Reading the Remains

Notre Dame Magazine
Reading the Remains
Twilight Palace takes us back to a time when the cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde National Park, Colorado, were still occupied. Home to hundreds of people, Cliff Palace is one of the larger, and consequentially more spectacular, cliff dwellings in the Southwest, and when it was in its prime it must have been quite the sight to see. We can’t see it the way it was, of course, although Twilight Palace comes very close to that. The National Park Service strategically placed lanterns and lights within Cliff Palace with the eyes of artists. Thinking through the end result, they made sure that as darkness fell the ruins would light up, and in so doing, take us all back in time. It is easy—far easier than usual—to imagine that the dwelling was fully occupied. Cliff Palace has been lit only a couple of times in the last several hundred years. This is a good time, too, to celebrate the lives of the Ancient Pueblo People. It is a time to remember that it was not an easy, nor gentle, life for them. Every day was a challenge for survival, every moment a struggle. The art that they have left behind is gives us a glimpse into the beauty that they saw. And the buildings that they left behind are mute testament to their incredible skills. Let us remember them, and see the world through their eyes.

We’re sitting in silence in the Long House cliff dwelling in Mesa Verde National Park, watching the sun swallow the shadows across the far canyon wall.

I strain to hear the whispers of the ancestral Pueblo people who built the complex villages tucked into massive sandstone alcoves in southwestern Colorado, then left them sometime in the late 13th century. I can feel their presence viscerally, emanating from the soot they scorched into the rock and the small imprints of maize in the mortar.

Read more here.

October 4, 2018

Art and HistoryArcheologyDonna GlowackiAnthropologyArchitectureCollege of Arts and LettersHistoryNotre Dame Magazine

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