Winding down

Monday we head south for closing. Things are falling into place here.

I have one more tour of Mesa Verde to give, probably the last tour ever, after 44 1/2 years. Tuesday was an opportunity for a wonderful experience. Late in the season, when I was a seasonal ranger in 1966, I studied the wall abutments on the ground floor of Spruce Tree House. Tuesday, to clarify and better understand a feature we often interpret (interior decorations in plaster), I had the opportunity to visit a second-story room. Very different experience.

Perhaps the most intriguing of the features in the room is the white handprint. Someone, more than 800 years ago, put his or her left hand in some wet, white plaster, then pressed that hand against a red-plastered wall a few inches from the lower left corner of the doorway. What a personal touch! And there's another white left-hand print under the doorway and another white design at the lower right corner of the door.

In the picture at the top, the whole doorway can be seen. It sits in the middle of the wall, in an intricate plaster context. What is being learned, thanks to plaster conservation specialists from the University Museum in Pennsylvania, is that the wall was originally plastered white. Then it had a dado layer of red plaster applied up to a point midway up the doorway. There is also a horizontal floor band of white plaster applied over the red at the bottom of the wall. The top of the wall appears black because smoke and soot from a hearth on the other side of the room seems to have adhered to the white more than to the red, turning the upper half of the wall black.

In addition to the white plaster designs under the door sill, there is an interesting step-stone set in the wall under the sill and there are additional designs worked into the edge where the red overlaps the white. A series of three red triangles sticks up into the (formerly) white plaster. Like a train of marshmallows, a line of little white plaster dots runs up the hill, down the hill, etc. Except they originally looked red, because the little white dots had little red plaster caps on them, most of which have worn off.

Pretty fancy embellishment, right? According to the archeologist I was with, this appears to be a treatment found in upper rooms, not ground floor rooms. Why? Dunno.

The other two pictures show the view south from that decorated room and the view north. In the lower picture, you can see an original roof of a first-floor room that has been preserved. In the far right corner of that roof, there is a hatch through which a ladder would have extended, providing access from the ground floor to that second-story room.

In the other direction, a three-story room block is visible. There was a ground-floor line of rooms right below the camera that is gone now; it wouldn't have looked like a straight, three-story face. There would have been ladders going up onto the roofs of those ground-floor rooms, and then one could step into the second-story doorways. In addition, there would have been a ladder or ladders going up to a balcony supported on that row of poles, giving access to the low storage rooms on the third floor.

All that aside, this is a place that, in the 13th century, was alive with people who expressed their concepts of beauty in - and on - their architecture, as well as in pots, jewelry and other artifacts of living. And unraveling that story is an exercise in ongoing revelation! tv