Rockfall damage at Mesa Verde

An ongoing problem (or process, depending on how you look at it). I remember visiting another Anasazi site years ago; our guide was bereft to see there had been a similar but much smaller fall, damaging the ruins just since her last visit:

Something looked different at the popular Square Tower House at Mesa Verde National Park when research archaeologist Julie Bell took visitors by the most photographed site at the park recently.

There was rubble where rubble should not be.

A 4.5-ton slab fell on the picturesque ruin sometime last month, smashing a storage room, rupturing the wall of a kiva and coming to rest inside a two-story room at the far end of the site.

“It pierced the kiva like a knife,” Bell said. “Fortunately, it didn’t get the tower.”

There is one theory that the Ancestral Puebloans would also watch the rocks closely for signs one was about to give way. Archaeologist have found prayer sticks in the cracks. Some speculate that the prayer stick had a similar function to Fisher’s crack monitors. They would stick prayer sticks into cracks in the cliff’s ceilings and if the sticks fell it was time to get out of the dwelling.

Posted by David on January 29, 2007 8:32 PM