Mesa Verde

Mesa Verde is 25 miles of the Highway but thankfully that is all National Park land so it is metalled road.

The museum at the visitors' centre has a number of dioramas explaining the development of settlement on the Mesa. It starts 10,000 years ago with primitive hunters

then progresses to the basket culture and enhanced basket cultures.

Around 550CE you have proto-puebloan pit dwellings 

so-called because the structures were made by digging pits into the mesa ad building over the top, and from c1000-1300CE high puebloan culture building multi-storey structures  with square rooms for living in and round kivas or meeting rooms with a plaza for communal activities.

The mind-boggling bit is that they did this within natural cracks in the mesa cliff face and got about between levels and up to their fields on the mesa tops on simple wooden lean to ladders. I would not have wanted to be pregnant there.

There are several different groups of buildings with rooms for maybe up 200 people in each spread over several miles along the mesa. 

There is only 18" of precipitation a year in this area (including snow) but it was enough to grow crops with irrigation. Something must have happened around 1300CE though  because the pueblos were abandoned at the same time as the Chaco vallley pueblos. It is speculated that there may have been successive years of drought.