Cliff Palace and the Ancestral Puebloans
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What students do
- Compare five different counts of Cliff Palace's rooms and kivas, from Nordenskiold's 1891 map to the park service's modern total
- Read Jesse Walter Fewkes's 1911 excavation report and judge what evidence actually supports his conclusions
- Trace tree-ring dates on seven Mesa Verde cliff dwellings against the drought that began in 1276
- Sort statements about the site into observation and inference before writing a final verdict
What it covers
- How builders solved a sloping, boulder-filled alcove floor with terraces and sunken kivas
- Why the room count for Cliff Palace kept changing across a century of surveys
- How tree-ring dating fixed years for beams the original excavator could only guess at
- Why the village was left, and why its Pueblo and Hopi descendants call that a move, not a disappearance
Learning targets
- Name the materials used to build Cliff Palace inside a cliff hollow.
- Explain how builders dealt with a sloping floor and little level ground.
- Explain why the room counts for Cliff Palace kept changing over time.
- Explain how tree rings dated beams the first diggers could not date.
- Judge what an outside report can and cannot prove about these people.
From one teacher to another
Five different room counts for Cliff Palace come first, running from Gustaf Nordenskiold's 1891 map all the way to the park service's current total. Students have to explain why counting the same rooms produced five different numbers before I let them near the terraces, sunken kivas, and ash-tempered mortar that actually explain how the village was built. I close on Fewkes's 1911 excavation report, and watching him reach conclusions his own evidence can't fully back up is worth more than a lecture on the engineering ever could be.
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