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.
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.
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