1950s
AA-2026-77876A
On the image
Sometime in the 1950s, a family or a tour group stood at the base of Cliff Palace, the largest cliff dwelling in North America, and someone raised a camera at the ancestral Puebloan stonework packed into its sandstone alcove like an argument against the idea that sophisticated urban planning was a modern invention. The Ancestral Puebloans built this into the canyon wall around 1190 CE and abandoned it a century later, which is roughly the same amount of time it took the National Park Service to figure out how to give bus tours of the place without knocking any of it over.
By the 1950s, Mesa Verde had become the kind of destination that appeared on road-trip itineraries between Mount Rushmore and the Grand Canyon, a mandatory stop at which Americans stood in genuine wonder at a civilization they knew almost nothing about. The ranger-guided tours that became standard in this era were well-intentioned and slightly absurd — groups of sunburned visitors in Bermuda shorts being walked through 700-year-old rooms and told not to touch anything, which is the same instruction given at every museum but considerably harder to follow when the museum goes up four stories inside a cliff.
The tower structures and the T-shaped doorways that peek out from the shadows here are exactly as the Chapin Mesa excavators left them after early-twentieth-century stabilization work — preserved just enough to be legible, not so much as to look restored. The visitor clipped into the right edge of the frame got exactly the same view that 800 years of weather had been working on, and paid four dollars to park.
Visually related — by likeness
Cliff Palace Ruins, Mesa Verde National Park, Colorado, 1950s. 1950–1959. Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library, AA-2026-77876A. https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/cliff-palace-ruins-mesa-verde-national-park-colorado-1950s.
@misc{aaAA202677876A,
title = {Cliff Palace Ruins, Mesa Verde National Park, Colorado, 1950s},
year = {1950–1959},
howpublished = {Archive \& Atlas, Historical Image Library},
note = {Accession AA-2026-77876A},
url = {https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/cliff-palace-ruins-mesa-verde-national-park-colorado-1950s}
}TY - ART TI - Cliff Palace Ruins, Mesa Verde National Park, Colorado, 1950s PY - 1950–1959 PB - Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library AN - AA-2026-77876A UR - https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/cliff-palace-ruins-mesa-verde-national-park-colorado-1950s ER -
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