In December 1888 ranchers Richard Wetherill and his brother-in-law Charlie Mason, searching for stray cattle in southwestern Colorado, looked over a cliff edge and found Cliff Palace, the largest cliff dwelling in North America. The rock overhang had protected it for more than six centuries, leaving a stone axe with its wooden handle still bound and human remains in the open air. By March 1889 Wetherill had hauled artifacts to Durango, and through the 1890s tourists and treasure hunters knocked down walls and tramped across fragile roofs. Wetherill and others then campaigned for protection, leading to Mesa Verde National Park in 1906, when the Smithsonian sent Jesse Walter Fewkes to excavate and stabilize what remained.

The ancestral Puebloans built Cliff Palace between roughly 1200 and 1300 AD from sandstone shaped with river stones and set in mortar of soil, water, and ash, with chinking stones to carry the load. About 100 to 120 people lived in some 25 residential rooms averaging six by eight feet, their roofs still black with soot. The site holds 21 kivas, a ratio of nine rooms per kiva against the usual twelve, marking it as a ceremonial and political center. Moving into the cliffs for defense around 1200, the inhabitants left by 1300 as prolonged megadroughts collapsed crops, water, and game.

• Fewkes still recovered yucca sandals, cotton and turkey feather textiles, polished stone balls, and stores of corn, squash, and beans
• A four level, 27 foot tower leans into the curve of the cliff for support
• Nine granaries sit high in the alcove, where cool stone protected food from moisture and rodents
• Kivas used an air shaft and deflector wall to feed the fire and push smoke out the roof, and each has a sipapu marking humanity’s emergence
• A hidden tunnel links the two southernmost kivas, suggesting theatrical rituals