Manitou Cliff Dwellings 6/16/2010

Today Mom and I went to see the Manitou Cliff Dwellings in Manitou Springs. The Manitou Cliff Dwellings is a rare historical treasure. Preserved under a protective red sandstone overhang, authentic Anasazi cliff dwellings, built more than 700 years ago, await you here. There are no "Do Not Touch" signs. You are free to touch and even go inside these fascinating architectural remnants of an American Indian culture that roamed the Four Corners area of the Southwest from 1200 B.C. to A.D. 1300.
The Manitou Cliff Dwellings is located in Manitou Springs, Colorado, at the foot of Pikes Peak, the mountain that provided the inspiration for the writing of, America the Beautiful. The dwellings are open seven days a week, year round, except for Christmas Day and Thanksgiving. Over the years, Native American Indians - descendants of the Ancient Ones - have demonstrated their living culture through traditional dances handed down from generation to generation.
Next to the cliff dwellings is a three-story Pueblo-style building that houses the Anasazi museum and a Southwestern gift shop. This structure was faithfully designed and constructed in the architectural style of the Pueblo Indians, descendants of the Anasazi.


The word "Anasazi" (ah-nuh-SAH-zee) is used to describe a distinctive American Indian civilization and culture that existed from about 1200 B.C. to A.D. 1300 in the Four Corners Area of Southwestern United States. See Southwest Culture Map. These people are probably best known for the ruins of their monumental cliff dwellings at places like Mesa Verde, which they abandoned at the end of the 13th century. But that's a small part of their story.
The structures at the Manitou Cliff Dwellings are authentic Anasazi cliff dwellings faithfully reconstructed and preserved so that generations can witness and experience something of this impressive people. This website is similarly dedicated to responsibly and accurately educating visitors about the Ancient Ones and, perhaps, stimulating some to explore this vanished culture more deeply.
"Anasazi" is the name used by most archaeologists since 1936 to describe this culture as separate from others in the Southwest Tradition cultural grouping, like the Hohokam and the Mogollon. In the early years of Southwestern archaeology, when we knew little about these people, they were known as Cliff Dwellers. The Anasazi probably called themselves simply "The People" in their language. So do most of their ancestors, each in their own language.
Anasazi is a Navaho (more correctly, "Diné" or "Dineh") word which, depending on pronunciation, means either "enemy ancestors" or "ancient people who are not us." Many modern Puebloan descendants of the Anasazi object to the use of this term. The Hopi use the word Hisatsinom to describe their ancestors. Sometimes the Hopi word Moqui (or Moki), meaning "the dead," is used.
In this modern era, when we examine the meaning and appropriateness of words more carefully, some prefer to use the term "Ancestral Puebloan Peoples" to designate the peoples known otherwise as Anasazi or Hisatsinom. Sometimes they (and other ancient ancestors) are referred to as "the Ancient Ones" or "the Old Ones."
We have chosen to use the standard archaeological term "Anasazi" and, sometimes, "the Ancient Ones" or "the Old Ones" to avoid repetition. We did not use the term "Hisatsinom" because, though it may be used by the Hopi, it is not used at the Zuni, Acoma, Río Grande and other pueblos. "Ancestral Puebloan Peoples" derives from the Spanish word "pueblo," and brings up memories of a people who treated the original natives of the American Southwest far worse than the Navaho ever did. Besides, that long string of words would soon tire most readers, and our resorting to the abbreviation "APPs" would probably be no better.
In time, we may all arrive at better, more appropriate language. We're still not out of the woods with words like "Indian," Christopher Columbus' mistaken identification of Western Hemisphere natives as residents of India, or "Native American," which many American Indians choose not to use.
If our use of the word "Anasazi" should seem or is offensive to anyone — especially the living descendants of the resilient, resourceful and creative peoples whose culture we explore on these virtual pages — we offer our apologies. We mean no disrespect.
Some early archaeologists thought that the Anasazi 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 Anasazi. They say, "We are still here!" There is strong scientific evidence to confirm that the Ancient Ones 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 Ancient Ones left their cliff dwellings and stone pueblos, though most think they were either starved out or forced out. The Anasazi 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.
These ancient peoples of the American Southwest developed a complex civilization of large interrelated communities. The Anasazi evolved from nomads who lived in temporary dwellings to become accomplished farmers. In time, they created massive, free-standing stone buildings of up to five stories and cliff dwellings like those on display at the Manitou Cliff Dwellings. See Architecture for more infomation.
From oral histories that have been handed down, generation to generation, we understand that they held the Earth as sacred and believed that all living things have a soul or spirit which is part of the Great Spirit. Unlike Europeans and their descendants, their land was not privately owned or controlled by a king. They saw themselves as caretakers of the land for the Spirit of the Earth (see Spirituality and Religion).
In appearance, these ancient people were short, stocky and big-boned. Described as long-headed, their hair was usually black, but was often brown and wavy. They started as nomadic hunter-gatherers, killing wild game with spears, gathering wild plants for food and other uses, and indulging in a little agriculture, growing mostly maize and squash.
Today, we say the Anasazi emerged as a distinct culture as early as 1200 B.C. (see Anasazi Chronology), 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 Anasazi 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.
In the second major Anasazi cultural period, beginning around A.D. 750, they are called the Pueblo Anasazi. 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 pithouses, 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 Anasazi 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.
Contemporary scientists think that life was pretty good for the Ancient Ones, especially during this second period. Why, then, did they end up abandoning their magnificent architecture and permanent homes to migrate hundreds of miles and seemingly lose their cultural identities in Hopiland, Zuni and the pueblos of the Upper Río Grande?
In addition to the drought and marauding enemy theories, scientists suggest that things like poor sanitation, pests, and environmental degradation may have caused the Anasazi to move. If those other explanations require more of a stretch of imagination, there is yet another to ponder: the Anasazi communities may have gotten bigger than the culture could handle. The internal stress and strife, along with the external factors might have just made life too uncomfortable.
Oral histories of the Hopi, Zuni and Pueblo peoples as well as scientific findings suggest that the exodus from places like Chaco and Mesa Verde may have been family by family or clan by clan, and may have occurred over a hundred years.
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 Chaco, 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 Anasazi 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 Anasazi 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. See Southwest Cultures Map.
After the Anasazi 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 Anasazi 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 Anasazi 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, Anasazi 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 Anasazi 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 Anasazi 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 Anasazi did not build huge irrigation canals. Anasazi 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 Ancient Ones 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 Anasazi as a distinct culture, the Southwestern peoples generally lived in caves and camped in the open or in temporary shelters. The beginning of the Anasazi 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.
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 Anasazi 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 Anasazi 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.
Most early Anasazi were cave dwellers. The advent of the pithouse brought them out into the open, though they still lived largely in the earth. As early as A.D. 350, but aggressively from around 700-750, the Anasazi began to build above-ground structures of mud (jacal or adobe) and stone. They gradually raised the floor to ground level. The transition wasn't immediate, however. Many masonry structures still had sunken floors.
In time they made an even greater transition, to the mesa tops. Some of the most haunting and thought-provoking ruins lie above the canyons on gently sloping islands of land dotted with cedar and piñon.
In some regions, like Kayenta, they never gave up the pithouse altogether. In most, however, above-ground masonry buildings ultimately became the standard that lasted to the end of the 13th century.
Anasazi building styles varied with time, the availability of materials, the urgency of the construction project and the skill of the builder. As the Ancient Ones began to build from the ground up, they may have started with jacal before they moved into pure masonry building techniques. In what looks like a natural evolution from pithouse construction, loosely spaced wooden stakes or poles were plastered with mud to make walls. As jacal construction evolved, stone slabs were placed around the base, and courses of stone were laid up around the outside. The next logical step was to build exclusively with stone.
Masonry walls often consisted of a core of rough, irregular loose stones finished on two sides with a veneer of shaped stones. Sometimes the mason would fashion a wall from a single or double course of larger, more regular blocks of sandstone or limestone. Anasazi masonry became quite elegant and refined over time. Both the stone and jacal structures were fitted with a roof similar to that of the pithouse — sturdy poles overlain with a lattice of slender poles, branches and brush. A layer of mud finished the job.
Doorways were narrow and short, like the people. Sometimes they were T-shaped. Some archaeologists suggest that the top portion was wider so that shoulder-borne burdens could be brought in more easily and that a blanket could be draped on the shoulders of the narrower bottom to keep out some of the cold air in the winter. Others suggest the T-shape was for defensive purposes. Some modern-day Hopi elders say that the shape of the doorway is symbolic of the Hopi worldview, like their traditional hair style.
Surprisingly, even the best masonry work was often hidden — coated inside and out with a smooth layer of mud. Today, it is still possible to see walls plastered more than seven centuries ago, many with the original whitewash, hand painted designs and the designer's handprints.
Architecture evolved with cultural advances, especially the gradual expansion of Anasazi communities from a few scattered dwellings to a hamlet to a village to a town. In time, architecture must have become a highly respected profession as Anasazi engineers and stone masons built increasingly elaborate buildings.
Almost all Anasazi buildings faced south in order to capitalize on the warmth of the winter sun. To individual walled rooms, others were added to create rectangular blocks of rooms that housed many families. Most had at least one super-pithouse, a kiva. Often at the center of the community, the underground kiva is thought to have been used for ceremonial, religious or community purposes.
Usually a pueblo had at least one special subterranean community pithouse — a kiva, sometimes up to 60 feet in diameter. Most were entered through a hole in the roof. A stone bench for sitting lined the perimeter. There was a hole in the floor — now called a sipapu — symbolizing the people's connection from birth with Mother Earth. Near the center was a fireplace. Ventilator shafts on the sides made the kiva more livable.
The first kivas appeared at the beginning of the Pueblo I period, about A.D. 750. While most ancient kivas are round, some are D-shaped or square. From the 10th Century on, many kivas included a small room opening out from the perimeter on the south or southeast, creating a sort of keyhole design. The side room is believed to have been used for the storage of ceremonial items.
Today, the Hopi and other descendants still use kivas (square and above ground in the case of the Hopi) for ceremonial, religious and celebratory purposes. Most archaeologists believe that the ancient kivas were also used for such purposes. They say that women and children were never allowed into the sacred depths. Men would enter through the hole in the roof, climb down the ladder and find a place on the bench. When they had all gathered, they would smoke, weave or dialogue about important matters facing the village. Sometimes they would dance to invoke the spirits, bless the crops or give thanks. Recently, however, it has been argued that we are only conjecturing when we conclude that kivas were primarily religious facilities. The dissenters think that these structures may have been used for domestic or community gatherings, like a town hall. The debate is not over.
Today, we use the term pueblo to describe the larger Anasazi buildings, groups of buildings, and communities. Many Anasazi communities were vacated and lay empty only to be reoccupied years later, often by people from different clans and, sometimes, different cultures than those of the original builders.
Some Anasazi towns were quite large. Yellow Jacket, near Cortez, Colorado, is the largest prehistoric town we know of in the Four Corners Area. More than 1,800 rooms are believed to have housed about 3,000 people.
Some of the individual structures were as big as present day apartment buildings. Many had several levels, up to five stories. One partially restored building at Aztec Ruins National Monument in New Mexico had at least 220 ground-floor rooms, 119 second-story rooms and more than 12 third-story rooms. The Great House may have had as many as 450 rooms aggregating 161,000 square feet. In addition, there were 29 kivas and one Great Kiva. Fifty feet in diameter, the Great Kiva had four massive columns set on 375-pound hand-carved limestone bases supporting a 95-ton roof. Pueblo Bonito, at Chaco, occupied more than three acres and rose five stories. With more than 800 rooms it was home to about 1,000 people. Until 1882 it was the largest apartment house in the world!
Cliff dwellings — stone houses, villages and towns built in caves or on large shelves in sheer rock canyon walls — are generally considered most representative of Anasazi architecture. In fact, before much was known about the inhabitants of places like Mesa Verde, the ancient builders were called simply Cliff Dwellers. Though these dwellings may be the most spectacular of the Anasazi architecture, they constitute less than ten percent of all Anasazi habitations built from about 1200 B.C. to the end of the Anasazi era, about A.D. 1300. When you consider the enormous amount of work that went into constructing a cliff dwelling, it seems surprising that they were rarely occupied continuously for more than 80 years.
Most cliff dwellings were built on south-facing ledges in deep sandstone canyons. Thanks to the southern exposure, the low-riding sun provided heat in the winter. The overhanging lip of the cliff offered cool shade from the high summer sun. Agricultural fields were maintained on the mesas above and, sometimes, in broader canyons below the dwellings. Access to most cliff dwellings consisted of a series of small hand- and toeholds in the steep sandstone walls. Sometimes there was a slender bridge of rock to cross. There were no handrails. Today, few of us besides seasoned climbers and committed archaeologists would dare to scale a sheer rock wall without ladder or rope to enter a cliff dwelling 75 feet above the canyon floor.
The Anasazi built cliff dwellings before the 13th century. One of the oldest of the important cliff dwellings, Keet Seel, was originally inhabited around 950. Redesigned in 1272 to include 160 rooms, it is the second largest cliff dwelling. The largest is Mesa Verde's Cliff Palace.
During the 13th century, for reasons that are still debated, the Ancient Ones focused almost exclusively on cliff dwellings. In a single 100-year period, they built and occupied most of the existing cliff-side structures that have captivated modern viewers. Some archeologists suggest that, by living in the canyons rather than on the mesas, the Anasazi made more land available for cultivation in a century that saw two major droughts. Others believe that cliff dwellings were built as protection against some unidentified enemy.
Cliff dwellings are not the only Anasazi architectural structures that invite our curiosity, awe and interest. Especially in the Mesa Verde and Northern San Juan Basin areas, the Old Ones built round, square and D-shaped towers several stories tall, apparently intended for non-residential use. One of the possible uses of these towers was for communications. Messages could be transmitted by a communications technician using a mica "mirror" to reflect the sun and signal from the top of a tower to a technician on a tower in a nearby village. Some modern scientists and native elders suggest that towers were also used for astronomical observations. Following the appearance of Haley's Comet in 1066 and solar eclipses in 1076 and 1097, five astronomical observatories were built at Chaco. Many others were built elsewhere in the Four Corners Area.
It seems ironic that the ancestors of modern Puebloans may have reached their cultural peak in the 13th century only to "disappear." Most of the cliff dwellings were built and vacated in less than 100 years. Though that time period represented several generations for the Anasazi, 100 years is a very short lifetime for a village, especially an elaborately constructed stone village in the side of a cliff.
By 1300 Keet Seel, Mesa Verde and all the other cliff dwellings were abandoned. Early archaeologists found evidence that cliff dwellers may have left hastily. Pottery, tools, baskets, woven fabrics, grain and ears of corn were often left behind, as if the inhabitants were out on an errand and intended to return shortly. The rotted and collapsed roofs and cold fire hearths, however, gave mute testimony to the centuries that had passed since the dwellers had departed.
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 Anasazi. 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 Anasazi sites and where their ancestors live now.
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 Anasazi 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 Ancient Ones 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 Anasazi. Scientific speculation about the "mysterious disappearance" of the builders of the cliff dwellings continued up to the current era. Many descendants of the Ancient Ones, 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 Anasazi 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.
Just as the Judeo-Christian culture has its creation story, all of the Southwest clans and tribes have stories of their origins and their reasons for existence. These spiritual belief systems are not written, but are passed down orally by elders from generation to generation. The Southwestern natives all believe in a version of a common creation story. All are spiritual or religious people and all have faith in the Creator. One shared spiritual belief is that all forms of life are imbued with soul or spirit and are part of the Great Spirit. They respect the power of prayer -- something that even modern science is coming to appreciate.
Apparently, the early Anasazi believed in an orderly universe in which people and things are not simply good or bad. They saw evil as an imbalance in the relationship between humans and the universe and good as a combination of positive beliefs and actions which help to maintain harmony. Present-day Hopis and other Anasazi descendants continue to live by the centuries-old wisdom that humankind's primary responsibility is to honor the Earth. Each clan has religious and spiritual responsibilities. If all those responsibilities are met, there is harmony in their society.
The spiritual lives of the Ancient Ones depended on their relationships with the natural world, of which they saw themselves a part. Religious practices were established in the context of survival, and revolved around food and water. Rituals and ceremonies focused on things like hunting, plant fertility, planting and harvest. In the arid Southwest, it is not surprising that a major spiritual figure in their lives was Avanyu or Palulukon, a horned or plumed water snake associated with water and believed to live in the bosom of the Earth.
According to the Pueblo creation story, we live in the Fourth World, "World Complete." The previous three were destroyed by the Creator. The Pueblos believe that, if humanity does not live up to its sacred commitment to protect the Earth and respect other living things, Mother Earth may bring the world we know to a violent end. Though the reasons may appear to be different, the outcome would seem to be the same as predicted in Book of Revelation in the Bible. Some Native American elders are already warning that we are inviting apocalypse.
When the ancient ancestors came into this Fourth World, they were told to go in the four directions and claim the Earth for Great Spirit. Then, each clan was to return and find its true home or "Center Place." This helps to explain the extensive migrations of clans and may help us understand why many ancient sites were occupied for only a few generations, seemingly abandoned, then reoccupied, often by different clans.

The Manitou Cliff Dwellings is an archaeological and natural history preserve. We've gathered and protected historical artifacts to enhance the centerpiece of our site, the awe-inspiring Anasazi cliff dwellings.
These authentic cliff dwellings were first opened to the public in 1906. Since then we have taken great care to preserve them so that generations of visitors can travel through time to experience a great American society now long gone. When you visit us in person, there will be no need to hurry as you follow the self-guided tour and explore each room of these carefully preserved structures. As you do, we invite you to imagine what it was like to live over seven hundred years ago in a structure like this.
Below the Cliff Dwellings is a three-story Pueblo-style building which houses the Museum and Gift Shop. We built the Pueblo so visitors could see and appreciate the building style of some of the descendants of the Anasazi. We faithfully copied the architecture of the Pueblo Indians, many of whom still live in structures like these in the Rio Grande Valley in New Mexico. Some structures, like the five-story building at the Taos Pueblo and the Acoma Pueblo, west of Albuquerque, have been continuously occupied for over 1,000 years. Of course, our Pueblo is not quite that old! The first six rooms of the Pueblo were built in 1898.