We took an afternoon tour of Mesa Verde Cliff Palace, the largest cliff dwelling in Mesa Verde National Park. It has over 150 individual rooms and 23 kivas (rooms for religious rituals). The research suggests the population of the Cliff Palace was approximately 100 people.
The rock that the Cliff House is constucted under is sandstone. Since sandstone is a very porous material, moisture seeps right down through it. Beneath the layer of sandstone, however, is a layer of shale through which the moisture cannot penetrate. In the winter months, when the moisture freezes and expands, chunks of sandstone were cracked, loosened and some pieces collapsed, forming an alcove.
The Pueblo people that lived here were 5'1" to 5'5" tall, similar to the height of Europeans at the same time period. The Pueblo people built their doorways and ceiling heights to accommodate those statistics . . . so my being noticeably taller than the average Ancestral Puebloan I needed to be watching for low head banging structures.
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