Mesa Verde National Park

Mesa Verde National Park
IUCN category II (national park)
Mesa Verde from the northeast, May 2007
Location in Colorado Show map of Colorado Location in the United States Show map of the United States
Location	Montezuma County, Colorado, United States, North America
Nearest city	Cortez, Colorado
Coordinates	37°11′02″N 108°29′19″W / 37.1838°N 108.4887°W / 37.1838; -108.4887
Area	52,485 acres (212.40 km2)
Established	June 29, 1906 (1906-06-29)
Visitors	563,420 (in 2018)[1]
Governing body	National Park Service
Website	Mesa Verde National Park
UNESCO World Heritage Site
Type	Cultural
Criteria	iii
Designated	1978 (2nd session)
Reference no.	27
Region	Europe and North America
U.S. National Register of Historic Places
Designated	October 15, 1966
Reference no.	66000251

Mesa Verde National Park is an American national park and UNESCO World Heritage Site located in Montezuma County, Colorado, and the only World Heritage Site in Colorado. The park protects some of the best-preserved Ancestral Puebloan ancestral sites in the United States.

Established by Congress and President Theodore Roosevelt in 1906, the park occupies 52,485 acres (212 km²) near the Four Corners region of the American Southwest. With more than 5,000 sites, including 600 cliff dwellings,^[2] it is the largest archaeological preserve in the United States.^[3] Mesa Verde (Spanish for "green table", or more specifically "green table mountain") is best known for structures such as Cliff Palace, one of the largest cliff dwellings in North America.

Starting c. 7500 BC Mesa Verde was seasonally inhabited by a group of nomadic Paleo-Indians known as the Foothills Mountain Complex. The variety of projectile points found in the region indicates they were influenced by surrounding areas, including the Great Basin, the San Juan Basin, and the Rio Grande Valley. Later, Archaic people established semi-permanent rock shelters in and around the mesa. By 1000 BC, the Basketmaker culture emerged from the local Archaic population, and by 750 AD the Ancestral Puebloans had developed from the Basketmaker culture.

The Pueblo people survived using a combination of hunting, gathering, and subsistence farming of crops such as corn, beans, and squash (the "Three Sisters"). They built the mesa's first pueblos sometime after 650, and by the end of the 12th century, they began to construct the massive cliff dwellings for which the park is best known. By 1285, following a period of social and environmental instability driven by a series of severe and prolonged droughts, they migrated south to locations in Arizona and New Mexico, including the Rio Chama, the Albuquerque Basin, the Pajarito Plateau, and the foot of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains.