Part B:
      In the Mesa Verde National Park in Colorado, one of the most amazing sights in the United States is
dug into the side of a mountain. Sandy-colored towers, walls and rooms sit there, overlooking the park.
They have no roofs, but the structures are protected by the overhanging cliff. Eight centuries after their
construction, they are in excellent condition—and remain one of the most intriguing archaeological sites
in the country.
      Who built these fabulous dwellings? Why did they choose to dig them into the face of the rock
itself? When did they live, and how did their civilization fade?
      Although not all of those questions have definite answers, archeologists have discovered much about these long-ago Native Americans. The largest of their dwellings, Cliff Palace, was discovered on
December 18, 1888, by a pair of Colorado cowboys who were riding the mesa in search of missing cattle.They spied the crumbling structures through the driving snow and rode their horses toward one of the most intriguing finds in archeological history.
      Cliff Palace and the other cliff dwellings were constructed by the Ancestral Pueblo people, a group
comprised of several Native American tribes whose descendants include the Hopi, Zuni and Acoma
people. The Ancestral Pueblo people lived in and around the American Southwest and their history goes
back to as early as 100 A.D., during a period known as "Late Basketmaker II," due to the fine woven
baskets produced during this period.
      Over the next thousand years, the people of the Southwest settled down gradually. They stopped
living in caves and shallow pits, and began building homes. They moved from a strictly hunter-gatherer
culture to one increasingly dependent on agriculture, growing beans and domesticating animals like
turkeys. The more they farmed, the more water they needed, and they built dams, walls and other basic
irrigation systems.
      Their civilization continued advancing, and by the period known as "Pueblo I," the Ancestral Pueblo
people began building large stone communities. These sprawling dwellings, some of which had as many as 100 rooms, were the forerunner to the later cliff dwellings. As agricultural life began to be more
centered on recently-introduced cotton, and the communities' artisans became more advanced in pottery,the cultural life of the community focused around the kivas.
      A kiva is an underground circular chamber used for ceremonial purposes, and the largest Ancestral
Pueblo dwellings had many of them. Most of the towers were built around these low, round pits. It is easy to imagine the people of Cliff Palace gathering in these kivas to carry out social ceremonies around the campfire.
      By 1200 A.D., the Ancestral Pueblo people began building their homes into the cliffs. No one knows
precisely why they moved into the hills, but it's possible that the shift was to make their homes easier to
defend in times of war. Many of the cliff dwellings in Mesa Verde National Park are accessible only by
rope-ladder, which would have made them very easy for defense against a potential attacker.
      Most of the dwellings in Mesa Verde are built in shallow parts of the rock, and are able to hold only
two or three rooms. But Cliff Palace, which was built up over the course of the 1200s, is much larger. It
contains over 150 individual rooms and more than 20 kivas. At its peak, it could have provided shelter for more than 100 people.
       One of the most intriguing features of the dwellings is the size of the doorways, which are much
smaller than the ones we have today. This would not have bothered the people of Cliff Palace, because
they were much shorter than the people of the 21st Century. The men were around 5 feet 5 inches tall,
and the women around 5 feet tall. Their apartments, which were accessed by climbing tall wooden
ladders, averaged about 6 feet 8 inches tall—a much lower ceiling than you are probably used to!
       Just as it is not quite sure why the Ancestral Pueblo people began building dwellings like Cliff
Palace, no one knows exactly why they eventually abandoned them. A theory is connected with what
happened in 1276, when just as Cliff Palace was reaching its height, the region was struck by the "Great Drought." For 23 years, rainfall was sparse, a catastrophe that would continue to plague the region off-and-on until around 1450. As agriculture became more and more difficult, the Ancestral Pueblo people were perhaps forced to move to better farmland—and Cliff Palace had to be left behind.
【題組】26. Which of the following is TRUE about the special dwellings in the Mesa Verde National Park?
(A) They were built into the side of a mountain around 100 A.D.
(B) They were discovered by some cowboys of Ancestral Pueblo people.
(C) They have stayed mostly intact for over 800 years.[!--empirenews.page--]
(D) They were sandy-colored towers with walls, roofs and rooms.