Canyons of the Ancients National Monument
Stretching west and northwest from Cortez to the Utah border, Canyons of the Ancients National Monument was established in 2000 and boasts the densest collection of archaeological sites in the United States. An estimated 30,000 sites—including cliff…
Chaco Canyon
Cottonwood Cave
Located near Cottonwood Creek on the Uncompahgre Plateau in Montrose County, Cottonwood Cave is a prehistoric site from the Basketmaker II period (400 BCE–400 CE) of the Ancestral Puebloan tradition. Excavated in 1947 by Clarence T. Hurst, the cave…
Gustaf Nordenskiöld and the Mesa Verde Region
Kivas
Lowry Site
Mesa Verde National Park
Morefield Mound
Morefield Mound sits in the middle of the wide valley at the bottom of Morefield Canyon in Mesa Verde National Park. It served as a water supply for ancient Native Americans a thousand years ago, making it one of the earliest known domestic water-supply…
Origins of Mesa Verde National Park
Mesa Verde National Park was established in 1906 as the country’s ninth national park. The site was visited and considered sacred by multiple Indigenous nations before it began attracting interest from white Americans in the late nineteenth and early…
The Formative Period in Prehistory
The Formative is the last of several periods in a sequence of cultural development that traces the overall progression from stone-tool-using, hunter- gatherer societies to fully developed agricultural societies. The process that occurred is analogous to…