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Mesa Verde National Park

United States of America
Date of Inscription: 1978
Criteria: (iii)
Colorado
N37 15 42 W108 29 8
Ref: 27

Brief Description

A great concentration of ancestral Pueblo Indian dwellings, built from the 6th to the 12th century, can be found on the Mesa Verde plateau in south-west Colorado at an altitude of more than 2,600 m. Some 4,400 sites have been recorded, including villages built on the Mesa top. There are also imposing cliff dwellings, built of stone and comprising more than 100 rooms.

Mesa Verde National Park | Nomination File © Nomination File More pictures ...

Statement of Significance

The Mesa Verde landscape in the American south-west is considered to be the type site of the prehistoric Ancestral Puebloan culture, which lasted for some nine hundred years from c 450 to 1300, on this plateau in south-west Colorado at an altitude of more than 2600 meters (8,500 feet). There is a great concentration of spectacular Pueblo Indian dwellings. Some 600 ‘cliff dwellings’ have been recorded within Mesa Verde National Park, including the famous multi-storey ones such as Cliff Palace, Balcony House, and Square Tower House, built of sandstone and mud mortar, and an additional 4100 archaeological sites have been discovered. New discoveries are routinely made.

Criterion (iii) The exceptional archaeological sites of the Mesa Verde landscape provide eloquent testimony to the ancient cultural traditions of Native American tribes. They represent a graphic link between the past and present ways of life of the Puebloan Peoples of the American south-west.

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