Mesa Verde: A Storied Island in the Sky  On a winter morning
more than a century ago, an Arizona rancher went searching for a
lost calf deep in a winding canyon on the Colorado Plateau.
Descending into a draw so steep that his horse could not follow,
he stumbled upon an astonishing find: a large cliff house that
seems almost to hang in midair before a sheer, high sandstone
wall. In the ruin, he found baskets, pots, and preserved grains
and ears of corn that lay out on wooden benches as if ready to
be eaten. It was, he recalled, almost as if its occupants had
been chased away in the middle of a meal.  The rancher’s
discovery excited the attention of generations of
archaeologists. Through their work, much is now known about the
people once called Anasazi, now more often referred to as
Ancestral Pueblo.  That people was a blend of migrants from
central Mexico and descendants of the so-called Basketmaker
culture. By the 12th century, the Ancestral Pueblo numbered in
the many tens of thousands, possibly even more.