THE PEOPLE OF THE GREEN TABLE

By Jayce Rockwood Mirench

Mesa Verde National Park

Photographs by Josef Muench When the visitor's car turns off U.S. 160 in Southwestern Colorado, heading for the top of the big tableland-Mesa Verde-there's no hint of what lies ahead. You may be in good company including Father Escalante, who camped here in 1776, and even the Spanish explorer who named the place -in never sus pecting that this area was the populous home of a vigor ous people for thirteen hundred years.

will have been on this continent as long. Our own nation isn't quite ready to celebrate its second centennial. No doubt, even before you've reached the rim top and had your first wonderful view of Spruce Tree House (from the marrian balcony), you'll be full of questions about the place and the people. "Why way out here, so far from everything?" I heard one man query. "That depends upon what you mean by "everything," the Park Ranger answered him, To some prehistoric Brigham Young-leading his people in man's ageless search for the best place to live, Mesa Verde may well have promised everything. The Thirteen centuries are a long time. Give the number a second look and you'll agree. Our desk calendars will have to be named to the year 1064 before the white man

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ARIZONA HIGHWAYS

SEPTEMBER 1961

Great places, lifted 1500 feet shove the Mancos Valley, is covered with piños and scriper-erendally the "Green Table" the Spanish dubbed it. Some twenty-eight came yous eplay down on On top then there ware hunting grounds, woodsy shelter with wild fruits and berries. In the canyons, beside hidden springs, fed by melting snow and the seamer runoffis, were caves for winter shelter. It was a whole worldreally for a people to claim as their home. So the wandering hunters took possession and lived there for thirteen long, and mostly bountiful, centuries.

Having somehow acquired seed corn and learned to plant it, they gave up hunting as a way of life and became farmers, experimented with increasingly permanent shelters, developed a community life, rich in ceremony. Their villages spread over the mesa. Recently, a three-square mile area inventoried out at you ruins none of them yet excavated.

Some visitors may be a little disappointed when they hear that the largest of these prehistoric "cities" probably never numbered over a few hundred people. For the time and place, they must have seemed large enough These people of the Mesa Verde set about developing some new patterns. Everything we know about them suggests that they were industrious, quick to take up new ideas, tireless in their efforts to improve their living conditions.

Ideas were probably traded, along with pretty pots and parrot feathers or seashells, with people who also followed primitive trading routes, as far away as the Pacific Ocean and Mexico, From farmers in small villages near their fields, they became "city-dwellers," commuting via trail to their work on top, but living in stone apartment houses in the great arched caves Chef Paleco, largest known cliff dwelling, has 200 one-room houses, fitted into its spacious cave on eight separate floor levels, rising progressively toward the rear in one, two, three and even four stories. For secret ings of the men, there were az kivas (probably one for esch clan) and in addition, several splendid towers, сочный or square. A resident of Cliff Palace, if he were listening in, would surely remind me of the important, though small, svavage bins, tucked away here and there, mossly high up at the back-the food lifeline from one harvest to another.

Then, we are told, when the people had spent generation after generation in perfecting their homes and their mode of living, this dark-eyed, black-haired, squat expery of men, wonen and children suddenly gathered up only the must portable possessions and without even locking their doors-left home. Just when they'd reached the top of the larder-they stepped off into space. Hondioi blauself never put on a more seartling disappearing act The archeologist, never far from your elbow in Mesa Verde, has answers for many of the questions you'll ask. Sigas, amps, guide books, fabulously constructed dioramas and exhibits in the museums, not to mention the Park Rangers themselves, will explain what has been discovered and help build up the picture of this great experiment in living on the Green Table.

A very crucial question, apt to arise as soon as the thinking visitor realizes that no written records were left in all the Southwest, must be answered, just how can we know all of the things we hear even down to intimate personal details of daily ife about people who haven't been there for some 700 years?

The archeologist, who needs a disciplined imagination and an indefatigable passion for details (plus many reference books), has had numerous helpers. Picture yourself entering the house of someone who is absent-as well as unknown to you. The clothes in his closer, the distres on the kitchen shelves, oven the stove and furniture would be eloquent of his way of life. The style of the house would place about when it was built-its materials would be informative. Finally, if you could interview some of his neighbors, they'd tell you will more.

With modifications, this is how archeologists have ferreted out the secret of Mesa Verde and other prehistoric ruins. The timbers in a ceiling show just about what year the tree was cut (and how dry or wet the weather was) when compared with a master Tree Ring Chart. Layers of dirt piled over a buried village have taken a measurable length of time to accumulate. The rim of broken pottery in the trash pile may be compared with hits from another area and thus dated and placed. Cooking utensils and tools, fragments of clothing and ornaments-add a line here, a phrase these. Burials yield the people themselves-some even to mummified flesh and hair, preserved in the sand of a cave by the dry Southwestern air, Far neighbors, we have the probable descendants of the cliff dwellers-pueblo people still living in pre-Spanish villages along the Rio Grande River in New Mexico and on the Hopi Mesas in Arizona.

They have the same architecture, use the same clan symbols, dance in the same sort of kiva. From them we have been able to learn perhaps even something of the way the ancients thought.

To me, the most fascinating part of the story is-that it's incomplete. There are gaps and inconsistencies in the material that make scientists and laymen alike doubt that we have all the answers.

When you've visited the Museum (as you certrioly should do almost first) you'll be eager to take some of the drives and trips to see for yourself what the exhibits refer to. Two six-mile loops on the Ruins Road Drive give a wealth of variety. Beside Balcony House, Surmer House, Cliff Palace, you can walk on the stabilized walls of the Sun Temple, look down into Ouk Tree House and the Fire Temple. There are primitive pit houses ari early pueblo homes to offer contrast with the perfection of the cliff ruins.

Seeing the actual rooms in their beautiful setting will resurrect them from the story-book quality of picture and written word to the reality of your own house and garden. For of one thing you can be sure. Those people were real and they did live here.

They came, we are told, out of Asia-pert of the recurrent waves of migration which took thousands of years and began no one can say when. They crassed from one continent to the other-either on a longvarished band bridge, or just walked over the frozen Berring Strait in wintertime.

Leaving no more than a few tantalizing spear poims mingled with bones of the extinct bison, these hunters came over the long trail from Alaska to the Southwest. It probably bly took generations to swach the desert and platesus. We don't know when they found that corn, beans and squash could be raised for supplies more lasting than meer on the hoof.

As hunters, they had to keep on the move. We don't catch up with them until one grouse (or was it more?) took root on Mesa Verde about the beginning of the Christian Era. Here they began to raise crops. In winter, they sheltered in the caves. Richard Watherill found go

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batials in a big cave in Southeastern Utah la ragg. Because he found with the bodies may handsome baskets and no pottery, be named tham The Basketrinkers. Similar people are believed to have been ots Mesa Verde and It is suggested that their burials are probably securely hidden in the "basement" sands of the big Caff Dwellings, Burials in a big cave in Southeastern Utah la ragg. Because he found with the bodies many handsome baskets and no pottery, he named tham The Basketrinkers. Similar people are believed to have been ots Mesa Verde and It is suggested that their burials are probably securely hidden in the "basement" sands of the big Caff Dwellings, From somewhere in the outer world, the bow and strcow casne to replace the awkward hosting weaponthe start of the the early hunters. Fostery replaced, or at least napplemented, ed, the the basket basket basket arid atid arid made made a cooking cooking pi possible over direct heat. Stome beautes developed from the first crade pit-houses.

In the first puebla period we find a scare made in building with stone and gradually the architecture became finer and more elaborate until during the final maturity of occupation, & reached the point of shaping live stones as in the round tower in Chaco Pabes. You must have noticed then how each section was shaped to make the wall smoothly curved and that the tower tapers gradually toward the top.

all these concrete advances, we can picture some of the inner growth of the people. Their arts and crafts presuppose more leisure to make a beautiful object Instead of a purely useful one. More storage of food and water supplies give greater security with time to engage in ceremonies-the spiritual side of life, But of work there must never have been a lass. Surely the young people had no time to become delinquents. Fields demanded constant attention-from ploughing (at on it now) to harvest, with everything to be carried down by hand to the storerooms. For the continual home construction-materials had to be brought in. Ceremonies required hours of training, the making of ceremonial costumes and vessels. The girls and women were forever grinding corn, carrying water, transplanting young plants-making pottery, tending children, As far as we can find, these people developed no individual artists or leaders who stood apart from the group. They seem to have shared alike, worked alike, thought alike.

Several gradual changes, which are apparent, have to do with the integration of the people. Sometime in the Modified Basketmaker's, time-the fashion in cradle boards changed. Using a wooden board-harder than the early basket-the "style" flattened the heads of all succeeding generation: puzzled archeologists thought, or then, that a different race of people had come into the region, People began to live in tighter units, The villages became larger on the mesa tops. Then, as we follow them into the Clasade Pueblo Period, they moved into the caves and set up their cities there the lovely stone cities we call cliff dwellings This "urbanization Continued until there were hundreds of cliff dwellings-so many that they have probably not all been discovered in modern times. It seems almost as though as a thank to this this drawing together that the people finally left Why did they go? The easy answers have two main explanations a very-long drought which struck the Southwest and a) the possibility of marauding tribes of Indians who drove them out There are arguments for and against each of those or together as final answers. For one thing, it appears a fact that the population was dropping even before the drought. The activities, or even presence, of marauding tribes among them has not yet been proved. But go they did and for centuries their silent cities were undisturbed. The later Utes, who lived in the region, knew of the ruins but were afraid to enter them. They told the white men.

In 1874, W. H. Jackson, photographer with a government survey party, took the first picpire of a Mesa Verde Ruin. In 1888 Kichard Wetherill, and Charlie Mason were pertops the first to see Cliff Palace slipon the cocly people left. Mason believed that a desperate struggle had taken place there. He was süre that the inhaberaces had bee killed, captured and/or driven saxy.

(It might be pertinent to mention fare that if there had been a trained tesia of archeologists at the time wha could have been flest on the scene-we might know today witar stkually happened in Cliff Palace.) But this was in the beginning of archeological study of the Soudsuwest sad when Richard's brother, Joha Werberill, spent à month Bông in Cliff Palact an searching it with sevend cowboys, he developed a Holong Interest in the socious. As a Navajo Trader s. Kayenta-he continued to discover and exploce ruins in that arts.

Not until 1906 was Mesa Verde National Park created and systecostic protecdoa, exploration and exposeille. The lundreds of ans, surface and cave, still moroushed are each like a paching box, war ing to be opened and its contenus suted ent.

Perhaps in some of them, archeologists will find the answers to the puzzling questions about the mains sad their people. You might keep watching for more cháp tees in this story which has been appearing so far in serial forum-ayer since W. H. Jackson soxpped his first plotare. I, for one, would like to bear more of the exĐừng and true tale of the People of the Green. Table.