By Lisa Levitt Ryckman

A pair of 19th-century ranchers looking for lost cows stumbled instead upon the magical legacy of an ancient people.

On Dec. 18, 1888, Richard Wetherill and his brother-in-law, Charles Mason, tracked their livestock to the edge of a canyon on top of Mesa Verde and made a discovery that would change the future of Colorado's past.

Through the falling snow, the men saw stacks of rooms, some four stories high, flanked by towers. The buildings were tucked into every corner of a ledge against the canyon wall, a veritable castle of stone.

They called it the Cliff Palace. Today it stands as one of the most spectacular remnants of a civilization that has fascinated generations of archaeologists and anthropologists.

``It's an enchanting landscape,'' said Linda Cordell, an archaeologist and anthropology professor at the University of Colorado and the author of 10 books on prehistoric Southwest people. ``The mesas, canyons and cliff dwellings are magically beautiful.''

The Navajo called the cliff dwellers the Anasazi, which means ``ancient ones'' or ``ancient enemy.'' The direct descendants of the ``ancient ones,'' the Hopi and the Pueblo, prefer the term ancestral Pueblo.

The people of the cliff palace were artists who created pottery adorned with intricate black-and-white designs and architects who built multistoried pueblos from loaf-sized blocks of sandstone, carefully carved, stacked and mortared with mud.

They were savvy engineers who constructed a massive reservoir and canal to capture rare heavy rains.

They were successful farmers; by 1050, their communities extended from the Grand Canyon to the Upper Pecos and throughout southern Utah and southern Colorado.

Their golden age lasted 200 years. And then they were gone.

The ancestral Pueblo disappeared from the area nearly 600 years before Benjamin Wetherill and his family settled outside the tiny town of Mancos. They grew wheat and oats on the Alamo Ranch and were on friendly terms with the Ute Indians, who often spoke to them of buildings left behind in the canyons by the ``ancient ones.''

After they found the Cliff Palace, the five Wetherill brothers - Alfred, Win, Richard, Clayton and John - began exploring the region in earnest, sending artifacts and mummies to Denver and Chicago and drawing more visitors and scholars to the area.

Among them was Gustav Eric Adolf Nordenskiold, a young Swede who came for a visit in 1891 but spent the summer excavating the ruins and persuading the Wetherills to dig with more care and thought.

``The cliff-dwelling work was much more exciting than hunting gold (and I have done both), because we never knew what we might find next,'' Al Wetherill wrote later. ``We had started as ordinary pothunters, but, as work progressed along that sort of questionable business, we developed quite a bit of scientific knowledge by careful work and comparisons.''

In September, the Swedish scholar packed up his collection and headed back to Europe, a trip delayed by two weeks in Durango after an irate citizens' committee objected to the idea of a foreigner taking prehistoric treasures out of the country.

But the courts ruled that there was no law to stop him. Today, Nordenskiold's artifacts are displayed at the National Museum of Helsinki, Finland.

The incident helped stir a movement to preserve the ruins as a park. It became a decade-long fight led by Virginia McClurg, who visited Mesa Verde in 1882 and 1886.

``The Cliff Palace is the prey of the spoiler,'' she told President McKinley in 1899. ``Soon it will be too late to guard these monuments.''

On June 29, 1906, the conservation-minded Theodore Roosevelt signed a bill making Mesa Verde a national park - the only park in the world created for no other reason than to preserve the legacy of a prehistoric people.

The people who built the elaborate villages on the canyon ledges were small in stature - probably no more than 5 feet 4 inches tall - and had a life span of 40 years or less. They kept dogs as pets, made robes and blankets from turkey feathers and ate deer, squirrels, rabbits and rats.

Religious ceremonies were a key part of daily life: Spruce Tree House, one of the largest villages in Mesa Verde, had 114 rooms and eight kivas, or ceremonial rooms. Looms have been found in the kivas, indicating that men were the weavers among these people, just as men are the weavers among modern Hopi.

They grew corn, beans and squash in a dry farming belt that received enough moisture during certain periods to allow their village to expand to as many as 5,000 residents.

Now, after more than 100 years of archaeological exploration, the ancestral Pueblo are at the center of a raging controversy over whether they practiced cannibalism.

Rancher Richard Wetherill was the first person to claim there was violence among these generally peaceful prehistoric people, based on his observations of dozens of skeletons pulled from a single site.

``Most archaeologists have ignored that claim,'' said Christy Turner, an anthropologist from Arizona State University who has studied the subject for decades. ``We fell in love with the beautiful Pueblo Indians, their wonderful pottery. How could they be bad? How could they be like us?''

Archaeologists generally agree that there is clear evidence of violence among the ancestral Pueblo, but they are more skeptical about Turner's claims of cannibalism, Cordell said. An archaeologist might look at a bone that Turner says has a clear ``cannibal signature'' of cooking and cutting and see something very different.

``I don't think there's any question that there was major violence and that people were bashing each other,'' she said. ``But it's very, very, very difficult to demonstrate ingestion.''

Violence might have been triggered by the social pressures created by a fickle climate that made it increasingly difficult to grow enough food to feed their villages. An extended drought at the end of the 13th century might have been the final blow.

By 1300, their palaces were empty. But it was no prehistoric vanishing act. The ancestral Pueblo headed south, in search of more predictable water and weather, Cordell said. Their legacy lives on in their descendants.

``The most impressive thing about them is that they established communities that had a sense of tradition that has lasted until today,'' said Cordell, who is director of the University of Colorado Museum in Boulder.

``That's so magical: that something so old, that goes back so far, is still known and appreciated today.''

May 18, 1999

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