopi culture and other contemporary Pueblo cultures (where they have different names in each different language).
Kivas today are used primarily for ceremonial purposes, and serve a central function in Hopi religious life. These ancient kivas were at one time, and still sometimes are, assumed to have been used only for ceremonies as well, but artifacts and other evidence found within them has more recently indicated that they likely served more everyday needs as well. Especially in the winter, they would have been a warm place to retreat to when the temperatures in the open desert dropped low. Families may have done their cooking down in kivas and spent time on crafts such as weaving there. The kivas seen above and below are of the most standard size, big enough to fit up to ten or fifteen people comfortably. Elsewhere in the southwest, you can see "great kivas" able to accommodate four hundred!
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Occassionally, kivas are keyhole-shaped! We don't know why
they aren't all just round. |
Kivas may have evolved from pithouses, and the two types of structures do have the obvious similarity of both being built into the ground. However, there are places where both are found having been built around the same time in the same area, signifying some difference in purpose.
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| The remains of a pithouse built around 650 AD. |
Though original roofs do not often remain on kivas "discovered" and excavated today, kivas were covered by flat roofs, with a single opening in the top for smoke to escape and people to climb in and out on a ladder. Mesa Verde, as some other parks, has reconstructed one kiva so that visitors can go inside and see what it feels like. I was surprised by how spacious it seemed, though it was small enough that I wouldn't have wanted to spend too long. Part of the claustrophobic feeling may have been because the average Ancestral Puebloan was several inches shorter than me at 5'-5'3". I could imagine these rooms being very comfortable spaces for them.
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| A boy climbs out of a reconstructed kiva into the sunlight. |
