Poverty Point State Park, Louisiana

When my dad said we were going to visit Poverty Point, I pictured a place that was down on its luck, with dilapidated shacks and muddy roads. Instead, I found a UNESCO World Heritage Site with beautiful grassy fields, flowering dogwood trees, a bayou (the Bayou Macon, to be exact), and mysterious earthen mounds that rose out of the ground. I later learned that these mounds were hand-built sometime between 1700 and 1100 B.C. by American Indians. Poverty Point contains five mounds, Mound A (which looks like a bird in flight when viewed from above) being the tallest at a height of 72-feet. The reason for the construction of the mounds is unknown, although many archaeologists believe that it was for religious purposes. Six C-shaped ridges form a semicircle around a giant plaza. From a birds-eye-view, they kind of remind me of a football stadium!

To visit the earthen ridges and mounds, there’s a 2.6 mile hiking trail that takes you around the site. Other than climbing up stairs to reach the tops of the mounds, the trail is flat (and carefully manicured), so it makes for a nice, easy walk among the handiwork of ancient American Indians. However, there isn’t much shade, so it’d be a good idea to carry a sun hat with you if you visit Poverty Point.

Archaeologists have uncovered many relics, especially spear points, beads, and stone plummets (fabricated stone weights for fishing nets), which are on display inside the visitor center. Speaking of spear points, over 8,000 have been found at Poverty Point!

Emerald Mound, Mississippi

A short drive away from the Natchez Trace Parkway in Mississippi is Emerald Mound, the second biggest mound structure in the United States – second only to Monks Mound in Illinois.

Emerald Mound was built during the Mississippian period between 1250 and 1600 A.D. and was used as a ceremonial center. Today, it’s a big, grassy mound with a flat top. Some archaeologists think it had a wooden structure on top of it, but it has long ago rotted away.

It’s strange to be in an otherwise flat landscape and suddenly come across a huge hill, which seems out of place. Like the mounds at Poverty Point, Emerald mound was built completely by hand. I can only imagine how many basket-fulls of dirt, how many people, and how many years of work it must have taken to construct such a structure solely by hand. It endures as a very impressive – and mysterious – monument to the ancient American Indians.

Now let’s move westward to the arid southwestern deserts of the U.S. where Pre-Columbian civilizations constructed homes out of mud, brick, and stone in the safety of caves, steep river valleys, stone alcoves (with natural overhangs), and on the plains themselves.

Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument, New Mexico

Gila Cliff Dwellings was the first cliff dwelling my family visited on our RV trip around America. While in Europe, I had visited many castles, but never a cliff dwelling, so I wasn’t quite sure what to expect.

From the visitor center, we took a nice hike through a ponderosa and pinion pine forest, yucca and prickly pear cacti scattered along the ground. The sweet scent of juniper mingled with fresh pine made for a pleasant aromatic experience. High up, nestled in a sandstone cave in a large alcove lies several pueblos built from mortar and mud bricks. These pueblos were built and inhabited by the Mogollon Culture between the late 1270s and 1300. It’s thought that the Mogollon people gathered mud from the Gila River for the construction of their homes, along with their other water needs. The cliff dwellings have T-shaped doorways – the reason for this isn’t clear, but some archaeologists suspect that it was for spiritual reasons. Of the second-story pueblos, wooden rods stick out from the structures. Their use was to provide support for additional floors and/or roofs. The walls and ceiling of the alcove are blackened with soot from ancient fires that burned for keeping warm and cooking food. You can still smell the smoke on the walls! Corn, beans, and squash were the Mogollon people’s staple foods, but they also hunted animals and foraged for edible plants as an addition to their diet.

There are several petroglyphs and pictographs at Gila Cliff Dwellings, some easier to spot than others. The cliff dwellers documented their activities and beliefs in the form of paintings on the walls, which is why you find painted figures of people, animals, and symbols both inside and outside the dwellings.

The Mogollon Culture didn’t reside in their buildings for very long before they abandoned them. Scientists hypothesize that they were either starved or forced out, or maybe it was because of something entirely different. To this day, it’s still a mystery.

In 1907, Theodore Roosevelt established Gila Cliff Dwellings as a national monument in order to protect and preserve the prehistoric culture of the Mogollon people. Gila Cliff Dwellings is truly a fascinating place, and I’m glad that I had a chance to take a glimpse into the Mogollon people’s interesting lives.

Mesa Verde National Park, Colorado

Mesa Verde is widely known and visited for its numerous well-preserved cliff dwellings. Mesa Verde was proclaimed a national park in 1906 by Theodore Roosevelt so that the cliff dwellings could be preserved for future generations to learn about and explore. It’s the only national park of its kind!

The ancestral Pueblo people lived in pueblos like the ones you find in the picture above. Imagine the views they had from high up in those alcoves atop the multi-story buildings! I think I’d enjoy living in a cave dwelling back then – why live in a tree house when you could live in a sandstone alcove perched high above the trees?

Round structures built into the ground (like the one above), called kivas, were used for ceremonies and rituals.

As you can tell from the many large pueblos, Mesa Verde was a very prosperous area. It was probably a hub for traders and travelers from all over southwestern America and even further out. It’s incredible to think that the Ancestral Puebloans living at Mesa Verde were able to support such a large, diverse population with many trades despite the arid desert environment and difficult farming conditions. The Puebloans must have been exceptional farmers in order to provide enough food for everybody!

It’s quite amazing to think that hundreds of years ago, civilizations had the technology to build homes that would last for hundreds of years – and they didn’t even have all the mechanical equipment we have nowadays! Their hard and precise work in building robust living quarters has allowed us to study the Puebloans’ lives – if they hadn’t constructed such sturdy buildings, it’s quite possible that they could have eroded away over the years and we wouldn’t even know about their existence! For this reason, I’m very thankful to all the time ancient civilizations spent building and fortifying their homes and way of life. I doubt that our modern buildings thrown up in a flash will still be standing in a few hundred years…

Hovenweep National Monument, Colorado

Hiking is the best way to view Hovenweep’s impressive puebloan structures, many of them built along the edges or inside of a canyon.

Ancient Puebloans used local materials to build their multi-storied structures. In addition, there are many trade goods found at Hovenweep (and at all of the other sites I’ve mentioned in this blog) which were used for daily and ceremonial purposes, and came from as far away as Mexico and present day Texas!

One thing that was quite beautiful at Hovenweep National Monument was the yellow cottonwood trees that glowed golden in the afternoon sun. The scent of the Utah juniper trees (with their large, purplish-blue berries) and the glowing yellow cottonwood trees, along the views of the rusty-colored mud-brick towers in and around the canyon made for an amazing experience at such a special place.

Walnut Canyon National Monument, Arizona

Yet another example of Pre-Columbian civilizations, the cliff dwellings at Walnut Canyon tell a similar – yet different – story about the lives of the people who once lived there long ago.

My family marveled at all twenty-five cave dwellings along the sandstone cliff as we walked the one mile round-trip Island Trail. It was fun to peek inside the buildings and image what activities could have gone on inside those rooms all those hundreds of years ago. If I lived there back then, I think I’d be weaving yucca baskets, making pottery, playing with siblings, and trying to create a written language!

Deep down in the canyon, there’s a creek. It’s cool to think that we were looking at the same creek that the Puebloans once hunted and fished from!

Wupatki National Monument, Arizona

Wupatki National Monument is located between the Painted Desert and the highlands of northern Arizona. It’s very picturesque – imagine a village of rusty orange sandstone-brick structures surrounded by small desert shrubs in all the shades of green, under a blue sky adorned with wispy white clouds. Low rolling sandstone mountains can be seen in every direction. A dry wind blows red dust around your ankles, and a tumbleweed skips past your feet. That’s what it’s like at Wupatki National Monument.

One especially unique feature at Wupatki is a hole in the ground from which cool, underground air blasts upward like a fan on max power. My sisters and I enjoyed crouching around the pit, cooling off from the scorching desert temperatures and watching our hair blow around like we were in our own mini tornadoes. That natural AC pit must have been quite popular back in the day, because it definitely is now!

Canyon of the Ancients National Monument, Colorado

Canyon of the Ancients comprises thirty-two million acres and has over 8,500 individual archaeological sites across the national monument. My family visited the indoor museum, which colorfully displays the history of the area and archaeological finds from the Anasazi people. It was very interesting to view their handiwork, such as their black-and-white pottery, yucca baskets, and seashell jewelry (they attained the seashells by trading).

There is also a short hike that leads up above the visitor center to a rectangular set of ruins atop a low hill overlooking a river. Perhaps it was a ceremonial center or a military watchtower, or something different altogether. The view from up there was stunning! In one direction, there are snow-capped mountains, green rolling hills, and a river valley, and in another there’s a wide river with desert plains around and behind. My family quickly got a few pictures of the beautiful landscape before heading back down the winding trail and driving home. The desert can be really hot during the day, but it very quickly cools down once then sun begins to set!

Bandelier National Monument, New Mexico

Bandelier was the last national monument showcasing the impressive cultural heritage of the ancient Puebloan people that my family visited during our trip. Although a lot of the building methods and topography of the site were similar to other Puebloan heritage sites we visited across the southwest, what my sisters and I really enjoyed the most about Bandelier was climbing up all the tall, wooden ladders. In total, the vertical ascent via ladders to the highest cliff dwelling named “Alcove House” was 140-feet! It was amazing fun, and we had amazing views. However, it is definitely not for the faint of heart!

As with the other places described in this blog, my sisters and I enjoyed imagining what life was like within the perimeters of the mud and stone walls. We observed the pueblos and made educated guesses on what certain depressions or divots in the floors of pueblos could have been – like a mortar for grinding corn (and other grains and spices), for example.

As we drove home, we had a special surprise to end the day – a vibrant double rainbow! We pulled over at a local library, and all of us did our best to capture both rainbows as they made huge arches across the drizzly sky backlit by bright sunshine.

I hope you enjoyed learning about ancient American civilizations as much as I did, and until I share my next adventures, dare to explore!

Vivienne