'Mummy Lake' Used for Ancient Rituals, Not Water Storage

Far View refers to the group of archaeological structures located on the northern part of the park's Chapin Mesa ridge, where Mummy Lake is also situated. Shown here, one of the last structures built on Chapin Mesa.

(Image credit: Larry Benson)

In Colorado's Mesa Verde National Park, a large 1,000-year-old structure long thought to be an Ancestral Puebloan water reservoir may not have been built to store water after all, a new study suggests.

Instead, the so-called Mummy Lake — which isn't a lake and has never been associated with mummies — likely held ancient ritual ceremonies, researchers say.

Mummy Lake is a sandstone-lined circular pit that was originally 90 feet (27.5 meters) across and 22 feet (6.65 m) deep. In 1917, American naturalist Jesse Walter Fewkes pegged the structure as a prehistoric water reservoir. Several subsequent studies of Mummy Lake have also supported this view, leading the National Parks Service to officially name the structure "Far View Reservoir" in 2006. (Far View refers to the group of archaeological structures located on the northern part of the park's Chapin Mesa ridge, where Mummy Lake is also situated.)

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"The fundamental problem with Mummy Lake is that it's on a ridge," said study lead author Larry Benson, an emeritus research scientist for the U.S. Geological Survey and adjunct curator of anthropology at the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History. "It's hard to believe that Native Americans who understood the landscape and were in need of water would have decided to build a reservoir on that ridge."

Far View Village lies on a ridgeline that decreases in elevation from north to south, and includes Far View House, Pipe Shrine House, Far View Tower, Mummy Lake and other buildings. Previously, scientists had thought Mummy Lake — the northernmost structure — was a key part of a large water collection and distribution system that transported water between these structures to areas south of the reservoir.

They proposed that a gathering basin was once located uphill from Mummy Lake, and that a hypothetical "feeder ditch" connected the two locations. Studies have shown that another shallow, foot-paved ditch runs south from Mummy Lake to Far View House and Pipe Shrine House, and a third ditch connects Far View Village to Spruce Tree House and Cliff Palace (two structures built centuries after the Far View group) farther south. [Image Gallery: Lake Natron Gives Up Its Dead]

Benson and his colleagues propose Mummy Lake is an unroofed ceremonial structure, not unlike the ancient kivas and plazas elsewhere in the Southwest. They noted that the structure is similar in size to a great kiva found at a Pueblohistorical site near Zuni, N.M. It also resembles a ball court and amphitheater at the Puebloan village of Wupatki in Arizona — interestingly, Fewkes also thought these two structures were reservoirs.

Benson and his colleagues suspect the same thing happened at Mesa Verde. Mummy Lake was built as early as A.D. 900, around the same time as the rest of the Far View group of structures; Cliff Palace and Spruce Tree House, on the other hand, date to the early 1200s. The researchers think the community relocated to the latter structures between A.D. 1225 and 1250, and connected their past with their present using the ceremonial roads.

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Joseph Bennington-Castro is a Hawaii-based contributing writer for Live Science and Space.com. He holds a master's degree in science journalism from New York University, and a bachelor's degree in physics from the University of Hawaii. His work covers all areas of science, from the quirky mating behaviors of different animals, to the drug and alcohol habits of ancient cultures, to new advances in solar cell technology. On a more personal note, Joseph has had a near-obsession with video games for as long as he can remember, and is probably playing a game at this very moment.