A plateau is defined as a large highland area of fairly level land separated from surrounding land by steep slopes. There are many famous plateaus in the world including the Bolivian Plateau in South America, Ethiopian Plateau in Ethiopia, Tibetan Plateau in China, Deccan Plateau in India, Anatolian Plateau in Turkey, and the Mato-Grosso Plateau in Brazil (http://www.edu.pe.ca/southernkings/plateaurh.htm).
One plateau that stands alone for its multi-cultures and spectacular geologic formations, is the Colorado Plateau in the Southwest, Four Corners region of the United States. The Four Corners region is the only place where four U.S. states, Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona, come together at one point. The 130,000 square miles that encompass the plateau expand across “Northeastern and northern Arizona, the southern two thirds of western Colorado, northwestern New Mexico, central Utah, southern Utah, and the southern two thirds of eastern Utah� (http://freespace.virgin.net). The Colorado Plateau is a large basin area surrounded by highlands or mountains. There is evidence of isolated volcanic activity within the Plateau, but mostly the Plateau contains smaller plateaus, mesas, and buttes carved into the many layers of sedimentary rock that were deposited when the area was covered by inland, shallow seas.
The formation of the Colorado Plateau is unique. The distinctive land features that tattoo other provinces of the Western United States are not present here. Instead of being “thrust, stretched, and fractured� (http://cpluhna.nau.edu) into disjointed mountains and deep basins like its western counterparts (i.e. Rocky Mountains to the east and basin and range country to the west) the Colorado Plateau basically remained “structurally intact� and resisted the physical changes evident in the topography surrounding it (http://cpluhna.nau.edu). The Colorado Plateau floated along the western edge of the landmass that eventually formed the North American continent. When much of the rest of the western United States was rising as high as three miles above sea level due to volcanic eruptions and the movement and collision of tectonic plates, the Colorado plateau remained a distinctive, mostly undeformed piece of continental crust. The only remnants of tectonic forces in the Plateau are the “broad, dome- shaped uplifts, shallow basins, and folds� (http://cpluhna.nau.edu). As the landmass or piece of crustal plate containing the Colorado Plateau journeyed northward from the South Pole region, water from rising seas imprinted the entire region with large amounts of sedimentary rock. The Colorado Plateau consists of highlands surrounding the Colorado River. The landforms of the Colorado Plateau are a mixture of soft and hard rock marked by deep canyons carved by the Colorado River and its tributaries.
Colorful, unrivaled physical features not only define the Colorado Plateau, but the region contains the “fossil remains of 12,000 years of human occupation, spanning the entire temporal range of human prehistoric development from the Paleo-Indian culture to the modern Pueblo Indiansâ€? (http://cpluhna.nau.edu). Embedded in the plateau are over 16,000 archaeological sites revealing the transformation of thousands of years of culture. These archeological sites extend throughout the region in the form of pueblos and cliff dwellings, and rock art such as pictographs (paintings) and petroglyphs (carvings). The distinct landforms of the Colorado Plateau, along with the ancient history and culture of the humans who inhabited it, are visible and preserved and the remaining multi-cultural communities tell an interesting story. –Matt Staton
