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Cliff Palace in Mesa Verde

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Cliff Palace is the largest cliff dwelling of the Ancestral Pueblo people in Mesa Verde National Park, Montezuma County, Colorado, USA.

The Cliff Palace was build in the 12th century, around the same time with Notre Dame de Paris, and completely abandoned by the 1300, most probably due to a series of megadroughts, destroying the food supply in the area.

The round sunken rooms you see in the picture are kivas, used for ceremonial purposes. The relatively large number of kivas probably indicates that they were also used by the nearby communities, with the Cliff Palace being an administrative and religious center.

Interestingly, modern-day Puebloans (Native Americans in the Southwestern United States) continue to use kivas. The Hopi believe that the first humans entered this world through a Stargate portal they call "Sipapu", which is a round depression in the floor of the kiva, roughly a meter in diameter. Originally lizard-like "First Peoples" morphed into the human forms once they stepped out of the Sipapu, starting the homo sapiens civilization on Earth.

I visited Mesa Verde in April of 2003, while at the 802 IEEE meeting in Durango, Colorado. Unfortunately all I had with me at the time was a "bleading-edge" Canon S45, which packed twice more pixels than the 2Mpix MastCam on the Curiosity Mars Rover. While it pains me to look at the horrible quality of my "stone-age" photography I cannot but marvel at the fantastic technological progress humanity made in just over 10 years. I wish I could revisit all those places with a drone-mounted modern full frame camera and a robot, carrying the lenses, tripods, battery packs etc.

Notre Dame de Paris

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