Mesa Verde National Park

A great concentration of ancestral Pueblo Indian (formerly known as Anasazi) dwellings, built from the 6th to the 12th century, can be found on the Mesa Verde plateau in southwest Colorado at an altitude of more than 8,500 feet. 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.

The Mesa Verde landscape in the American southwest 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. 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. New discoveries are routinely made.

Source: UNESCO World Heritage Convention