"Probably beginning in the first millennium A.D., [the Anasazi] built increasingly complex communities here, complete with wide roads across the desert, complex dams that revitalized the landscape, and the tallest buildings in North America until the age of the skyscraper...[so] Why, after having invested so much work in this place, did the ancestral Pueblo people leave it all behind?"
Near Mesa Verde National Park, "it's a mystery that is finally beginning to unravel. Using painstakingly careful excavations of the area's prehistoric sites, elaborate computer and mathematical models and old-fashioned detective work, archaeologists are creating a more complex and subtle picture of the ancestral Pueblo people. In a field where new developments are often measured in decades, the past fifteen years have seen a flood of archaeological discoveries regarding their final years in the Mesa Verde region."
