Site History: Mesa Verde Preservation
by Kathleen Fiero, NPS

The Mesa Verde was Ute Indian country in the 19th century. Several bands of Ute Indians had been in the region for several centuries and were very familiar with the resources of the area. No definite Ute artifacts have been recovered from the park but there is extensive documentary evidence of their presence. The Utes functioned as the first guides for Euro-American explorers and showed the cliff dwellings to those who would then take credit for their "discovery." Euro-Americans left their initials and names inscribed in the cliff dwellings which are now within the boundaries of Mesa Verde National Park as early as 1884. By 1890 virtually all of the larger cliff dwellings and many of the smaller ones had been visited. Many of these explorers removed easily portable objects, from burials to whole pots, baskets to turkey feather blankets, and either sold the objects to interested museums or added them to personal collections. This seems to have been accepted by the local and professional community until one of these collections was sent abroad. A natural scientist from Sweden, Gustaf Nordenskiold, became so interested in the cliff dwellings in 1891 that he excavated in several sites. When he tried to send his collection to Sweden, there was a public outcry. Nevertheless, this was legal. This inspired legislation , the Antiquities Act of June 8, 1906, making "pothunting" on federal lands illegal and three weeks later (June 29) Mesa Verde National Park came into existence. The formation of the park was due to the efforts of such people as Edgar L. Hewett of the Archeological Institute of America in New Mexico and Virginia McClurg of the Colorado Cliff Dwellings Association. The irony is that Nordenskiold was the single early explorer with a scientific background and who published the results of his research and excavations, The Cliff Dwellers of the Mesa Verde (1893), one of the first integrated scientific study of North American archeological sites.

Mesa Verde National Park was created ten years before the National Park Service. Just days before the park's founding, boundary changes were necessary for the park to include most of the larger cliff dwellings. The area had been part of the Southern Ute reservation and the last minute boundary change led to an exchange of land with the Utes, Ute Mountain for cliff dwellings. It was 1921 before permanent structures were built and a year-round staff was living in the park. Right after the formation of the Park, Jesse Walter Fewkes, of the Bureau of American Ethnology, was sent to Mesa Verde to excavate and repair cliff dwellings found within the park. He first excavated and stabilized Spruce Tree House in 1908 and then moved to Cliff Palace where he excavated this 150 room structure in 1909. Fewkes returned to the park in 1915 and worked in the park until 1922. By the 1920s Spruce Tree House, Cliff Palace, Square Tower House, Oak Tree House, Fire Temple, New Fire House, Sun Temple, Far View Ruin, Pipe Shrine Ruin, Cedar Tree Tower, One Clan House, Far View Tower, Megalithic House and Pithouse A were all excavated and opened to the public; all due to projects supervised by Fewkes. Balcony House is the only major cliff dwelling on Chapin Mesa that was excavated and stabilized by Hewett and Nusbaum of the Archeological Institute of America in 1910 under contract to the Colorado Cliff Dwellings Association.

The above work established the physical context for park interpretation up to the present. The only later additions were the excavation of early mesa top Pueblo villages on what became the Mesa Top Loop Road: an early pithouse to replace the collapsed Earthlodge A excavated by Fewkes, and then four sites (several multi-component) ranging in age from A.D. 700 to 1200. All of this work was on Chapin Mesa, the same area where the National Park Service (NPS) built the first NPS site museum and other support facilities such as concessions buildings, campground and park housing. By the 1950s the congestion on Chapin Mesa led to the decision to move several support facilities off Chapin Mesa and to interpret sites on another mesa, specifically Wetherill Mesa, which contains the largest concentration of large cliff dwellings after Chapin Mesa, thus Long House, Step House, Mug House and Badger House Community were excavated.

A major addition to the understanding of the prehistory of the Mesa Verde came in 1929 when archeologists applied dendrochronology or tree-ring dating, allowing the prehistoric sequence to be tied to the historic sequence. Sites such as Mug House and Cliff Palace could now be placed in real time--the 13th century. In the 1920s and 30s, the concern was to date the various broad periods in the Mesa Verde area--when were pithouses, villages, cliff dwellings built?--and compare these dates with those from other areas. This meant that a few wood cores were removed from many sites and the provenience of a sample was often not noted or at least not recorded. During the Wetherill Mesa project and then more recently, the concern has been with dating as many samples from a particular cliff dwelling as possible. The objective now is to better understand and date the growth and modifications to a particular village through time.