The Vindolanda Tablets: the Texts of their Times

These days, if you want to quickly communicate with someone who is at a distance from you, you’ll send a text. But that was not a possibility back in the time when Britain was under Roman rule. Heck, it wasn’t even a possibility when I was a child!

Technology has changed, but the need to communicate over distance has not. When most people think of Roman writing, they think of the monumental: the geometric, all-caps Latin letters called Square Capitals, or Scriptura Monumentalis. These are the letters that were carved into stone monuments, tombstones, and buildings, and familiar to us because they are the direct ancestor of our modern uppercase letters.

But not all Roman writing was monumental in nature. Some communication does not warrant being carved in stone any more than it needs to be posted on social media today, for all to read. People today—and people during the Roman period—asked favors, checked schedules, and invited people to parties.

So how did the Romans send their little, private correspondences? For a long time, historians and archaeologists believed that these kinds of missives were all written on papyrus.

But then, the Vindolanda tablets were discovered.  

The tablets are named after the place they were found: Vindolanda, a Roman auxiliary fort that was occupied from approximately 85 AD to 370 AD. The fort was abandoned sometime before the Romans left Britain in the early fifth century and was not mentioned in history until William Camden included it in his 1586 book, Britannia. Camden surveyed the landscape, geography, antiquities, and history of Great Britain and Ireland, and included many Roman sites, including Vindolanda.  Some archaeological digs were done there between 1814 and 1835, but the real work began when archaeologist Eric Birley purchased the site in the 1930s. It has been a family passion ever since. Grandson, Andrew Birley, and granddaughter-in-law Barbara Birley continue the tradition, with a magnificent museum and continuing excavations conducted every summer.

The story of the Vindolanda tablets begins in March 1973, when a student excavator named Keith Liddell discovered a pile of unusual wood shavings. Another of the excavators peeled two of these apart and discovered writing on the inside. The two pieces of wood were taken to an epigraphist named Richard Wright, but by the time they had arrived, the wood surfaces had become black and unreadable due to oxygenation.  They were then sent to Alison Rutherford at Newcastle University Medical School, where she used multi-spectrum photography to produce infrared photographs of the writing. The results were disappointing because no one could read the letters. Finally, two university researchers: Alan Bowman at Manchester University and David Thomas at Durham University were able to decipher this previously unknown form of cursive, and the writings were able to be transcribed. Fifty years later, more than 1,700 of these tablets have been recovered from the ruins.

The tablets are made from birch, alder and oak, all of which grow in the vicinity of the fort. They vary between 0.01 to 0.12 inches thick, and are about 8 inches wide by 3 inches tall—close in size to a modern postcard. They were scored down the middle and folded in half, with the writing in the inside.

Scientists have been able to determine that the ink used to write on the inner faces was made from carbon, gum Arabic, and water. However, the ink is often badly faded or survives as little more than a blur, making transcription impossible. Infrared photographs are often far more legible than the actual tablets, but even these have lines, dots and other dark marks which may or may not be writing. This makes transcription difficult. Another thing that makes them difficult to read are the use of abbreviations. Researchers have noted one place where an h stood for for homines (men), and another where cos is written in a place where translators presume the word is consularis (consular). Also, words are divided rather arbitrarily at the end of lines. The word "epistulas" (letters), for instance, appears with the letter e on one line and the rest of the word on the next.

It turns out using wooden tablets for communication wasn’t unusual in the Roman world. After the Vindolanda find, a collection of 405 preserved wooden tablets called the Bloomberg tablets were found in London. They were discovered between 2010 and 2013, but are older than the ones found at Vindolanda.  Other tablets, called stylus tablets, have also been discovered in 20 different sites in Roman Britain, including Carlisle, Catterick, York, and London.

 These were imported and made from non-native wood. In the 3rd century, a Roman historian named Herodian, who was unlikely to ever have been in Britain, described a writing-tablet made from lime-wood, cut into thin sheets, and folded face-to-face by being bent, which sounds very much like the tablets found in Vindolanda.

The Vindolanda tablets have shed light on life on the frontiers of the Roman world. They document both official military matters and personal ones. For instance, the very first tablet that was transcribed lists the contents of a care package sent to a soldier, presumably by his family. It includes two pairs each of woolen socks (udones), sandals, and underpants (subligaria, literally ‘the things tied under!’).  Another tablet written by a cavalry decurion (squadron commander) named Masculus asks the prefect Flavius Cerialis about instructions for his men for the following day. He also includes a polite request for more beer, since the supply at the garrison is low.

But the most famous of all the Vindolanda tablets is the invitation to a party held in about 100 AD. Written by Claudia Severa, the wife of the commander of a nearby fort, it uses charming and intimate words to invite Sulpicia Lepidina, the wife of Flavius Cerialis, prefect of the ninth cohort of Batavians, who were stationed at Vindolanda, to her birthday party. The invitation appears to have been written by two different people. Most of the text is written in a professional hand, which scholars assume was the household scribe. The closing greetings, however, on the lower right-hand side of the tablet, are written in a different hand. It says “I shall expect you, sister. Farewell, sister, my dearest soul, as I hope to prosper, and hail,” and it is believed that Claudia Severa herself wrote them.  If that is true, the invitation is perhaps the oldest surviving document written in Latin by a woman.

 

Almost all the excavated tablets are held at the British Museum in London, where some are displayed in its Roman Britain gallery. Others are displayed at Vindolanda.

In 2025, I saw the Vindolanda tablets when I visited the site as part of my hike along Hadrian’s Wall. They were impressive, and led me to include this form of writing in my novel about Roman Britain. Currently entitled The Woman on the Wall at the End of the World (which is rather long and probably going to be changed before the story comes out), the novel opens with a Roman soldier from the 9^th Legion delivering a tablet to the main character, a potter named Enica. The tablet informs her that her lover plans to have dinner with her, and she expects him to “pop the question” when he is there. Enica writes—and receives—several more letters in the course of the story.  She doesn't look like this girl, who is Greek. Enica is a tall redhead, from the Briganti tribe who lived in Northern England. She was slave until her master died and left his pottery shop to her, a bit of generosity that makes her wonder why he did it.

I am working on my third, and I hope final edit of this story and, whatever it's name becomes, I hope to have it finished and published by late this fall or early winter. Keep checking in with me and I'll be able to give a better date as things progress. 

Those Doggone Dog Days of Summer: Blame it on a Star

For most people, the dog days refer to the muggiest, hottest days of the year, when the weather makes people—and animals—feel sluggish and worn out. Memes showing dogs melting in the heat tie canines to the sultry weather. But the term isn’t really actually about the hottest days, whenever they may occur. Nor does it refer to what the heat does to our canine companions. It is about specific days and, according to the calendar, the dog days of summer are drawing to a close.

The dog days of summer refers to the 40 days that begin on July 3^rd and end on August 11^th. According to The Old Farmer's Almanac, this timeframe marks the 20 days before the Sun and the star Sirius align with each other, and the 20 days after. During these 40 days, Sirius is too close to the Sun to be visible.

With a magnitude of −1.46, Sirius is easily the brightest star in the night sky. Its name comes from the Greek word Σείριος which means ‘glowing' or 'scorching'. It is almost twice as bright as Canopus, the second brightest star. For us, only our Sun shines brighter. Much of our perceived brightness, however, comes more from proximity than from actual luminosity. Our sun, of course, is very close to us, and Sirius is a close neighbor, only 8.6 light years away. Sirius A is about twice as massive as the Sun and about 25 times as luminous, but Canopus, Betelgeuse, and Rigel are all more luminous than it is.

Sirius isn’t actually a single star, but a binary star. The larger of its two, called Sirius A, is orbited by a faint white dwarf called Sirius B. It takes these two stars about 50 years to orbit each other. They are also moving through space together. Sirius is expected to increase in brightness as it moves closer to our Solar System. About the same time it reaches its peak magnitude, 60,000 years from now, it will also have slid south in our sky, becoming our southern Pole Star. After that, it will pass us by, becoming fainter with distance. 210,000 years from now, Vega should be our brightest star.

Sirius is known as the "Dog Star" because it is the brightest star in the constellation Canis Major, Latin for ‘big dog,’ and one of two dogs that follow on the heels of Orion the hunter. The best time to see Orion is in winter, when he chases Taurus across the night sky. During the summer, he is too close to the sun and is a daylight constellation, hidden behind the blue sky caused by the refraction of the sun’s rays through our atmosphere.

Ancient Greeks and Romans noticed that Sirius closed in on the Sun in mid-summer. They believed that its heat combined with the Sun’s heat to produce sultry summer weather. They thought this conjunction brought ill fortune in the guise of drought, fever, and general discomfort. Roman poet Virgil wrote that Sirius “brings drought and plague to frail mortals” when it rises.

Actually, Sirius brings little light to our Earth and no heat whatsoever.  The intense heat of the dog days of summer is actually caused by the Earth’s tilt and by "thermal lag." This is the delay it takes for the land and oceans to fully heat up after the longest day of the year, on June 21.

Yesterday morning I had to get up at 4 am so I could get my husband to the airport by 5:30. I was walking the dog in the dark when I noticed the Perseids, a fabulous cluster of stars, in the eastern sky. I looked a little below them and saw the V of Taurus and below it, lying on his side right on the horizon, was Orion. If Orion was rising, his faithful hunting dogs couldn’t be far behind, but low enough that they would still be lost in the light of the Sun. The dog days were not yet over, but they soon would be.

Now if only we could say the same for the hot weather.

Please Join me

 

History Lessons from a Walk in the Maine Woods

 

I recently got back from a wonderful month in Maine. My husband and I rented a house right on a lake, and we spent a good portion of our time in the water. We kayaked, and my husband learned to paddle board, which turned into great fun when the grandkids discovered they could use their Popa’s board as a diving platform.

But we did other things, as well, including touring a charming, small railroadmuseum, running in two local races (a 4^th of July 10K sponsored by L.L. Bean in Freeport, and a 5 miler that was part of the Yarmouth Clam Festival), visiting some beautiful beaches, touring the site where Poland Springs water comes from, eating a lot of good seafood, and hiking on several trails. 

It was on one of those hikes that I learned some interesting bits of historical trivia that just might show up in one of my books someday.

The Suckfish Brook Conservation Area was an easy walk from our rental, and so we decided to give it a try despite its unappealing name. This 94-acre public natural space featured wetlands, a peat bog, and woodland walking trails. There was a small parking lot that might hold three or four cars, and had a nice map delineating all the trails within the area. We picked a combination of trails that would lead us through several different ecosystems. We were surprised to find blueberries growing along the trail. I thought blueberries didn't ripen until much later in the season. 

My first history lesson came from a sign that was very close to the beginning of the trail. 

The sign explained that in New England, old-growth white pines grew very tall and straight. Some were over 200 feet tall. This made them ideal single-piece masts for massive sailing ships. During Colonial times, British officials marked the largest and best of these trees with three hatchet marks, creating a symbol known as “The King’s Broad Arrow.”

Under the King’s Broad Arrow policy, those trees, which were 24 inches or wider in diameter, were reserved for use by the crown.

The sign quickly caught my attention because I had seen a similar mark while hiking Hadrian's Wall, in Northern England, during the summer of 2025.  Although carved into stone, the mark we had seen in England also had three lines that radiated outward. We saw this mark in Housesteads, an old Roman fort along the wall, where our very informative tour guide, Allen Woods, pointed it out to us.  He explained that the symbol marked royal property and government equipment. After Allen had pointed it out, we saw this symbol several other times. It's funny how things show up once you know to look for them. 

One of the earliest known uses of the symbol in an official capacity seems to come from 1383, when it is recorded that a butler of King Richard II used a seal with that mark on it to designate that a barrel of wine was reserved for the king's use. The record states that the butler "signo regio capiti sagitte consimili signavit," or marked it with the royal sign like an arrowhead.

Over time, the symbol became particularly associated with the Board of Ordnance, and later the War Department and the Ministry of Defence. When Allen showed us the symbol, he said that it marked an old military road, and that the same symbol appeared on many other pieces of military equipment.

In America, the King’s Broad Arrow policy led to one of the first acts of forceful, coordinated resistance against British rule in New England. The Pine Tree Riot was an armed insurrection in Weare, New Hampshire in 1772, a full year before the Boston Tea Party. Governor John Wentworth sent had sent British colonial officers to mill towns to look for trees that had been cut down even though they bore the king’s mark. Most mill owners paid the fines levied against them, but one, Ebenezer Mudgett, refused . He rallied a group of local townspeople, who beat the officers with switches, cut off their horses' manes and tails, and forced the humiliated men to ride out of town through a gauntlet of jeering residents. The rioters were eventually arrested but a sympathetic local judge fined them only one shilling each. The riot showed the colonists’ willingness to use violence against British authorities in order to protect their economic freedom.

I was intrigued by the connection between the Maine woods and England's northern borders. It gave me a lot to think about. And I had never heard of the Pine Tree Riot before. 

I got a second jolt of history when we came across another sign about 3/4 of the way through our hike. This sign stood next to one of the many stone walls that ran through the woods. It explained that this wall once marked the edge of a field, and that a person could tell what kind of field by looking at the size of the stones within the walls. Pastures were delineated by large stones. The walls around crop land had smaller stones, picked from the earth so that plows wouldn’t buck on them. Every year, frost heaves would bring new stones to the surface, and these stones were added to the walls.

As Maine became more populated, the forests were leveled to build houses, cook food, and warm hearths. By the end of the 1700s, most of the massive old-growth mast trees along the southern Maine coast were gone, along with most other trees. In 1880, when Maine’s agricultural economy reached its peak, 64,309 farms covered over 6.5 million acres. Trees were relegated to wood lots and the area around farm houses. But as the nation grew, its agricultural centers moved west. By 1940, there were only 39,000 farms left in Maine, and trees were growing in the abandoned fields. Today, nearly 90% of Maine’s land has reverted to forest.

Of course, none of the trees in Maine bear the King's Arrow any more. But its forests are veined with the crumbling remnants of stone walls. I know I will never be able to pass one of these walls again without assessing the size of its stones and determining whether the field it once enclosed held crops or pasture, and I will always wonder about the people who built those walls. Someday, I might be able to tell their story. 

I'm in Maine right now, enjoying a summer vacation in a lake-side cottage, with lots of time for bobbing about with the grandkids.

My husband mentioned lately that he craved a pecan pie, and I would have made one for him, except I didn't want to go out and buy a load of ingredients that I wouldn't use up in the next two weeks.

So I improvised with what I had around. My first substitution: using butter instead of vegetable shortening in the pie shell. The resulting crust was rich and flaky. I may do this more often!

My second substitution was using maple sugar instead of karo syrup. This seemed like a no brainer. After all, I'm in New England, where much of the US's maple syrup is made! And I knew I couldn't use a whole bottle of karo syrup up any time soon. However, maple syrup has a thinner consistency than karo syrup, so I had to account for this in my recipe. I added a tablespoon of flour, and that was all the adjusting I needed to do!

Also, I wasn't in my kitchen, so I didn't have my equipment. Again, I improvised. First, instead of whirring the flour and shortening together in my food processor, I cut the butter into the flour using a fork. This was not as time consuming as I had feared, but I still prefer to use the food processor. 

Usually I use a piece of plastic wrap to chill my dough, and then a piece of wax paper to roll it out. This time, I used one piece of plastic wrap for both purposes.

The recipe I found on the internet that I used as a guide for this pie called for prebaking the crust, so that it wouldn't get soggy on the bottom. I don't normally do this, but I found that the effort was well worth it. Prebaking usually involves putting a piece of parchment paper into the crust, then filling the pie shell with dried beans. Because I had neither parchment paper nor beans, I improvised this step as well, using coffee filters, another pie pan, and a small casserole dish. The coffee filters stop the second pie plate from sticking to the pastry, the pie plate stops the crust from puffing up, and the small casserole dish added the weight that held the pie plate in place. 

Working in a strange kitchen can be a bit unsettling. I think we all have our favorite spatula and feel a bit lost without it. But in this case, things worked out just fine. The results came out pretty good; good enough to share.

Maple Pecan Pie

Crust: 1 1/4 cup flour

1 tsp sugar

1/2 cup cold, salted butter

1/4 cup ice water 

Place flour and sugar in a bowl. Mix with a fork. Cut the stick of butter in half longways, then turn and cut longways again so that you have 4 long sticks. Cut the sticks  into little cubes. Sprinkle the cubes over the flour and sugar mixture, then cut them in with a fork. (Cutting in means smash the butter, blending it into the flour until there are no big pieces left. Add the ice water, and stir and mix with the fork until the dough becomes one large clump. If this doesn't happen, add a little more water, half a teaspoon at a time, until it does. Press that clump into a round ball.

Wrap the ball of dough in plastic wrap (or use plastic wrap to cover the bowl in which you mixed the dough) and put it in the refrigerator for at least half an hour. 

While dough is chilling, preheat oven to 425°

When the dough has chilled, take it out of the refrigerator. Spread the plastic wrap on the counter and sprinkle it with flour. Put the ball of dough in the middle of the plastic, then turn it over so that the top is floured. Moving your rolling pin from the middle of the ball to the edges, roll your dough out on the plastic wrap. When your dough is spread out enough that you can place your pie plate upside down on the dough and see an inch of dough all the way around, pick up the plastic wrap and flip it, the dough, and the pie plate over. Your dough is now in the pie plate! Peel off the plastic and crimp the edge of the dough, cutting off excess and using it in places that need it. 

To prebake pie shell: place a coffee filter in the bottom of the pie shell. You may need to use two or three, overlapping them to fit. Place another pie plate on top of the coffee filter. If you don't have a second pie plate, you could try using a round casserole or a plate. What you need is something that generally fills the bottom and keeps it from puffing up in the oven. My second pie plate was smaller than the first (which is why you can see a ridge around the edge of my pie, just outside the filling). It was also light, so I placed a little round ceramic casserole dish (probably intended for souffles) inside my second dish to hold it down. 

Place pie plate in oven. Bake for 10 minutes. Take out of oven, remove pie plate (and casserole if using) and coffee filters. Return to oven for an additional 5 minutes.

Take pieshell out of oven and place on a rack to cool. 

Reset oven temperature to 350°

Pie Filling: 3 cups pecan halves

5 TBS melted butter

1/2 cup brown sugar

1 TBS flour

2 tsp vanilla

3 eggs

1 cup maple syrup

Measure 3 cups of pecan halves. Pick out 3/4 cup of the best looking nuts and set aside.

Pour the remaining 2 1/4 cup pecans into the cooled pie shell. 

I melted my butter by putting it in my mixing bowl and microwaving it, but you can do it any way you want. 

Add the brown sugar and flour to the melted butter and stir to mix.

Add the vanilla and eggs and stir until they egg is well distributed.

Add the maple syrup and stir well again. 

Carefully pour the butter/sugar/egg mixture over the nuts in the pie shell.

Place the reserved 3/4 cup of nuts and place them on top the pie. I like to do this in concentric circles. 

Bake the pie at 350° for 40-50 minutes. If your crust begins to get too brown, you can tent it with aluminum foil (assuming you have some, which I didn't!)

Home of the Spirit Animals

The history of the horse in North America is  controversial right now. Historians have long asserted that Spanish explorers introduced horses to the Americas. First arriving in Hispaniola in the Caribbean with Christopher Columbus during his second voyage in 1493, six horses reached the North American mainland with Hernán Cortés in 1519. Following the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, horses that were abandoned or escaped the Spanish adapted to the wild, becoming known as mustangs. Many were sold throughout the extensive Indigenous trade network, spreading thousands of miles long before Europeans entered the region.

But few know that the horse had its origins in North America. The Eohippus, ("dawn horse"), also scientifically known as Hyracotherium, developed in North America some 50 million years ago. This browser was approximately the size of a dog, but over millions of years, it grew and evolved into the Equus, our modern horse. It is believed that horses later crossed the Bering Land Bridge into Asia before they vanished from its home turf. Equus scotti, the last of the horses that lived in North America, disappeared about 10,000 years ago, just about the same time as other megafauna such as mammoths and saber toothed tigers did.

Some groups claim that horses never died out here, and that the Indigenous Peoples had horses long before the Spanish came.

Cyd Raschke's Home of the Spirit Animals (2025, Raven+Grace Press, ISBN 9798992383836) tells the story of how the first foal from Spanish horses might have been born in the Americas. The 2026 Spur Award for both Best Western Juvenile Fiction and Best First Novel, it follows a Native American girl who longs to return to her tribe after many years as a slave, and a Spanish Moor who is shipwrecked on the Texas coast. 

Diego had been sailing with a group of beautiful horses that were bound for Cathay when a hurricane sunk his ship. The year is 1496, and Europeans have not yet figured out that the Americas stand between them and the Far East. The San Esteban is charged with establishing a trading enterprise for exporting horses to China and Japan, and carries Andalusian, Arabian, and Galician horses. When the ship goes down, Diego manages to save the horses, but finds himself alone in a land that he believes is Java. He doesn't understand the customs or the language.

Sixteen-year-old Nemae came from a tribe that lived in what is now called the Texas hill country. When she was quite young, her father was killed in a war with other tribes, and she and her mother taken captive. They now live along the coast, and her mother has integrated into her new tribe, marrying and having a child, but Nemae continues to feel like an outcast. She dreams of majestic creatures, calling them the spirit animals of legend, and when Diego arrives with his horses, she believes they are calling her to something greater.

The two build a relationship as they travel to find her people, and a place that will accept a stranger and his strange new animals. Some people are hesitant or even terrified of the horses, while others are curious. Nemae and Diego advocate for them, showing how the animals can be used for hunting, transportation, and even protection. They also must argue that, unlike deer, the horses are not good to eat. Convincing the superstitious and tradition-bound people does not come easily.

This story of the reintroduction of horses to the Americas, is either upper middle grade or YA. It has some content that might be confusing or disturbing to younger readers, including some violence and some male predation of the subservient Nemae. It isn't graphic, but parents and teachers will want to talk with their readers about some sections.

About the Author

Cyd Raschke grew up in rural Washington State, where a relative placed her atop a palomino Belgian when she was a toddler. One inspiration for this story was to correct assumptions that wild horses are not native to America.She set the novel in Texas after learning the story of Mustang Island, and visiting Hill Country where she saw how ideal the land would be for horses to thrive. 

Ms. Raschke has a PhD in Social Psychology. She and her husband live in Newburyport, Massachusetts, where they raised two sons. Of Alaskan Native and Scandinavian heritage, Cyd feels a sense of loss of legacy shared by many descendants of Indigenous Nations and was grateful for the chance to share some of her native culture through this story. It is her first novel. 

Bandelier National Monument: A Beautiful Walk through History

Last week my hiking buddies and I went to Bandelier National Monument, and got not only a beautiful hike, but a lesson in New Mexico history.

Bandelier is a 33,677-acre site in Frijoles Canyon. It is near Los Alamos on the Pajarito Plateau.  Over 70% of the 50 square miles of the monument is wilderness, with only 3 miles of road and more than 70 miles of hiking trails. The whole area is dotted with the remains of ancient villages.

Bandelier was designated a national monument by President Woodrow Wilson in 1916. It was named for Adolph Bandelier, a Swiss-American anthropologist and archaeologist who spent eight years among the Pueblo tribes of New Mexico. Bandelier researched the cultures of the area before he wrote The Delight Makers, a novel set within the prehistoric Indian culture of the Southwest. In October of 1880, a man from the Cochiti Pueblo named Jose Montoya brought Adolph Bandelier to the area and Bandelier proclaimed the cliff dwellings "the grandest thing I ever saw." Recognizing the importance of its heritage, the National Park Service cooperates with surrounding Pueblos, other federal agencies, and state agencies to manage the park.

The first site that we came to was Tyuonyi (Que-weh-nee), a circular pueblo site that once stood up to three stories tall. Tree-ring dating of fragments of ceiling beams recovered from various rooms show that site dates from 1383 and 1466, during what is called the Pueblo IV Era. Other parts of the structure suggest that building may have begun around 1150, in what is called the Pueblo III Era.

The Pueblo III Era appears to have been a tumultuous time for the indigenous population. During this period, deep drought, environmental stress, and social unrest caused a wide-scale migration of Ancestral Puebloans away from the Four Corners area. Many of those migrants may have moved into Frijoles Canyon. Archaeological surveys of the area have found thousands of individual sites, but they were not all occupied at the same time. During the Classic Period, defined as AD 1325 to 1550, the population may have peaked. Most pueblos from this period have between 150 and 500 rooms each, with the largest containing approximately 1,500 rooms. This suggests a large population, though a specific total number of residents for the entire monument is not officially cited in any of the literature I found.

Near Tyounyi is the Long House. Built along the base of the cliff, these structures were 3 to 4 stories tall and supported by the walls of the canyon. The foundations of rock walls delineate the lower floors, while beam holes and cavates, the term for rooms artificially hollowed out of tuff, the soft volcanic rock, form the upper floors.

After that, we walked another half a mile to the Alcove House.  Formerly
known as Ceremonial Cave, this cave sits 140 feet above the floor of Frijoles Canyon and is accessed by 4 wooden ladders and a number of stone stairs. Archaeologists believe that approximately 25 Ancestral Pueblo people lived with Alcove House. There is a reconstructed kiva on the site, and viga holes and niches that suggest where the homes were. I cannot imagine what it would have been like to climb these ladders while carrying water from the stream below.

That is yours truly in the navy shirt and white cap. I am terribly afraid of heights and really proud of myself for making it both up to the top and down again. I cannot tell you which was harder!
 

Farther up the canyon, we spied ladders dug into the cliff walls and conjectured that they led to other places that may have been inhabited.

Bandelier was abandoned by 1600, when its inhabitants relocated to Cochiti, San Ildefonso, and other pueblos near the Rio Grande. These pueblos remain occupied. 

 

In addition to showcasing ancient structures, the park is famous for the park headquarters and visitor center, buildings that were built in the 1930s by crews of the Civilian Conservation Corps. There is a museum, a gift shop, and a café included in these buildings.

For more information about visiting Bandelier, click here.