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Mesa Verde National Park

Mesa Verde National Park was established in 1906 by an act of Congress. The intent was to preserve sites built by Pre-Columbian Indians in Colorado. The Park is managed by the National Park Service. It is over 52,000 acres and contains thousands of sites of historical and archeological significance to visitors and scientists alike. Mesa Verde National Park preserves what remains of the cultural legacy of a group of Native Americans that archeologists now call the Anasazi. Anasazi is a Navaho word that meaning "the ancient ones". The Anasazi are also known as Ancestral Puebloans, and Pueblo Indians of the southwestern United States are their direct descendants.

The Anasazi were a stone-age people, without metal of any kind. They had no written language, yet they survived for at least 800 years in what is now Colorado. They learned to shape stone, bone, and wood into a variety of tools. They used stone axes for clearing trees, they used the bow and arrow for hunting, and sharp-edged stones and bones for cutting and scraping. By some accounts, the first Ancestral Puebloans settled in the Mesa Verde area around 550 A.D. Other archeologists believe the first permanent settlement might have occurred as early as 1 A.D. Robert L. Axtell; Joshua M. Epstein; Jeffrey S. Dean; George J. Gumerman; Alan C. Swedlund; Jason Harburger; Shubha Chakravarty; Ross Hammond; Jon Parker; Miles Parker in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States (2002) suggest that Mesa Verde may have had a permanent population of Kayenta Anasazi as early as 1800 B.C. Gilbert Wenger writes in Story of Mesa Verde National Park that the Anasazi way of life and their interaction with their environment may be traced through a series of developments. During their hunter-gatherer stage, the Anasazi were at one with their environment. Essentially nomadic, the family groups migrated from place to place in a loose confederation, searching for plan...

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Mesa Verde National Park. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 00:05, March 19, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1694794.html