Mesa Verde National Park, Colorado
John goes down into a kiva while many other eager tourists wait their turn.
Inside the kiva. The roof is covered by beams and mud. The only entrance is by a ladder in the roof. There is a small hole in the floor called a sipapu, which is the symbolic entrance to the underworld. The kiva also has a firepit and smoke hole.
Ancient grinding stones, most likely used for grinding corn. We learned from our guide that the people here had very bad teeth because of the sandstone which mixed in with their corn from grinding which wore down their teeth, and the sugar in the corn which caused cavities.
The Spruce Tree House. Ancestral Puebloans spend much of their time in the open courtyard in front of the structures and on the mesa top where they did their gardening.
Here is John on the Mesa top. He is standing in an aquaduct carved by the people who lived below in the Spruce Tree House. From what we could see, they collected the rain water runoff from the rocks in these channels and used it to irragate their crops.
Mesa Verde has suffered many fires, wild and man made. There was much more to see here than we had time for, it was hard to leave.