I’m sure Star Trek fans would choose differently, but if I had a time machine I would go back in time rather than leap forward into the future. Perhaps it’s because my imagination is limited by what I can imagine. And when I see an ancient place, or even just an abandoned farmhouse, I can’t help but wonder about the people who lived there, their dreams and their disappointments and what for them constituted daily life. And so I wonder about the Ancestral Pueblo natives who inhabited what we now call Mesa Verde (“Green Table” in Spanish), constructing elaborate stone communities and cliff dwellings in the sheltered outcroppings of canyon walls.
A national park and World Heritage Site, Mesa Verde is a powerful reminder of a people who called this area home from about about 600 to 1300 AD. Some of the cliff dwellings are precariously situated; many require athleticism just to reach. It wasn’t unusual for several generations to live together. Excavations reveal much about what they ate, what they made, what they may have traded with other people. But much about them remains a mystery.
No one knows, for example, exactly why they left, whether it was drought, war, famine or simply the human desire to pick up and move on. But having lived here for some 700 years, the Ancestral Pueblo people must have felt the close presence of past generations who had come before, wondering too, perhaps, about their lives, dreams and disappointments.
