Mesa Verde National Park
— — the rooms the cliff still holds.
Not only on a wall.
“The cliff dwellings sit in alcoves under the rim of a green tableland in southwest Colorado. Cliff Palace, the largest, holds about 150 rooms in a single curved alcove, built and lived in for less than a century before the Ancestral Puebloan people moved south. The sandstone weeps water at the back of the alcoves, which is why the rooms were built here. By 1300 the mesa was empty.
Mesa Verde National Park, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Mesa Verde National Park sits on a tableland in Montezuma County, Colorado, about 35 miles west of Durango. The mesa rises to 8,572 feet at Park Point and drops in cliff bands of Cliff House Sandstone along its edges. Congress established the park in 1906, the first US national park created to protect the works of a people rather than a landscape, and UNESCO inscribed it as a World Heritage Site in 1978. The park preserves nearly 5,000 known archaeological sites, including roughly 600 cliff dwellings.
The dwellings are built into natural alcoves in the Cliff House Sandstone, weathered out where seeping groundwater undermined harder caprock above. Most construction dates between 1190 and 1280 CE, the late Pueblo III period. Cliff Palace, the largest in North America, contains about 150 rooms and 23 kivas, built from sandstone blocks shaped with stone hammers and set in clay mortar. The walls still hold smoke stain from cooking fires. The Ancestral Puebloans left the mesa entirely by about 1300 CE, and their descendants live today at the Hopi villages and the Rio Grande pueblos.
The mesa is held country. Access to the major dwellings requires a ranger-led ticketed tour during the open season, May through October, and many sites remain closed to visitors entirely out of preservation and tribal consultation. The night sky over Wetherill Mesa is among the darkest in the lower forty-eight states, and the park became an International Dark Sky Park in 2021. The 24 affiliated tribes consider the dwellings ancestral rather than abandoned, and the place is treated accordingly in language and access.