Cliff Dwellings: Anasazi And Pueblo Indians

Carved into the sides of cliffs in Mesa Verde National Park are what has come to be known as Cliff Dwellings. However, a more appropriate name would be cliff houses in a cliff village. The rooms range from small storage areas to entire communities of intertwined living spaces sometimes carved into the sides of cliffs. The Cliff Dwellings are believed to have been built by the Ancestral Puebloans (“Cliff Dwellings”), aka Anasazi and Pueblo Indians. This shift in the name of these people represents a changing discourse, one that used to view Native Americans as savages, but now recognizes these Native Americans as a collection of hundreds of separate communities with distinct languages and cultures.
The name “Indian” came from Christopher