Rant: a tour guide at Mesa Verde told our group the cliff dwellings were abandoned because of a drought, and I almost laughed out loud | Archaeology Discoveries

Tyler Garcia · 2026-09-16T01:35:06.325762+00:00

I took the balcony house tour at Mesa Verde last month and the guide gave the whole bus the old drought story like it was settled fact. The problem is that archaeologists have been arguing about this for years now, and a lot of them point at social stuff, fighting over land, changing beliefs, not just dry weather. The real takeaway is that when a tour guide gives you one neat reason for a civilization walking away, they are selling you a story, not the data. If a site is 700 years old and nobody wrote anything down, how do we decide which single cause gets to be the official one? Has anyone been on a tour where the guide just admits we do not really know, because I want to go on that one.

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Rant: a tour guide at Mesa Verde told our group the cliff dwellings were abandoned because of a drought, and I almost laughed out loud | Archaeology Discoveries - Chatter Central