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| The structures conform to the boulders in the alcove. |
This is one of the first areas of Cliff Palace where you can get up close and personal with the ruins. The ranger guiding my tour group had stopped and was giving the group a brief introduction and overview of Cliff Palace and the Ancestral Puebloans in general. His talk was informative, but knowing everything he was talking about, I slipped to the edge of the group and used the time to capture a number of images without the risk of any bystanders wandering through my frame.
The Ancestral Puebloans didn't quarry their stones, they simply reshaped the rock that erosion had worked free of the cliff face and without the proper tools to quarry and shape large rocks, they often had to build around the contours of the alcove they wanted to call home. What struck me in this image was the way the buildings incorporated the large boulders and worked around them. Frank Lloyd Wright would have been proud!
The Ancestral Puebloans didn't quarry their stones, they simply reshaped the rock that erosion had worked free of the cliff face and without the proper tools to quarry and shape large rocks, they often had to build around the contours of the alcove they wanted to call home. What struck me in this image was the way the buildings incorporated the large boulders and worked around them. Frank Lloyd Wright would have been proud!
