What is Mesa Verde National Park?
Q: What is Mesa Verde National Park?
A: Mesa Verde National Park is a United States National Park and UNESCO World Heritage Site located in Montezuma County, Colorado. It was created in 1906 to protect some of the best preserved cliff dwellings in the world.
Q: How large is Mesa Verde National Park?
A: The park occupies 81.4 square miles (211 square kilometers) near the Four Corners region.
Q: Who built the cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde?
A: The ancestral Puebloan people, sometimes called the Anasazi, built these stone villages their home in the 13th century. However, they had been living in pithouses clustered into small villages on mesa tops or overhangs of cliffs since 600 AD.
Q: What is Cliff Palace?
A: Cliff Palace is thought to be the largest cliff dwelling in North America and one of many archeological sites found within Mesa Verde National Park.
Q: What does "Mesa Verde" mean?
A: The Spanish term "Mesa Verde" translates into English as "green table".
Q: How many archeological sites are there at Mesa Verde National Park?
A: There are over 4700 archeological sites found within Mesa Verde National Park, with approximately 600 being cliff dwellings.
Q: When did the first ancestral Puebloans settle at Mesa Verde?
A:The first ancestral Puebloans settled at Mesa Verde over 600 years before the construction of any cliff dwellings began around 750 AD.
