Known for the dwellings of the people who archaeologists once called the “Anasazi,” (a derisive Navajo term meaning “ancient enemy”) Mesa Verde National Park in Montezuma County, Colorado, is home to some of the world’s most beautiful sandstone and adobe structures.

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The twelfth and thirteenth-century rectangular homes – and circular, subterranean religious structures (“kivas”) – of the Pueblo peoples include the famous “Cliff Palace,” a maze of twenty three ceremonial kivas and dozens of rooms. These pink, yellow, and red-plastered dwellings are shut behind windowless walls, under a great overhanging cliff. They are architectonic, squeezing dark rooms together to make an easily defensible fort that uses the cliffs’ natural curves as a guide.

We don’t know much today about the people who built the storybook towers of Mesa Verde (which means “green tablelands”). There appear to be two different styles and sizes of kiva, so there may have been two distinct periods of building, guided by different groups of religious elites. The total effect is stunning, and to people accustomed to separated homes and cities laid out on a grid, under an open sky, quite surprising.

For some reason, these dwellings were inhabited for only a century or so before some sort of disaster struck. Likely theories include a “mega-drought” that made life in the arid mesa-lands unsustainable. Rather than disappearing into thin air, it’s now that thought that the early Puebloan peoples migrated south, into Arizona and New Mexico, where they continued to refine their building practices and where their descendants live today.

Unfortunately, much of these amazing abandoned structures have been looted or destroyed by curio-seekers and vandals. What’s left owes much of its existence to a family of forward-thinking ranchers called the Wetherills, who had a good relationship with local Native Americans and gave outsiders responsible tours. President Teddy Roosevelt tried to protect the Park lands in 1906. In addition, photographer Ansel Adams documented the ruins in the 1940s, producing a series of powerful black-and-white images of the towers and walls.