[From the Archives] Mesa Verde and the Power of a Place: An Archaeologist Dwells On Human Memory and the Meaning of Our Past

Some places have the power to dramatically shape our memories, purpose, and the entire trajectory of our lives. How can we all better grasp the weight of history and leverage its lessons for humanity?

Photo by Alec Krum on Unsplash

Greetings, fellow wanderers,

Today I am republishing another post from the archives. I want readers to know that I am diligently working to publish my upcoming book, which is scheduled to debut in early 2026, so I will have a slight lull in the number of new posts for the next few weeks.

Also, Those Who Wander recently hit 800 subscribers! I am sincerely grateful to everyone who has supported me. Thus, as TWW acquires fresh subscribers, I recognize that many newcomers may not have access to or be familiar with some of my initial writings. With over 120 posts in the archive, I want to expose some of these paywalled posts to more readers.

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Now onto today’s archived post, Mesa Verde and the Power of a Place: An Archaeologist Dwells On Human Memory and the Meaning of Our Past

“Men do not learn much from the lessons of history, and that is the most important of all the lessons of history.”

- Aldous Huxley

I’ve been pursuing archaeology for more than fifteen years now—and it all began with a trip to Mesa Verde. Given the allure of the study of archaeology, I would guess there are still very few who know what an archaeologist does, much less how they think about the world — our history, present circumstances, and where we are heading into the future. Many an archaeologist has endless stories about how they are always being asked by members of the public about dinosaurs, Bigfoot, or ancient aliens. While I place some blame on the archaeologists themselves for not being more engaged with the public—informing them about our profession and the relevant insights from our work—the fact is there are simply far too few of us to begin with. Plus, there are fewer out there still who are tech- and media-savvy enough to reach large audiences and inspire them with the lessons of the past. But some of us are at least learning and trying.

Nevertheless, many people at least have a vague sense of what an archaeologist does. They know we dig in the dirt, find artifacts, and sometimes cloister ourselves off in labs and museums doing who knows what to “uncover the past.” But before we get to the big picture of archaeology, I want readers to understand first why I wanted to be an archaeologist in the first place, because frankly, I need to remind myself of that from time to time.

I’ve always been fascinated by history. In the third grade, it was an earth-shattering moment to realize that many generations of people had come before us and lived remarkably different lives from the ones we live now. The vastness of history and the diversity of cultures throughout time completely floored me. Who were they, how did they live, and how do we even know anything about them today? My head was left swimming trying to imagine what past human lives were like, and that love for history has persisted ever since.

I know exactly the moment I was inspired to pursue archaeology, too, because I wrote it down in a travel journal when my father, brother, and I took a two-week-long road trip through Colorado in the summer of 2009 in a beat-up 1981 Chevy Beauville van I had purchased for $800. I was working as a dishwasher in a cafeteria at the time and had little money to my name, so this was a ridiculous and unwise investment, but I didn’t care. I even paid for all of our gas, which cost about as much as the van. This was the first time I would visit the western United States, and one of my first major adventures that changed the direction of my life.

The van we drove in the summer of 2009 to tour Colorado got about eight miles to the gallon and burned a quart of oil every 100 miles. Photo by the author.

Mesa Verde National Park was one of the many places we visited on our tour around Colorado. For those unfamiliar with the history and archaeology of the place, it is one of the premier archaeological sites in the southwestern United States, next only to perhaps Chaco Canyon in New Mexico, only a few hours south. The entire southwestern United States, as with the entirety of the Americas, has been inhabited for thousands of years by many indigenous groups, but the peoples inhabiting this region from about the 7^th to 13^th centuries are referred to today as Ancestral Puebloans, with many contemporary tribes such as the Hopi, Laguna, Zuni, and Acoma being their living descendants. The Hopi refer to these “ancient people” as Hisatsinom.

How people managed to live and thrive in a desert environment such as this boggled my young mind, as it still does today. Through the centuries, the people of this region honed their crafts in irrigation and farming techniques to eke out a remarkable way of life along the mesas and steep valleys of the Colorado Plateau. They were well-connected in trade and even had road networks that connected communities throughout this expansive region. Embedded within the rock shelters and sandstone alcoves are thousands of stone slab structures cemented together using clay as mortar that were constructed for round homes known as kivas, ceremonial rooms, granaries, and water catchments. Collectively, they are referred to as cliff dwellings, with some only accessible by ladders and foot/hand holds chiseled into the rock. The place enchants you with inexhaustible wonder.

Journeying to a place like Mesa Verde evoked something deep in my young consciousness. At the time, I was just a rural midwestern teenager who spent much of his youth listening to heavy metal, skateboarding, riding BMX, and mimicking Johnny Knoxville and the Jackass crew on MTV. But this place transformed me. What I recall most was walking through the preserved remnants of Cliff Palace, a collective of stone edifices with around 150 rooms housing some 100 people, built into the sandstone cliffs below the high desert floor and above the steep valley below. What an astounding moment it was to wander through Cliff Palace and share this experience with my father, brother, and dozens of other awe-struck travelers within this archaeological mecca.

Our 2009 tour through Cliff Palace. Photo by the author.

Overview of the mesa and valley in Mesa Verde National Park. Photo by the author.

Overview of Square Tower House constructed between 1200-1300 CE. Photo by the author.

Our tour of Mesa Verde catapulted me into wanting to become an archaeologist. I wanted to grasp what it meant to live in a place like this and all the other thousands of sites across that open landscape. I was desperate to understand as much as I could about the past, not because I had carefully rationalized it, but because I instinctively felt it was vitally important to know. Here, I was inspired by the power of a place that left my mind overwhelmed by the concepts of deep time and the meaning of history. There is so much to know. How do we grasp the weight of it all? And what, if anything, can we learn and hold onto from that history? Can we sincerely uncover any worthy truths about the past?

Whatever switch was flipped in my mind during my days at Mesa Verde gave me a rushing sense that people and events in the past have intrinsic worth and demand to be understood as best we can. As difficult and as uneconomic as it is to fund a project like an archaeological dig and all the curation that goes into it, we owe it to ourselves and the memory of the past to work as diligently as possible and carefully document, preserve, and understand what these places mean for all of us. However, the road to unveiling the past is not an easy endeavor.

Being an archaeologist is about being a mindful steward of the past. We must do our best to not only preserve the significant material items and sites people leave behind for analysis, but equally, if not more importantly, engage others and explain to them why understanding the past matters. This task is not always easy because many of us care nothing for the past and would rather forget it and move on, clearing the way for modern industry and ever-expanding development. The future is now. Who cares about some broken potsherds and stone tools in an eroded gulley? Are we merely debating one value system for another—the future versus the past? Must they be in conflict?

A select few care so much that they devote a lot of their energy to making sure the narrative they tell about the past fits into some current political agenda that benefits them in the here and now. The Nazis were perhaps the most infamous distorters of history on record, desperately trying to brand themselves as a superhuman race, but many groups and cultures around the world, both historically and contemporarily, are just as energized and compelled to make their imagined past and ancestors look good at the expense of another group when the incentives are right.

However, I suspect most of us want to get the story of our collective history as straight as possible without it being tainted by modern hubris and political ideologies, which ultimately obscure the truth of events and the lives of people of the past, a grave injustice in my mind. We owe it to ourselves and especially those who are no more to share and represent these stories as authentically as possible.

But we are presented with an even deeper problem in my view: Our minds are like leaky pails–human memory is frail and vulnerable both as individual minds and collective societies—even with our computers assisting us. We forget important lessons far too easily, as Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan painfully warn in their book Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors:

“The many sorrows of our recent history suggest that we humans have a learning disability. We might have thought that the horrors of World War II and the Holocaust were enough to innoculate us against the toxins there revealed and unleashed. But our resistance quickly fades. A new generation gladly abandons its critical and skeptical faculties. Old slogans and hatreds are dusted off. What was only recently muttered guiltily is now offered as political axiom and agenda. There are renewed appeals to ethnocentrism, xenophobia, homophobia, racism, sexism, and territoriality. And with a sigh of relief we are apt to surrender to the will of the alpha, or long for an alpha we can surrender to.”

This book was published in 1992, and yet sounds eerily prescient of our current world order, does it not? There is something that does naturally recur in history: Fresh minds are born and might as well be considered blank slates when it comes to understanding history. History is nonheritable. We are simultaneously limited in our biology and have yet to devise better cultural means of transmitting history to one another. After all, it isn’t enough to just have encyclopedias of human history stashed on hard drives. We all must grapple with what’s on them.

Our single minds can only retain so much information and each generation that comes along is required to start the process of learning history over to synthesize and extract its meaning. As we continue to accrue ever more knowledge of the past, it becomes ever harder for a single mind or a small cohort of minds to keep our knowledge afloat, accessible, and accurate. Archaeologists and historians cannot maintain knowledge of the past on their own, nor should it be exclusively left to us.

How many of us do we need to carry on the collected wisdom and history of our species and protect it from becoming lost, distorted, or worst of all, neglected? The answer remains debatable, and not everyone is going to care about learning history. Yet some fraction of us do need to care and make the case clearer to the rest of us why stewarding the past matters.

In today’s world of endless distractions and everyone vying for our attention, it is questionable whether enough of us will maintain an enthusiasm for stewarding the past. Presently, I am “hopefully pessimistic” about that process as we sit on the precipice of an artificial general intelligence horizon and await its implications on humanity.

What Mesa Verde taught me most is that places have power. Power to inspire present action. How profound is it that a place constructed over 700 years ago by people I’ll never meet can influence the behaviors of some random midwestern teenager religiously listening to Slayer and nearly breaking his neck on his bike? This place possessed enough power to motivate me to pursue my B.A. and M.A. degrees in history and anthropology. To date, I’ve worked in eleven states as an archaeologist throughout the western and southeastern United States. I was trained first in the mountains of Wyoming, where I met my wife at an archaeological field school, and later spent my first years of CRM working throughout much of Wyoming and eastern Montana, and spent a summer working for the Forest Service in northwestern Colorado.

My most adventurous memories in archaeology were born in the West, and I received some of the best training here: hiking, surveying, digging holes, excavating sites, photographing, mapping, documenting, and reporting on the tiny remnants of the past: artifacts of stone, ceramics, bone, and charcoal from long-extinguished campfires. Artifacts can be exciting, but it is the larger story of what they signal about past human life and behavior that inspires many of us today. What lessons can we accurately draw from the past?

My research has made me think a lot about the topics of risk and resilience. I’m intrigued to understand how humans have lived with all the various risks we’ve encountered from disease and injury to violence and conflict to major existential risks like climate change, nuclear war, and artificial intelligence. I am eager to know what makes humans resilient, both individually and societally. I owe all this pondering inspiration to Mesa Verde and the people who once lived there, for they knew intimately all about risk and resilience. Likewise, with what I’ve learned from the many people still living on the Great Plains (I recall religiously devouring George Frison’s Prehistoric Hunter-Gatherers of the High Plains and Rockies in shabby hotels throughout Wyoming and Montana when we weren’t out scouring the ground on our surveys).

The people across these sprawling landscapes managed to survive and thrive for centuries in challenging environments. How do we learn these lessons of resilience from people and places like this? One general lesson of history that should give us pause: Humans throughout history have weathered many storms—severe trials and tribulations—and that should give us some hope for whatever challenges await us.

I wanted to become an archaeologist because I believe getting to the truth about our humanity is the one set of questions we must get right. History is foundational to everything else. I want to prove a great mind like Aldous Huxley wrong and that we can learn much from history. However, we have a long way left to go.

Who we are as humans, how we evolved, and where we’ve been will always be a recurring set of questions with fine, albeit challenging, lessons to learn with each passing generation. And when we live at a time with so many modern distractions, propaganda, and technologies that can easily distort our understanding of the world, I worry that far too few of us will learn to appreciate, much less know anything meaningful about our past as the years go by.

This is why physical places like Mesa Verde, Chaco Canyon, the Vore Buffalo Jump, Legend Rock, and the numerous important archaeological sites across this vast continent and the rest of the world need to be preserved and funded, and why physical travel and wandering to these locations are so important. Physical connections to our history are vital. We must witness these sacred places with all our senses present to gain our appreciation for a place. Who knows, they might just inspire more future stewards of the past.

The act of visiting Mesa Verde all those years ago radically altered my life trajectory. Up until this time, I was casually meandering through life. I was briefly in the Indiana Air National Guard and taking random courses at a community college when I visited Mesa Verde. This was because these were just placeholders, something to do while I “figured things out” as so many other confused youths do with each passing generation, seeking purpose in their lives. I had little direction in life until the moment I wandered through the cliff dwellings and museum exhibits overflowing with remarkable pottery, basketry, and other artifacts at Mesa Verde. After this excursion, I knew that I wanted to devote my life to studying the past.

Though these ancient archaeological sites are devoid of the people who made them now, they still possess an incredible power to inspire and motivate our actions today. Although I am by no means a mystical or religious person, I can nonetheless recognize and respect that these are special and sacred places for many, myself included. They will always be worth preserving and protecting for that reason alone.

Inspirational credit:

I wish to thank a fellow Substacker and travel writer

Yasmin Chopin

for introducing me to the concept of “place writing”—something distinct from travel writing where we hone in on “the obscure magic and mystery of a place.” I encourage everyone to visit her Substack

Place Writing

.

For consideration:

●      What place has inspired you? In what way did living in or visiting a place change the trajectory of your life?

Thanks for being a fellow traveler with me through this read. Please consider subscribing, sharing, and supporting this project. Much more to follow!

Cheers!

-JSB