08/31/2017
Mesa Verde Voices, a podcast series connecting the experiences of people from the past with the people of today, launches on Sept 1, 2017.
Mesa Verde National Park, Mesa Verde Museum Association, KSJD public radio and Mesa Verde Country Tourism Bureau collaborated to produce the pilot season. Our first three podcasts are: Revealed by Fire, discussing how fire has revealed sophisticated water management practices used more than 800 years ago; Corn=Life, the critical importance of corn to survival and agricultural practices that evolved to fit well with the dry climate of the southwestern United States; and Moving On, humans everywhere, including the Ancestral Pueblo people, have always moved around the landscape driven by cultural, spiritual, and survival demands. “Water, fire, food, migration…these are all topics which people across the country and the world are grappling with,” explains Cally Carswell, KSJD’s Mesa Verde Voices producer.
The podcast is available on iTunes or for download at mesaverdevoices.org.
“We want this podcast to both enrich the experience of visitors coming to visit Mesa Verde National Park and the other Pueblo sites in our region,” says Kristy Sholly, Chief of Interpretation at Mesa Verde National Park, “and we hope that it sparks conversations across the country. This project represents the highest ideals of the National Park Service around education, inspiration, conservation, and action. And we’re really proud to be able to bring the relevance of ancient cultures forward to our challenges today.”
Mesa Verde National Park, established by an act of Congress in 1906 was the first in the world to be established to protect both natural and cultural resources. Today, the park hosts more than 600,000 visitors annually.
But the podcast isn’t just about the park, according to Kelly Kirkpatrick at Mesa Verde Country Tourism Bureau, “Mesa Verde Voices highlights the experiences of people across a region and across cultures. The park and the Tribal Park on Mesa Verde were and are critically important, and, to really get a feel for the grand scope of the Ancestral Pueblo and Pueblo people today, this podcast series reaches out across the Four Corners, where most of the people live. I like to think of the culture living on Mesa Verde as Manhattan--a center of culture in our Country today, but only a jumping off point as it relates to the story of our nation.”
