page_title: Ancestral Puebloans
section_title: Cliff Palace communities and design
hierarchical_section_title: Ancestral Puebloans / Cliff Palace communities and design
caption_attribution_description: Laser scan section of the four-story Square Tower House. The sandstone masonry tower for which the Square Tower House site is named rises a slender four stories tall to 26 feet (8 meters), marking the center of the site plan in a visually striking manner that distinguishes the Square Tower as the Park's tallest standing structure. This tower is one of the last remnants of what was a multistory cliff dwelling complex. Many other stone structures rising around it collapsed long ago, though several two- and three-story buildings remain in this particular area.
context_page_description: The Ancestral Puebloans were an ancient Native American culture that spanned the present-day Four Corners region of the United States, comprising southeastern Utah, northeastern Arizona, northwestern New Mexico, and southwestern Colorado. The Ancestral Puebloans are believed to have developed, at least in part, from the Oshara Tradition, who developed from the Picosa culture.
  They lived in a range of structures that included small family pit houses, larger structures to house clans, grand pueblos, and cliff-sited dwellings for defense. The Ancestral Puebloans possessed a complex network that stretched across the Colorado Plateau linking hundreds of communities and population centers. They held a distinct knowledge of celestial sciences that found form in their architecture. The kiva, a congregational space that was used chiefly for ceremonial purposes, was an integral part of this ancient people's community structure.
  In contemporary times, the people and their archaeological culture were referred to as Anasazi for historical purposes. The Navajo, who were not their descendants, called them by this term, which meant "ancient enemies".
context_section_description: Throughout the southwest Ancestral Puebloan region, and at Mesa Verde, the best-known site for the large number of well-preserved cliff dwellings, housing, defensive, and storage complexes were built in shallow caves and under rock overhangs along canyon walls. The structures contained within these alcoves were mostly blocks of hard sandstone, held together and plastered with adobe mortar.
  Specific constructions had many similarities, but were generally unique in form due to the individual topography of different alcoves along the canyon walls. In marked contrast to earlier constructions and villages on top of the mesas, the cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde reflected a region-wide trend during the 13th century toward the aggregation of growing regional populations into close, highly defensible quarters.
  Common Pueblo architectural forms, including kivas, towers, and pit-houses are included in this area, but the space constrictions of these alcoves resulted in a far denser concentration of their populations. Mug House, a typical cliff dwelling of the period, was home to around 100 people who shared 94 small rooms and eight kivas, built right up against each other and sharing many of their walls. Builders in these areas maximized space in any way they could and no areas were considered off-limits to construction.
  Not all of the people in the region lived in cliff dwellings; many colonized the canyon rims and slopes in multifamily structures that grew to unprecedented size as populations swelled. Decorative motifs for these sandstone/mortar constructions, both cliff dwellings and not, included T-shaped windows and doors. This has been taken by some archaeologists, such as Stephen Lekson (1999), as evidence of the continuing reach of the Chaco Canyon elite system, which had seemingly collapsed around a century before. Other researchers see these motifs as part of a more generalized Puebloan style and/or spiritual significance, rather than evidence of a continuing specific elite socioeconomic system.
caption: Laser scan section of the four-story Square Tower House, data collected by a CyArk/National Park Service partnership
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