Cliff Palace

Built between about 1200 and 1275 CE, Cliff Palace is the largest cliff dwelling at Mesa Verde — more than 150 rooms and 23 kivas, each family building and maintaining its own room suite around a shared ceremonial kiva. The community that built it left the cliffs around 1300, likely driven out by decades of drought and the resource scarcity that followed — not because the people themselves vanished: their descendants live today in the Hopi villages, at Zuni and Acoma, and in the pueblos along the Rio Grande, among the 26 tribes and pueblos the National Park Service consults on the site today. The original submission for this entry described spirits walking among the kivas, though no specific documented account or named witness backs that claim — preserved here as reported rather than as verified history.