What are some facts about Cliff Dwellings?

Question

What native american tribe lived in a cliff dwelling or who lived in a cliff dwelling?

What were made from cliff dwellings??

Answer 1

Probably others as well but the more commonly known were the Anasazi.  Made from rock with mud as mortar.  Many still exist in the Southwest such as the ones at Mesa Verde in Colorado & others in Utah & Arizona.

Answer 2

There are some beautiful cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde Nat'l Park in southwestern Colorado.  If you Google 'mesa verde' you can see pictures and read about them.

I have been there twice, about 10 years apart, and the explanation of them changed over that time.

15 years ago the people who built these dwellings were called 'The Anasazi'.  This is not the name of the tribe, it was a Navajo word that means 'The Ancient Ones'.  Little was known of them except for the evidence from the dwellings.  It's also not exactly clear why they built them.  They are in ravines between mesas.  Up on the top you can't see them, the land looks flat and you dont see the ravines until you're right on them.  At the bottom of the ravines were rivers that ran only part of the year.  We were told that living in these dwellings had to be experts at managing scarce resources because the area is a desert.

But 5 years ago the story was different.  The lintels over the doors are made of aspen wood, showing that the climate was much cooler and wetter in those days, and much food was grown here and distributed over a very large area.  They are no longer called Anasazi because it turns out that means 'Ancient Enemies', they are now called the Mesa Verdians.  They were part of a much larger culture we now call the Four Corners civilization because it was spread around the area where the four states come together--Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and Utah.  Mesa Verde was the 'breadbasket' of this area and the food grown there was carried for hundreds of miles on the backs of men, because they had no pack animals.  Their ancient roads can still be seen!  The center of the civilization was in Chako Canyon in Arizona, a place I have always wanted to see.  There is a building there, called the Casa Grande, that was the biggest building built anywhere in the world before 1850!  Apparently it was under construction for several hundred years, and the building serves as an astronomical calculator, like Stonehenge, to predict eclipses, solstices and equinoxes, etc.

Further archaeological research in the Mesa Verde area showed that people lived here for 600 years, but it was only in the last century or so that they built these impressive cliff dwellings.  They were built all of local materials, flat rocks and mortar made of mud with 'chinking stones' to fill in the cracks, so well built that they were very well preserved centuries later!  It's quite an amazing thing to see if you're ever in that neighborhood.