MESA, A Spanish word meaning 'table' (cf. Latin mensa). and used especially in the Southwestern United States to designate the 'mall, isolated plateaus, usually rising abruptly from the surrounding plains, which are found seattered over the region traversed by the Colo rado Riven The mesas are remnants of an ancient plain which in a former geological age was uplifted from the MP:1111,01 Olin to a height of several thousand feet. This plain was cut down by to its present level except where a hard soperftoial rock protected the underlying soft. strata: such places were left as isolated blocks with steeply esearped sides. The most celebrated of the mesas are the Mesa Eneantada and the Mesa Verde.
The .lesa Enenntada or Enchanted Mesa. called by the Indians Rat zitno. is situated near the village of Acoma in west central New Mexico. It is a perpendicular sandstone rock rising tram a grassy plain. It is of elongated shape, feet long and from 100 to 350 feet wide. Above a sloping talus, 100 to 200 feet in height, towers the perpendicular wall to a height of 430 feet above the plain. The summit is nearly level, and consists of a hard rock very much weathered and supporting a few stunted cedars. The rock is held in superstitious awe by the neighboring. Aeoma, Indians, and a tradition is current among that their remote ancestors once inhabited the summit. The rock had never been ascended
by white men until Professor Lihbey scaled it in the summer of He and F. W. Hodge, who ascended it in 1897, found an artificial stone monument and numerous fragments of pottery and some stone implements.
The .:11‘..sa Verde is situated in the extreme southwestern corner of Colorado, on the right Walk of the Mancos River. It is a plateau 15 miles long and S miles wide. Its talus is 300 to 5110 feet high, above which rises a precipitous wall of yellow sandstone 150 to 300 feet farther, the top of the mesa being 400 to 800 feet above the plain. It derives its name ( = 'green') from the fact that its entire upper surface is covered with a dense growth of cedars and pinion trees. The summit is more accessible than that of the Eneantada, being intersected by the numer ous ramifications of a canon which opens into that of the Mancos River. The rock walls of the Mesa Verde are interrupted by numerous hori zontal ledges occupied by the ruins of ancient cliff dwellings, sonic. in a remarkable state of preservation. Large numbers of stone imple ments, potsherds, and some mummies have been found among the ruins. Consult Nordenskjiild, The Cliff-Dwellers of the Mesa lerde, translated by Morgan (Stockholm, 1893). See CLIFF DWELL ERS.