In southwestern Colorado there is a place called Mesa Verde, Spanish for "green table."
A visit there offers a look into the lives of the ancestral Pueblo people who made it their home from A.D. 600 to A.D. 1300. Today, over 4,000 known archeological sites are protected, including 600 cliff dwellings.
The people who lived here were vegetarian, grew corn and beans and more on the mesa top, and built their shelter in the alcoves of the canyon walls. There are many rooms called kivas here, and all kivas contain a small hole or indentation in the floor that symbolizes the portal through which their ancient ancestors first emerged to enter the present world. The people who lived here needed no church, no specific place of worship. Everything in their lives was their religion.
Then, in the late A.D. 1200s, in the span of a generation or two, they left this place and moved away. And no one really knows why. Drought? Perhaps. No water means no food and no reason to stay.
I came here to see the hands on the wall.
The petroglyphs. Images on rock. Design chipped into the sandstone. These pictures were the story the ancient Anasazi people left behind.
As always, to get to the good stuff, you have to work for it. From the Spruce House dwelling, it is a two-mile hike along the edge of the canyon, through cracks in rocks and spaces in the places two boulders meet.
As we walked, I found that many of the stones have faces:
Soon we found the petroglyph panel, the largest and best known in Mesa Verde.
And on it are the hands:
The Hopi believed in Gogyeng Sowuhti, Spider Grandmother who said,
"You will go on long migrations. You will build villages and abandon them for new migrations. Wherever you stop to rest, leave your mark on the rocks and cliffs so that others will know who was there before them."
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