The natural holes in the volcanic tuff and the soft stone made an ideal back wall for the vast complex of two- and three-story buildings at Bandelier National Monument in New Mexico.
At Bandelier National Monument the ancients built mortared brick walls up against a towering rock wall.
Built by the Ancestral Puebloans at about the same time as the buildings at Aztec Ruins National Monument, these structures are thought to have included both storage rooms and living quarters.
The side and front walls were constructed of bricks made from the volcanic tuff.
Kiva at the entrance to the monument has been fully restored to include a roof and, as we passed through it, Indian music played softly over speakers, evoking a haunting feeling of how this room might have sounded in its day. Bandelier National Monument While the pueblo community at Aztec Ruins National Monument was built on open plains, the settlement 170 miles away at Bandelier National Monument, near modern day Los Alamos, New Mexico, includes not only a maze of stone masonry buildings but also a fascinating cliff face that was once the anchoring wall of a huge community of two- and three-story "cliff dwellings." Built by the Ancestral Puebloans at about the same time as the buildings at Aztec Ruins National Monument, these structures are thought to have included both storage rooms and living quarters. The best thing about Bandelier National Monument is that timber ladders have been placed outside many of the alcoves, and visitors are encouraged to climb up and have a look. These ladders are a blast for kids and for people like us that are kids at heart. Scampering up and down these ladders made our heads spin with questions and imaginative musings about how these ancient
people lived. Bandelier National Monument is so popular that a mandatory free shuttle bus takes visitors into the monument during peak times because there is very little parking available. We went to the monument just as it was opening so we could be among the few allowed to park their own vehicle in the parking lot. This put us on the hiking trail half an hour before the busloads of tourists began to arrive and gave us a chance to explore the ruins without any crowds. The Main Loop Trail took us past the 250-room masonry settlement of Tyuonyi built on the open plains and then on to the Long House cliff dwelling. Most of what remains of Long House is the towering cliff wall that formed the back side of the multi-story pueblo community. The area around Bandelier National Monument is the sidewall of an enormous caldera—a vast depression in the land created by a volcano that exploded and then imploded into itself a million years ago. The cliffs are made of soft volcanic tuff that is pockmarked with thousands of closet-sized holes. The ancient people used these holes to create the back wall or back room of their buildings. The side and front walls were constructed of bricks made from the volcanic tuff. Timber rafters and floor joists were held in place by boring a hole in the
SOUTHWEST RUINS
COAST TO COAST SPRING MAGAZINE 2019
22
Made with FlippingBook HTML5