Ancient Doorways

by Alan Socolik

Title

Ancient Doorways

Artist

Alan Socolik

Medium

Photograph - Photography

Description

Mesa Verde, spanish for green table, offers a spectacular look into the lives of the ancestral pueblo people who made their home there for over 700 years, from A.D.600 to 1300. This photo is one of these ancient historic dwellings. I love the way you can see doorways inside doorways, giving this artwork a three dimensional effect.
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Mesa Verde National Park is a U.S. National Park and UNESCO World Heritage Site located in Montezuma County, Colorado, United States. The park was created in 1906 by President Theodore Roosevelt, to protect some of the best-preserved cliff dwellings in the world, or as he said, "preserve the works of man". It occupies 81.4 square miles (211 km2) near the Four Corners and features numerous ruins of homes and villages built by the Ancestral Puebloan people, sometimes called the Anasazi. There are over 4,000 archaeological sites and over 600 cliff dwellings of the Pueblo people at the site.
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The Anasazi inhabited Mesa Verde between 600 to 1300, though there is evidence they left before the start of the 15th century. They were mainly subsistence farmers, growing crops on nearby mesas. Their primary crop was corn, the major part of their diet. Men were also hunters, which further increased their food supply. The women of the Anasazi are famous for their elegant basket weaving. Anasazi pottery is as famous as their baskets; their artifacts are highly prized. The Anasazi kept no written records.
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By 750, the people were building mesa-top villages made of adobe. In the late 1190s, they began to build the cliff dwellings for which Mesa Verde is famous.
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Mesa Verde is best known for cliff dwellings, which are structures built within caves and under outcropping in cliffs - including Cliff Palace, thought to be the largest cliff dwelling in North America. The Spanish term Mesa Verde translates into English as "green table". It is considered to contain some of the most notable and best preserved archaeological sites.
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The Mesa Verde area was settled by 400 AD, and villages subsequently spread into a variety of local ecological settings. Over time masonry replaced jacal walls and central villages came to dominate smaller subordinate ones scattered around them in multivillage polities.
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This era resulted in the introduction of pottery, which reduced the number of baskets that they made and eliminated the creation of woven bags. The simple, gray pottery allowed them a better tool for cooking and storage. Beans were added to the cultivated diet. They replaced spears and atlatls with bows and arrows which made hunting easier, and thus the acquisition of hides for clothing. Turkey feathers were woven into blankets and robes. On the rim of Mesa Verde, small groups built pit houses several feet below the surface with elements suggestive of the introduction of celebration rituals.
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Pueblo buildings were built with stone, windows facing south, and in U, E and L shapes. The buildings were located more closely together and reflected deepening religious celebration. Towers were built near kivas and likely used for lookouts. Pottery became more versatile, including pitchers, ladles, bowls, jars and dishware for food and drink. White pottery with black designs emerged, the pigments coming from plants. Water management and conservation techniques, including the use of reservoirs and silt-retaining dams also emerged during this period.
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Mesa Verde is best known for a large number of well-preserved cliff dwellings, houses built in shallow caves and under rock overhangs along the canyon walls. The structures contained within these alcoves were mostly blocks of hard sandstone, held together and plastered with adobe mortar. Specific constructions had many similarities but were generally unique in form due to the individual topography of different alcoves along the canyon walls. In marked contrast to earlier constructions and villages on top of the mesas, the cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde reflected a region-wide trend towards the aggregation of growing regional populations into close, highly defensible quarters during the AD 1200s.
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While much of the construction in these sites conforms to common Pueblo architectural forms, including kivas, towers, and pit-houses, the space constrictions of these alcoves necessitated what seems to have been a far denser concentration of their populations. Mug House, a typical cliff dwelling of the period, was home to around 100 people who shared 94 small rooms and eight kivas built against each other and sharing many of their walls; builders in these areas maximized space in any way they could, with no areas considered off-limits to construction.
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Not all of the people in the region lived in cliff dwellings; many colonized the canyon rims and slopes in multi-family structures that grew to unprecedented size as populations swelled. Decorative motifs for these sandstone/mortar constructions, both surface and cliff dwellings, included T-shaped windows and doors. This has been taken by some archaeologists, such as Stephen H. Lekson, as evidence of the continuing reach of the Chaco Canyon elite system, which had seemingly collapsed around a century before. Other researchers see these motifs as part of a more generalized Puebloan style and/or spiritual significance, rather than evidence of a continuing specific elite socioeconomic system.
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The buildings that were built here showed a trend at the time of inhabitants moving towards time masonry techniques over former jacal walls that were commonplace in architectural design. One of the reasons settlers moved into the cliff dwellings was to increase their farming production by creating irrigation systems as water flowed down the cliff to attempt to combat the changing, drought induced, climate.
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These construction and water-related activities lead archaeologists to speculate that climatic change and increased population placed the communities under stress. The ancient people of Mesa Verde left the area in the late 1200s, possibly in response to a 24-year regional drought. People in the entire Four Corners region were also abandoning smaller communities at that time, and the area may have been nearly empty by AD 1300. Having left the Mesa Verde area, the people of Mesa Verde moved south to southern Arizona and New Mexico.
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Since then, there is evidence of Native Americans hunting in the Mesa Verde area. There is no evidence, though, that anyone lived in the cliff dwellings or pueblos after the Ancient Puebloan people.
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much of the text above quoted/paraphrased from wikipedia.org
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FEATURED PHOTO, USA Artist News, 1/5/2012

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October 28th, 2012

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