THE MANITOU CLIFF DWELLINGS ARE COMPRISED OF ANCESTRAL PUEBLOAN CLIFF DWELLINGS.

PRESERVED

ARCHITECTURE

RELOCATING THE CLIFF DWELLINGS

The Manitou Cliff Dwellings Preserve is comprised of stones gathered from a collection of twenty-five mesa top dwellings located on private farmland a few miles northeast of McElmo Canyon, near Dolores Colorado. These dwellings were partially buried and scattered amongst farming fields. In the early 1900’s these structures were slated to be bulldozed over to create additional farmland for the existing farmers in the area and the dwelling stones were to be used to line the irrigation ditches.

The creation of the Manitou Cliff Dwellings Preserve was the vision of Virginia McClurg and Harold Ashenhurst. It was undertaken to create a museum that preserves and protects the fine stonework architecture of the Ancestral Puebloans which at that time were unprotected from vandals and artifact hunters. After several failed attempts to get Mesa Verde established as a National Park, as well as repeated failed attempts of the Antiquities Act passing through congress, Virginia McClurg, a philanthropist and women’s advocate for preserving and educating Indigenous cultures, decided to make a drastic move in order to preserve some of the remarkable Ancestral Puebloan architecture before it was destroyed. Vandals were looting and destroying many Native American dwellings with dynamite, looking for buried artifacts and treasures. At the time, the Federal government wasn’t willing to protect any of these sites across the southwest. Viginia McClurg had been advocating for Mesa Verde to become a National Park, but she also wanted the park to be under women’s control and operation. She did not want the Federal government and men to be in charge of the park as she felt they would not do justice in protecting the park and keeping it clean and well preserved. After being unable to come to agreeable terms on the future of Mesa Verde, and fearing that vandals would ultimately destroy Mesa Verde and the surrounding area’s cliff dwellings, Virginia McClurg decided to form the Colorado Cliff Dwellings Association and in 1904, began an extensive relocation and preservation project.

Virginia McClurg and her team acquired the rights to some mesa top dwellings, and The Colorado Cliff Dwellers Association began a large undertaking of unearthing and collecting the stones from these sites, packaging and carrying them by oxen and horse drawn carriages to the railways in Dolores, CO. From here, the stones would travel by railroad to Colorado Springs and then horse and oxen again to James Canyon, also known as Deadman’s Canyon in Manitou Springs. With the arrival of the dwellings, the canyon was to be renamed Cliff Canyon. Cliff Canyon provided a very similar landscape and vegetation to the McElmo region with protective sandstone cliff overhangs as well as providing a southwest facing canyon wall with which to build in.

Virginia McClurg believed that without the Federal government’s protection, looters, vandals, and pothunters would ultimately destroy Mesa Verde and all of the Ancestral Puebloan architecture in the surrounding areas. Her team faithfully documented in dimension and appearance several of these sites to preserve the cliff dwelling architecture. Thus, once the stones arrived in Manitou Springs, they were precisely arranged in Cliff Canyon rebuilding several iconic structures in the southwest in an effort to preserve this Ancestral Puebloan architecture. Upon opening in 1907, our preserve was acknowledged by Dr. E.L. Hewett, Director of American Archaeology and father of the Antiquities Act, for its detail of workmanship and educational purpose.

Our three-story pueblo structure demonstrates the architecture of the Taos Puebloans of New Mexico. These Puebloans are descendants of the Cliff Dwellers belonging to the Ancestral Puebloan cultural line. This pueblo building was erected at the turn of the century and home to a Native American family of dancers who educated and entertained the tourists for several generations. This Native American family lived in the pueblo as late as 1984. Over the years, the pueblo was expanded into museums of pottery and artifacts. It has since been expanded to include our souvenir gift shop that offers Native Made pottery, jewelry, and artifacts, as well as Colorado and US made gifts. We welcome you to explore the Ancestral Puebloan Culture and get a “hands on” educational experience, while you are visiting the Pikes Peak region.

While the Manitou Cliff Dwellings is a preserve of relocated stones and structures, modeled and preserved after those found in the southwest, 120 years later, our mission remains the same: We are an outdoor educational preserve helping visitors to understand, appreciate, and marvel at a glimpse of the Ancestral Puebloan Culture and how they survived long ago.

The Ancestral Puebloans

Where Did They Go, and Why?
Accomplished Builders, Related To The Earth
Phase One: Basketmaker Puebloans
Phase Two: Pueblo People
Solving The Mystery Of Cliff Dwellers “Disappearance”
End Of An Era
Cliff Dwellers Influence Lives On
Agriculture and Other Food Sources
Architecture
Clans & Tribes
How do we know about the Cliff Dwellers?
Major Ancestral Puebloan Regions and Sites

Modern scientists are not certain why the Cliff Dwellers left their cliff dwellings and stone pueblos, though most think they were either starved out or forced out.

Some early archaeologists thought that the Cliff Dwellers disappeared without explanation, abandoning magnificent stone structures like the Cliff House cliff dwelling and a half-million gallon reservoir at Mesa Verde National Monument in Colorado, a five-story pueblo “apartment house” of 800 rooms at Chaco Cultural National Historic Park in New Mexico, and a huge sunken kiva with a 95-ton roof supported by four wooden posts at Aztec Ruins National Monument, New Mexico.

Many clans of present-day Indian tribes trace their ancestry to the Ancestral Puebloans. They say, “We are still here!” There is strong scientific evidence to confirm that the Cliff Dwellers didn’t mysteriously disappear, but evacuated major cultural centers like Chaco, Mesa Verde and Kayenta over perhaps a hundred years, and joined what are now Hopi and Zuni communities in Arizona and New Mexico and Pueblo villages along the Río Grande.

Modern scientists are not certain why the Cliff Dwellers left their cliff dwellings and stone pueblos, though most think they were either starved out or forced out. The cliff dwellers left little writing except for the symbolic pictographs and petroglyphs on rock walls. However, a severe drought from about A.D. 1275 to 1300 is probably a major factor in their departure. There is also evidence that a marauding enemy may have forced them to flee.

In this first major period they are called the Basketmaker Puebloans because of their highly refined basket making.

Today, we say the Cliff Dwellers emerged as a distinct culture as early as 1200 B.C., when they began to depend more on growing domesticated crops and began to make their houses more permanent. We call their early homes pithouses. The house was nothing more than a shallow hole in the ground which was covered with a roof of branches and mud. They still moved around as they depleted soil and exhausted wood supplies and game animals in an area.

In this first major period they are called the Basketmaker Puebloans because of their highly refined basket making. They used yucca, apocynum, bark and other plant fiber to make things like sandals and baskets to store food. The baskets were light and portable and suited their lifestyle. They also began to weave and make cord, then clothing, from cotton.

During this period they also began to make pottery, often forming coils of clay inside a basket for structure, then scraping and smoothing the surface with a stone. Pottery was clearly superior to baskets for holding liquids and cooking food.

The Ancestral Puebloans built large, multi-story stone structures with hundreds of rooms to house the new communities on open ground.

In the second major Ancient cultural period, beginning around A.D. 750, they are called the Pueblo People. They began to settle down, rely even more on agriculture, and stay in one place much longer. They gathered together in larger and larger communities.

Before and during this phase there were many developments — mostly gradual or evolutionary — that dramatically changed their culture. They began using the bow and arrow, which was much more accurate and effective than the spear and atlatl (throwing stick) they’d used previously.

To their domestic crops they added beans — including common, kidney and navy beans. During their nomadic wanderings they needed baskets for their lightness and mobility. As they settled down, they used more pottery for food storage and cooking. Their pottery making developed into what we consider an art form.

Their pit houses, which had become deeper and more permanent, began to give way to a new kind of construction, above-ground structures. They started building with stone. Eventually, more families came together as clans, and clans formed tribes. Hamlets grew to villages, then towns. Larger numbers of people participated in religious and spiritual ceremonies. The round or keyhole-shaped underground kiva grew in size, importance and permanence. Usually, it was built in a central plaza.

The Puebloans built large, multi-story stone structures with hundreds of rooms to house the new communities on open ground. Yellow Jacket, near Cortez, Colorado, is the largest prehistoric town yet discovered in the Southwest. It had 1,800 rooms and housed nearly 3,000 people. Later, perhaps in response to enemy threats, the Cliff Dwellers began building the awe-inspiring stone structures, which we call cliff dwellings, perched on rock ledges above a canyon bottom.

The Ancestral Puebloans built large, multi-story stone structures with hundreds of rooms to house the new communities on open ground.

The Puebloans built large, multi-story stone structures with hundreds of rooms to house the new communities on open ground. Yellow Jacket, near Cortez, Colorado, is the largest prehistoric town yet discovered in the Southwest. It had 1,800 rooms and housed nearly 3,000 people. Later, perhaps in response to enemy threats, the Ancient Ones began building the awe-inspiring stone structures, which we call cliff dwellings, perched on rock ledges above a canyon bottom.

In any event, the big cultural centers broke down.

Over time, Mesa Verdeans had abandoned their mesa-top structures to build elaborate, multi-room cliff dwellings in the same area. At, pueblos on open ground were given up for new ones at the base of cliffs. All of that suggests that they sought protection from an enemy.

The newer villages and towns must have been more defensible. Yet, if an enemy raided the agricultural fields and destroyed the remaining crops, the Ancestral Puebloans might have fled to safety only to face starvation.

Then there were the droughts. Tree-ring dating tells us that there was a 50-year drought commencing in A.D. 1130 and another from about A.D. 1275 to 1300. By A.D. 1300 Chaco, Mesa Verde and Kayenta were abandoned and their former residents scattered to the East and South, gone but not forgotten.

Ancient cultures certainly influenced each other. One developed a skill or tools and, through trade with others, the innovation was passed on.

The Cliff Dwellers had commerce with other major cultures in the Four Corners Area, like the

Hohokam and Mogollon. They all influenced each other as well as the development of other cultures, like the Sinagua and Salado.

After the Ancestral Puebloans left their great houses and cliff dwellings in the 12th and 13th centuries, their culture emigrated with them. Thus, their influences can be seen even today in the Hopi, Zuni and Pueblo cultures.

The foraging ancestors of the Cliff Dwellers were nomads. For food they killed small animals, using spear and atlatl. They also harvested wild plants.

The historical line between the hunter-gatherer culture and the emerging Ancestral Puebloan culture is defined in part by evidence that around 1200 B.C. they began to settle down in one place for longer periods of time and domesticate and cultivate crops from one year to the next.

In the Basketmaker period the primary crop was corn, also known as maize, which is believed to have evolved from teosinte, a wild grass native to what is now Mexico and Central America. Because the climate in the Southwest was (and is) much colder and drier than that of Mexico, Ancestral Puebloan farmers probably cross-bred different corn varieties and selected those that survived best. At the same time, they were growing squash, which also came from Mexico. Around A.D. 500, beans were added to the Cliff Dwellers diet. Pottery, which was supplanting baskets for food storage and cooking, was essential to the beneficial use of this new dietary item because of the bean’s longer cooking time.

The Cliff Dwellers often sun dried their vegetables. Many food items were stone-ground, using grinding stones — metate and mano. Seeds were parched in hot coals and ground into meal. Pine nuts were ground into a paste. Corn was ground to make corn meal. Food was stored in large pits, often sealed in baskets or pottery for protection from insects, animals and moisture.

Unlike the Hohokam people to the south, the Ancestral Puebloans did not build huge irrigation canals. Their diversion and collection of natural precipitation was not irrigation in the usual sense. In general, their dry-land farming relied on the natural blessings of rain and the runoff from melting snow. Often they helped Mother Nature by building check dams, terracing hillsides or locating fields near the mouths of arroyos and springs. One of the largest of their water conservation efforts was a 500,000 gallon reservoir at Mesa Verde.

For all of their reliance on domestic crops, the Cliff Dwellers did not abandon the foods of their nomadic forebears. Even in A.D. 1300, corn, squash and beans, alone, would not sustain them. They still hunted animals like deer, rabbits and prairie dogs. And they gathered wild plants for sustenance. The nuts of the piñon pine were eaten roasted or ground. They ate the ripe fruit of the banana yucca and dried the red fruit from the prickly pear cactus for later consumption. Pigweed and amaranth provided greens.

Before the emergence of the Ancient Ones as a distinct culture, the Southwestern peoples generally lived in caves and camped in the open or in temporary shelters.

The beginning of the Ancestral Puebloan era is defined largely by changes in lifestyle as the hunter-gatherers became more serious about agriculture and they began to stay in one place for a number of years. Part of settling down involved building more permanent living quarters.

Pithouses

Over a shallow pit in the earth the Ancient Ones built semi-permanent houses of poles and brush plastered with mud. These pithouses were essentially the same as those first built in northeastern Europe 25,000 years ago. Pithouse technology was probably transmitted east through Siberia, across the ice bridge between Asia and North America about 12,000 to 14,000 years ago, down through Alaska and Canada to the American Southwest.

An individual pithouse was occupied for an average of about 15 years. By modern standards (in the developed world), these early habitations of the Cliff Dwellers were cramped, smelly, crude, dark, smoky, and cold most of the time during the winter, but probably far superior to the caves and temporary shelters the nomads were used to. In places where soil and water were present in quality and quantity suitable for growing food, a number of Ancient Ones families would build pithouses and create a small community.

From about A.D. 500, as pithouse design and construction evolved, the shallow pits grew deeper — more like three to five feet deep. Often, the sides of the pit were plastered with clay or lined with stone — either large slabs wedged upright in the soil or courses of smaller stones laid around the inside perimeter. Generally, pithouses were round, and between nine and twenty-five feet in diameter. Later, around A.D. 700, many new pithouses were square, rectangular or shaped like the letter D.

Usually, four posts were positioned upright in the pit, joined at the top by four horizontal beams and crossed with ceiling joists. The outer skin of the pithouse was made of branches, brush and grass or a matting of tree bark. Construction was completed with a layer of mud on the outside of the roof and walls for protection from the weather. Inside was a central fireplace, used for heating and cooking. Side vents and a hole in the roof provided fresh air and evacuated smoke.

Today, there are almost no remaining pithouses in the open. The elements have obliterated them. Many of the existing examples have been discovered through excavation. There are pithouse reproductions at places like Mesa Verde and in the Museum at the Manitou Cliff Dwellings.

The Ancient peoples of the American Southwest, like most other Earth cultures, started out with the family as the basic unit of societal organization.

In time, they identified with an extended family, or clan. Among Native American Indians in the Southwest, clan ties follow matrilineal blood lines. Later, clans banded together as tribes or nations. Many modern-day Native American Indians still maintain their clan relationships and responsibilities.

Clans are very important to our understanding of the history of the Ancestral Puebloans. The oral histories of clans, passed from generation to generation, combined with scientific information and archaeological observations, have helped us to discover or confirm who constructed specific Cliff Dweller sites and where their ancestors live now.

The following is a partial list of clans which have existed from ancient times to the present:

All Kinds of Beads
Elk
Red Shell
Ant
Fire
Sage
Antelope
Flute
Sand/Earth
Badger
Frog
Shipewe
Bear
Habovu
Snake
Bear Strap
Hawk
Snow
Blue Green Flute
Horn
Spruce
Buffalo
Ivy
Squash
Butterfly
Kachina
Sun
Calabash Squash
Kachina Badger
Sun Forehead
Cholla Cactus
Lizard
Tadpole
Cloud
Mountain Lion
Tansy Mustard
Corn
Mountain Sheep
Tcaizra
Cottonwood
Mouse
Tobacco
Coyote
Nabovu
Turkey
Crow
Oak
Turkey Buzzard
Dance Kilt
Opuntia Cactus
Turquoise
Deer
Parrot
Water
Dove
Pinon
Yascha
Drab Flute
Porcupine
Yellow Bird
Eagle
Rabbit
Yellow Finch
Earth or Sand
Rabbitbrush
Young Corn

The following is a partial list of names of ancient and modern tribal names from the Southwest:

Acoma
Jemez
San Juan
Agate Basin
Kayenta
Sandia
Apache
Keresans
Santa Ana
Archaic
Laguna
Santa Clara
Athabaskin
Mesa Verde / Verdean
Santo Domingo
Basketmakers
Mogollon
Sevier Fremont
Chaco/Chacoan
Nambe
Shoshone
Cliff Dwellers
Navajo
Sinagua
Clovis
Northern San Juan
Tanoans
Cochiti
Numic
Taos
Cohonia
Palute
Tesuque
Eastern Hisatsinom
Papago
Tewa
Eastern San Juan River
Pecos
Tigua
Fremont
Pecuris
Tiwa
Hakataya / Hakatayan
Pima
Towa
Haru Santa Ana
Pojoaque
Ute
Havasupai
Prescott
Uto-Aztecan
Hisatsinom
Puebloan
Walapai
Hohokam
River Hohokam
Winslow
Hopi
Salt-Gila R. Hohokam
Yavapai
Hopi Bear Clan
San Felipe
Zia
Islela
San Idlelonso
Zuni

A tribe is a larger unit made up of clans, which are made up of families. The names we give to ancient and contemporary tribes originated in different ways. Some are Spanish or English phonetic versions or the original native word. For example, Tesuque is a Spanish word that approximates the tribal word which is phonetically spelled Te-Tsu-Geh. Some tribal names are literal translations of a native word. The Spanish word “Pueblo” is used to describe some tribes who call themselves “The People” in their own language. Other tribal names are based on the tribal language, like Tewa, Towa and Tiwa or Keresan. Others are simply Spanish or English names unrelated to words in the native culture, like San Ildefonso, Santa Clara and Fremont.

Unlike many ancient cultures around the world, the Cliff Dwellers did not leave books or scrolls detailing their history. Yet we seem to know so much about this culture. How can that be?

During the 19th and the beginning of the 20th Century, much of what we know about the Cliff Dwellers was determined by simple and, often, unscientific techniques. For example, two Colorado cowboys are said to have discovered the magnificent Cliff Palace structure at Mesa Verde on a bitterly cold day in December, 1888. The male members of the ranching family soon became amateur archaeologists, digging, gathering and selling pottery, weapons, tools and other artifacts, mostly to museums. Even without formal training, they were able to identify major distinctions in the pottery they found and conclude that different sites were occupied during different time periods. For more information, see Major Anasazi Sites: Northern San Juan Region.

In the late 20th Century, the melding of more sophisticated scientific techniques and contemporary Native American Indian knowledge has dramatically increased our understanding of these peoples. For some time, many scientists have gone about their business privately evaluating the physical evidence and positing theories about the long-gone Ancestral Puebloans. Scientific speculation about the “mysterious disappearance” of the builders of the cliff dwellings continued up to the current era. Many descendants of the Cliff Dwellers, who had forgotten neither their ancestors nor the ancient towns and cities they built, were angered by what they saw as White Man’s presumption. Recently, however, the circle has been completed, and science has had help filling in the blanks.

These days, more respect and attention is being paid to living Southwestern natives and their oral clan histories, which have been passed on from one generation to the next for millennia. Now, native stories of tremendous migrations, accounts of natural events and recollections of times when ancestors lived in specific places in the Southwest are correlated with historical and astronomical records, rock art, pieces of pottery, carbon-14 dating and tree-ring dating to determine with a high degree of certainty which clans built and occupied major sites, when particular sites were built and abandoned, why the inhabitants moved and where the builders’ descendants live now.

What kind of physical information about the Cliff Dwellers do we have? Well, there is the pottery and pot fragments that we’ve found. Archaeologists can identify and date distinctive styles of pottery, the people who made it, and the evolution over time of form, style and design. Thus, pots and potsherds found at a site can help scientists determine who inhabited the site and the general time period during which it was occupied. Then, there are the distinctive designs that identify individual clans and their symbolic language in the form of pictographs describing things like celestial phenomena, Earthly events and physical and spiritual beings. Many Southwestern pictographs are painted or inscribed on pottery. Perhaps the most dramatic are petroglyphs carved on boulders and in the stone walls of canyons and buildings.

A more modern technique of dating arises out of the fact that tree growth and tree ring width vary each year with precipitation. Now, by examination of annual growth rings in the trunks of trees and correlating the overlapping histories of hundreds of thousands of cut timbers with written, oral and other physical records, scientists have recorded climatic cycles for nearly 9,000 years. Dendroclimatologists, as these scientists are called, can accurately date events as far back as 6700 B.C. They can examine the rings of beams in ancient Southwestern buildings and determine the exact year in which the tree was cut and used in construction. The oldest timbers help to establish the end of a period of occupation of a site.

Oral histories describing individual clans’ travels and stops at specific sites, their accounts of eclipses, comets and other celestial events, and recollections of droughts and other major natural events are correlated with pictographs, petroglyphs, clan “signature” symbols, potsherds, tree-ring dating and historical records of astronomical and Earth events to further refine our understanding of this “prehistoric” period. In fact, in this more enlightened era, as we’ve learned to trust the oral histories, the whole idea of “prehistory” is being challenged.

At least from the time of Jesus, and for possibly 1,500 years before, the Ancient Ones occupied a huge chunk of mostly arid and barren real estate in the Four Corners Area of the American Southwest where four modern states – Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona and Utah – join at one point. Many 19th century archaeologists believed that the Ancient Ones disappeared after they abandoned major cities like Mesa Verde and Chaco near the end of the 13th century. Now, we know that they didn’t just vanish into thin air, but migrated to the Río Grande Valley, Hopi, Zuni, Acoma and other pueblos in Arizona and New Mexico. (See the SW Cultures Map). In fact, modern scientists have extended the historical timeline of the Ancestral Puebloans to at least 1700 and, often, right up to the present to encompass the modern Puebloan descendants of the Ancient Ones.

Scattered throughout the immense area once occupied by the Cliff Dwellers are hundreds of thousands of sites, ranging from caves and individual campsites in the open to multi-story adobe pueblos and magnificent cliff-side stone cities. Most of the major sites are within the boundaries of national or state parks and monuments. On the following pages we deal mostly with such major sites since they are generally more accessible and better maintained.

The area of primary Cliff Dweller occupation, as shown on the SW Cultures Map, overlaps with areas occupied by other ancient Southwest cultures, including the Mogollon, Hohokam and Hakataya. In the following pages we focus on the purer, non-overlapping part of the Ancestral Puebloans territory, bounded on the south by a line running roughly from Flagstaff, Arizona, to a point about 50 miles south of Albuquerque, New Mexico. Modern archaeologists break this area of Ancestral Puebloan cultural influence into six distinct districts or regions: Chaco, Northern San Juan, Kayenta, Virgin Kayenta, Cíbola and Río Grande. (See the Ancient Sites map).
Chaco Region
The Chaco Region is located in the northwest corner of New Mexico and centered on Chaco Canyon, the area of probably the highest level of societal and cultural development of all the Ancestral Puebloan regions. (See the Chaco Region Map).

Included in the Chaco Region are the following major Cliff Dweller sites:

Aztec Ruins National Monument, near Farmington, Aztec and Bloomfield, New Mexico
Chaco Culture National Historic Park (including Pueblo Bonito and Chetro Ketl), south of Farmington, New Mexico
El Malpais National Monument, south of Grants, New Mexico

Northern San Juan (Mesa Verde) Region
The Northern San Juan Region, sometimes called the Mesa Verde Region, occupies the southwestern corner of Colorado and the southeastern corner of Utah. (See the Northern San Juan Region Map). Included in this region are America’s best-known Ancestral Puebloan ruins at Mesa Verde.

Included in or near the Northern San Juan Region are Ancestral Puebloan sites at:

Arches National Park, near Moab, Utah
Canyonlands National Park, near Moab, Utah
Cedar Mesa Area, near Blanding, Utah
Chimney Rock Archaeological Area, near Chimney Rock, Colorado
Dominguez and Escalante Pueblos, at the BLM Anasazi Heritage Center near Dolores, Colorado
Edge of the Cedars State Park, near Blanding, Utah
Grand Gulch Primitive Area, near Blanding, Utah
Hovenweep National Monument, near Blanding, Utah
Lowry Pueblo Ruins, near Pleasant View, Colorado
Mesa Verde National Park, near Cortez, Colorado
Natural Bridges National Monument, near Blanding, Utah
Newspaper Rock State Monument, near Monticello, Utah
Three Kiva Pueblo, near Moab, Utah
Ute Mountain Tribal Park, near Cortez, Colorado
Yellow Jacket Pueblo Ruins, near Pleasantville, Colorado
Yucca House National Monument, near Cortez, Colorado

Kayenta Region
Largest of the Cliff Dweller regions, Kayenta spreads across northern Arizona into southern Utah and northwestern Colorado. Some researchers identify the western part of the Kayenta Region as the Virgin Kayenta. The Virgin subregion stretches from the midpoint on the Utah-Arizona border west to a point about 40 or 50 miles into Nevada. Bounded by the Grand Canyon on the south, the area is named for the Virgin River, which originates in southwestern Utah and joins the Colorado River in Nevada. (See the Virgin Kayenta Region Map and the Kayenta Region Map).

Included in or near the Kayenta Region are Cliff Dweller sites at:

Canyon De Chelly National Monument, near Grants, New Mexico
Capitol Reef National Park, near Torrey, Utah
Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, near Ticaboo, Utah
Holol’ovi Ruins State Park, near Winslow, Arizona
Navajo National Monument (including Betatakin, Keet Seel and Inscription House), near Kayenta, Arizona
Petrified Forest National Park, near Holbrook, Arizona

Cíbola Region
Straddling the Arizona-Utah state border at a point in line with Winslow, Arizona, on the west and Albuquerque, New Mexico, on the east, Cíbola is by far the smallest of the Ancestral Puebloan regions. Centered on the existing Zuni Indian Reservation, it includes El Morro National Monument, which contains the remains of Ancient Ones culture. (See the Cíbola Region Map).

Included in the Cíbola Region are:

El Morro National Monument and Inscription Rock, east of Zuni, New Mexico
Ruins in and around the Zuni Pueblo and Indian Reservation, including Hawikuh, Halona (now Zuni) and Heshotauthla

Río Grande Region
Seventy to eighty miles wide and straddling the river for which it is named, the Río Grande Region lies entirely in New Mexico. It reaches from a point about 25 miles south of the Colorado border to a point about 50 miles south of Albuquerque. (See the Río Grande Region Map) With the exception of Hopi, Zuni, Acoma and Laguna, it encompasses the majority of the present day homes of Puebloan descendants, including the 14 Río Grande pueblos.

Though ancient Southwestern peoples occupied the region for millennia, most of the major Cliff Dweller sites in this region are newer than those in other regions. Among the major sites are: