In 1000 BC, the Basketmaker culture emerged from the local Archaic population, and by 750 AD the Ancestral Puebloans had developed from the Basketmaker culture. The first Ancestral Puebloans were nomadic foragers whose economy relied upon hunting and gathering wild foods.
When they became sedentary and began to cultivate corn (maize), they also began to build circular pits as storage bins. Later they reinforced the bins with stone walls and covered them with roofs, and some individuals began to use the structures as homes. The pit houses were pretty basic, with a living room sunk a few feet below ground and timbers to hold up the roof. But within a few hundred years, the Puebloans had abandoned the mesa top and moved down into the cliffs themselves.
They began building cliff houses in the 1200s: multistory structures of sandstone bricks and mortar, tucked into deep rock alcoves. The structures ranged in size from one-room granaries to villages of more than 150 rooms. While still farming the mesa tops, they lived in cliff dwellings, repairing, remodeling, and constructing new rooms for nearly a century. In the late-1200s, the population began migrating to the south, into present-day New Mexico and Arizona.
There was probably more than one reason the Pueblo people left the Mesa Verde region in the late A.D. 1200s. There was a drought from A.D. 1276 through 1299. This drought probably caused food shortages, especially because the population had grown so large.
Eventually, the Pueblo people of the Mesa Verde region decided to migrate south, where the rains were more reliable.
Ancient village of Mesa Verde National Park
