Reaching the Alcove House at Bandelier National Monument requires several long climbs up very steep ladders, great fun for kids and kids at heart.
A trip to the Alcove House at Bandelier National Monument requires several long climbs up very steep ladders.
cliff to support one end of each beam and resting the other end on the opposite stone wall. The cliff dwellings stood two and three stories high, and timber ladders were used to climb from one story to another. The rooms along the Long House cliff seem to go on forever, with rows of divots showing where the roof timbers were held in place. The ruins of the stone walls present a floor plan of the original structures. In a few places the entire wall and roof structure has been stabilized and recreated to show what the community looked like when it was intact. Most fascinating to us was the discovery that not only were these ancient people fine potters and craftsmen, but they liked to decorate the interior walls of their homes. In a few places a kind of painted plaster is visible on the cliff walls. One alcove in particular sports a painted geometric pattern that is bright red. Petroglyphs adorn the cliffs outside the pueblo homes as well. Further down the trail we visited Alcove House, which is a huge cave perched high up on a cliff face accessed by a series of very long ladders. Although there was little to see in the cave besides a covered kiva that is currently being reconstructed, the view was beautiful. Whiletherehasbeenalotof stabilizingandreconstruction
work at both Aztec Ruins and Bandelier to give visitors a sense of what the ruins looked like hundreds of years ago, at Tsankawi Ruins just a fewmiles from Bandelier we felt like archaeologists ourselves because no rebuilding has occurred at all. Outlines of foundations are hard to make out in the grass, and painted pottery shards with matching patterns were scattered on the ground here and there. Tonto National Monument In the late 1800s, Swiss born scholar Adolph Bandelier explored many ancient ruins of the Southwest, and the evocative cliff dwellings at Bandelier National Monument bear his name because he was the first person to study them. We were intrigued to learn that he also spent a lot of time studying the cliff dwellings that were built by the Salado People 460 miles to the southwest at Tonto National Monument outside of Phoenix, Arizona. Whereas the pueblo communities at Bandelier and Aztec Ruins were both built in the early 1100s, the people at Bandelier thrived until about 1550 while those at Aztec Ruins abandoned their community after just a century, around 1250. It is unknown exactly where these people moved, but it is intriguing that just when Aztec Ruins was abandoned around 1250 another group of people
SOUTHWEST RUINS
COAST TO COAST SPRING MAGAZINE 2019
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