Deep in the canyons of the four corners of Utah, Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona are many houses of the old people - the Ancient Ones. The Anasazi (Navajo for "the Ancient Ones") lived and farmed the valleys and open spaces across what is now the Four Corners region. Archaeology studies have determined Ancestral Puebloans is the more accurate identification for the ancient Native American culture that first developed around 1000 BC. Beginning with the earliest explorations and excavations, researchers identified Ancestral Puebloans as the forerunners of contemporary Pueblo peoples. Three UNESCO World Heritage Sites located in the United States are credited to the Pueblos: Mesa Verde National Park, Chaco Culture National Historical Park and Taos Pueblo.

Pueblo, meaning "village" in Spanish, was a term originating with the Spanish explorers who used it to refer to the people's particular style of dwelling. The Ancestral Puebloan culture is perhaps best known for the stone and earth dwellings its people built along cliff walls, from about 900 to 1350 AD in total. The reasons are unknown for building complex structures only late in the 2000+ years of living in the area. Modern study of the tree rings in the support of buildings show a consistent age of building in the many various sites. The builders used blocks of sandstone, set in wet mortar mixed from the tan sandy soils, and smoothed by their own hands.

Also unknown to modern research is why the Ancestral Puebloans left their established homes in the 12th and 13th centuries. Factors examined include climate change, prolonged periods of drought, cyclical periods of topsoil erosion, environmental degradation, deforestation, hostility from new arrivals, religious or cultural change, and influence from Mesoamerican cultures. Many of these possibilities are supported by archaeological evidence. The abandoned structures were left virtually untouched for 500-years. Early European explorers found pottery, food, clothing and all forms of everyday life left behind. Under the protection of the National Park Service, some structures have been partially restored and opened for visitors. Others remain closed to all but archaeology study.

Images presented here mix a few different locations and visits to the Four Corners area. Two great multi-storied ruins, Cliff Palace and Spruce Tree House, reside in Mesa Verde National Park. The Spruce Tree House can be viewed, but is currently closed to tour due to dangerous falling rocks from the collapsing roof of the alcove. Although I had much of Mesa Verde nearly to myself in December 2017, I missed being able to participate in ranger-led tours of the many cliff dwellings in the park that occur only in the summer months. I've intermingled comments between the images below to discuss different sites.

Images are from an EOS 5DIII and various Canon EF lenses. They're sized to fill your wide-screen display. Try using <F11> to maximize your browser window for the full effect. If the images overshoot your display, such as a laptop, just click on the image or the URL link and they'll resize to your screen from the host Flickr site. You can click a bit further into the image details on the Flickr page, if desired. EXIF data is available from host Flickr page as well.

Today, you can get no closer than standing at the base of the Montezuma Castle near Camp Verde, Arizona . Amazingly, this well-preserved structure was open to the public using ladders to climb up and enter as recently as the 1950s. Neither part of the National Monument's name is correct. When European-Americans first observed the ruins in the 1860s, they named them for the famous Aztec emperor Montezuma in the mistaken belief that he had been connected to their construction. In fact, the dwelling was abandoned more than 40 years before Montezuma was born, and was not a "castle" in the traditional sense, but instead, functioned more like a "prehistoric high rise apartment complex" with many families living there.

Montezuma Castle National Monument by Paul Sager, on Flickr
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Cliff Palace is the largest cliff dwelling in North America. It was south- and southwest-facing, providing greater warmth from the sun in the winter. The dwelling is constructed of sandstone, wooden beams, and mortar. Many of the rooms were brightly painted. Cliff Palace was home to approximately 125 people, but was likely an important part of a larger community of sixty nearby pueblos, which housed a combined six hundred or more people.

Cliff Palace
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Spruce Tree House is equally as impressive, but closed due to the danger of the collapsing roof. An alcove is not the same as a cave. Caves are underground chambers and caves are not found in Mesa Verde. Alcove formation is caused by water that seeps into cracks in the sandstone, freezing and thawing in these cracks, eventually expanding and slowly pushing the rock apart. Portions of rock fall off in blocks, creating the alcoves used by the Ancestral Puebloans.

Spruce Tree House
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The Mummy Cave Ruin is the largest ancient Puebloan village preserved in the Canyon de Chelly National Monument. Situated 300 feet above the canyon floor, this village has close to 70 rooms. The east and west alcoves contain living and ceremonial rooms, and the walls are decorated with white and pale green plaster.

Mummy Cave Ruin
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Mummy Cave Ruin
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From about AD 550 until about AD 1200, most people chose to live on the mesa tops near their fields, living first in pithouses and later, in pueblos. Today, visitors enter Balcony House at the north end of the site by climbing a stout double ladder erected by the National Park Service in the 1930s.

Balcony House
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Aztec Ruins, built and used over a 200-year period, is the largest Ancestral Pueblo community in the Animas River valley in northwest New Mexico. Like most other ancient settlements of the Southwest, the Aztec Ruins date to the 12th century and were built by tribes indigenous to this region. Inspired by popular histories of Cortez's conquest of Mexico, Anglo settler's named the place "Aztec" even though research later showed the site was abandoned centuries before the rise of the Aztec Empire located thousands of miles to the south.

Aztec Ruins National Monument
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Aztec Ruins National Monument
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Aztec Ruins National Monument
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Mystery Valley, near Monument Valley and within the Navajo Nation, holds a large number of very well preserved Anasazi (Navajo for "the Ancient Ones") ruins and artifacts.

Anasazi Ruins in Mystery Valley
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