Square Tower House
by The Forests Edge Photography - Diane Sandoval
Title
Square Tower House
Artist
The Forests Edge Photography - Diane Sandoval
Medium
Photograph - Nature Photography
Description
Note** Cowboys & Indians magazine contest winner for 2021, excited and honored to be included in the magazine this year.
Mesa Verde National Park which is Spanish for green table and was named so because of its forests of juniper and piñon trees growing wild on the Mesa or table top. Amazingly, Ancestral Puebloans built and inhabited Mesa Verde for more than 700 years, between 550 A.D. to 1300 A.D. Home to over 4,700 archaeological sites including 600 cliff dwellings and the mesa top sites of pithouses, pueblos, masonry towers, and farming structures. These sites are some of the most notable and best-preserved dwellings in the United States. Oddly, for the first six centuries, the inhabitants primarily lived on the mesa tops and it wasn't until the final 75 to 100 years that they constructed and lived in the cliff dwellings built in alcoves of sandstone rock, overhanging cliff faces for which Mesa Verde is known. The structures ranged in size from one-room storage units to villages of more than 150 rooms. They farmed on the mesa tops and continued to reside in the alcoves, repairing, remodeling, and constructing new rooms for nearly a century. By the late 1270s, the population began to dwindle and by 1300, with big game hunted out and the land on the mesa deforested by a severe drought that began around 1276, the Ancestral Puebloan occupation of Mesa Verde ended.
Square Tower, as it's known today was built on a southern-facing pocket along the eastern edge of Navajo Canyon. It is an exquisite multi-storied structure -- four stories tall in places along the cliff wall, then three and two -stories out and below that and consisted of over 80 rooms. Today, the remains of 60 rooms and 7 kivas are visible. As with most of the cliff houses, at the bottom of the draw below this site is a healthy spring which could have provided water for Square Tower's occupants. Hand and toe steps or stairs were carved into the cliff's sandstone, provided access to water sources and the mesa above where fields were located.
I stopped by Square Tower very late in the day, almost as the park was closing so the remaining sunlight shone on the cliff and tower face and left the remains of the dwelling in deep shadows. In deepening the shadows, I created a dimension of light that emphasized the tower and cliff walls, adding a sense of drama to the architecture. A wind came up from the canyon bottom and I wondered, did it cool them too, at the end of the hot, summer day when the days work was done, water was fetched from the spring below and it was time to gather for the night. I didn't hear flute music, only the wind that night, but I imagined it echoed in the walls of the canyon.
Uploaded
June 16th, 2018
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