yesterday, we visited Mesa Verde National Park. It is the home of the remains of many cliff dwellings of the Ancestral Puebloans.
During a snack break, we got to talking of visiting France. It was many years ago that my daughter and I visited Paris and Northern France. One thing I remember vividly is how awed we felt when we saw their "old" castles, monuments and sites. They were 800 and 1,000 years old. In our experience, the only "old" sites we had experience were at most 300 or so years old. In New England, there are some pre-revolutionary artifacts. But, the "oldest" American antiquities that we had experienced were far younger than their European counterparts.
Until yesterday, that is.
As I stood in Cliff Palace and Spruce Tree House, I realized that I was experiencing American antiquities to rival the European ones that so awed me. This knowledge awed me even more. Here I stood on American soil, in dwellings and ceremonial centers, that were more than 800 years old. The last known inhabitants left in 1209 AD! Some of the walls were probably even older than that. It was remarkable.
