Cliff Palace Kiva
by Catherine Sherman
Title
Cliff Palace Kiva
Artist
Catherine Sherman
Medium
Photograph - Photography
Description
"Cliff Palace Kiva, Mesa Verde National Park, Colorado" by Catherine Sherman.
This kiva is one of about 150 rooms in Cliff Palace, Mesa Verde National Park, Colorado. A kiva is a room used by Puebloans for religious rituals. Cliff Palace contains 23 kivas.
Cliff Palace, in southwestern Colorado, is the largest cliff dwelling in North America and had a population of about 100 people when it was inhabited.
During the late 8th century, Mesa Verdeans started building square pit structures that archeologists call protokivas. They were typically 3 or 4 feet (0.91 or 1.22 m) deep and 12 to 20 feet (3.7 to 6.1 m) in diameter. By the mid-10th and early 11th centuries, these had evolved into smaller circular structures called kivas, which were usually 12 to 15 feet (3.7 to 4.6 m) across. Mesa Verde-style kivas included a feature from earlier times called a sipapu, which is a hole dug in the north of the chamber that is thought to represent the Ancestral Puebloan's place of emergence from the underworld.
Cliff Palace was constructed primarily out of sandstone, mortar and wooden beams. The sandstone was shaped using harder stones, and a mortar of soil, water and ash was used to hold everything together.
Tree ring dating indicates that construction and refurbishing of Cliff Palace was continuous from around 1190 through 1260, although the major portion of the building was done within a twenty-year time span.
Featured in "Philanthropic Artists for a Cause" group (02/26/2016); "Images That Excite You" group (02/28/2016)
Uploaded
February 25th, 2016
Statistics
Viewed 658 Times - Last Visitor from New York, NY on 04/04/2024 at 8:11 PM
Embed
Share
Sales Sheet
