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Because on the inside, we are all outsiders.

Be an outsider with L.L. Bean. About 1400 years ago, long before Europeans explored North America, a group of people living in the Four Corners region, where today Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah meet, chose what is now called Mesa Verde for their home.

For more than 700 years, they and their descendants lived and flourished here, eventually building elaborate stone

communities in the sheltered alcoves of the canyon walls.

Then in the late 12 hundreds, in the span of a generation or two, they disappeared.

Today on America's National Parks, Mesa Verde, a spectacular reminder of this ancient culture and so much more.

While Europe was trudging through the Middle Ages, blissfully unaware of the new world,

indigenous Americans were living and thriving, but we know strikingly little about them.

Archaeologists have called these people Anasazi, from a Navajo word sometimes translated

as the ancient ones or ancient enemies.

We now call them ancestral Pueblo people, reflecting their modern descendants.

Here's Abigail Trebue.

The first people settled in Mesa Verde, Spanish for Green Table, about AD 550. They are known as basket makers for their skill at the craft.

Formerly nomadic, they were beginning to lead a more settled way of life.

Farming replaced hunting and gathering as the main livelihood.

They lived in pit houses clustered into small villages usually built on mesotops,

but sometimes in cliff recesses. They learned to make pottery

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