Richard Trout, age 14, of Galveston, Tex., for his question:
WHEN WERE THE FAMOUS CLIFF DWELLINGS BUILT?
Cliff dwellings were built in northern New Mexico, northern Arizona, southern Utah and southern Colorado by a group of Indians called the Anasazi. They gradually developed a type of many storied dwellings called a pueblo. For this reason, all groups in Anasazi history after about A.D. 700 are called Pueblo Indians.
About A.D. 1000, some groups of Pueblo Indians moved into the hills and built their homes in cliffs, perhaps for protection against their enemies. During the next 300 years the Anasazi culture reached its highest point among both these cliff dwellers and the other Pueblo Indians who had remained on the plains.
The cliff dwelling Anasazi Indians abandoned their famous houses by 1300, perhaps because of increased enemy attacks and a period of severe drought. They moved southward and built pueblo villages there.
Other Indian groups of south central Arizona and northern Mexico also built cliff dwellings, some of which were occupied as late as 1450.
Cliff dwellers farmed on the plains at the foot of their cliff homes or on the flat tops of the mesas above their dwellings. They grew beans, corn, cotton, squash and tobacco and raised turkeys. They hunted deer and mountain sheep with arrows that had points of flaked stone.
These people ate from pottery dishes and bowls that were painted with red or black designs.
Some cliff dwellers lived in caves that could provide shelter for several family groups, especially along river canyons. But most of these Indians lived in two or three story cliff houses.
They built their homes on protected ledges or in hollow spaces in cliff walls, using sandstone blocks and mud mortar. They built the small rooms one upon another and set each story back a short distance from the edge of the one below. As many as 1,500 persons lived together.
The cliff homes had few doors on the ground level. The people used ladders to reach the first roof. In case of attack, they drew up the ladders.
Steps and paths were cut into the stone walls around the dwellings. The paths led from the caves and homes up to the tops of the mesas and down to the valley floors.
Most of the villages had underground chambers called kivas, which the people entered through hatchways in the roofs. Men held councils in the kivas and also used them for secret religious ceremonies.
The Indians plastered the walls and painted many with symbolic paintings in red, green, yellow and white.
The Eastern cliff dwellers had round kivas, but the cliff dwellers in the South and the West built rectangular ones.
In summer, both men and women wore skirts woven from cotton, milkweed and yucca fibers. In winter, they wore fur robes and blankets made of cords wrapped with turkey feathers or strips of rabbit skin.