The Mesaverde Group consists of a thick wedge of fluvial, littoral-deltaic and shallow marine clastics shed into the Cretaceous Western Interior Seaway of North America. The western parts of the seaway lay within the strongly subsiding foredeep of the active Sevier fold and thrust belt further to the west. The study area is located east of the axis of maximum subsidence and is thus in a favourable position to record competing effects of eustasy, sediment supply and thrust-load induced subsidence. Facies and sequence analysis carried out on high quality outcrop and well log data led to the recognition of a complex depositional cycle hierarchy within the typical storm-and wavedominated inner shelf/shoreface/strand plain and delta systems of the Mesaverde.Fourth-order parasequences and parasequence bundles of estimated 1 0 0 -4 0 0 k a duration are the best recognizable, ubiquitous and most useful stratigraphic units. Their arrangement with respect to sequence boundaries, however, varies with their overall stratigraphic position and also differs from the Exxon models. Mesaverde progradation was interrupted by a major transgression that occurred out of phase with the aggradational to progradational stacking trend of third-order sequences. A proposed genetic model relates large-scale (secondorder) sequence architecture to tectonics: a Sevier thrust event as well as Laramide uplift within the foredeep controlled non-linear changes in the accommodation/supply ratio. Parasequence stacking patterns and sequence boundary formation, in contrast, were the product of (global?) eustasy enhanced by short-term, perhaps local, changes in the rates of subsidence and detrital influx.