Introduction to The Archaeology Show
00:00:01
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network. You're listening to The Archaeology Show. TAS goes behind the headlines to bring you the real stories about archaeology and the history around us. Welcome to the podcast.
Exploring Arizona's Verde Valley
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Speaker
Hello and welcome to The Archaeology Show, episode 257.
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Speaker
On today's show, we talk about the archaeology of Arizona's Verde Valley. Let's dig a little deeper, but don't fall on the well. I don't know. You got your well joking? Well, I don't know. This is a deep subject. We better move on. These are getting longer and longer. Well, it's a deep subject for a shallow mind. Oh, burn! Whose mind is shallow? Yours, for sure. Definitely mine.
Travel Anecdotes and Unexpected Delays
00:00:48
Speaker
Welcome to the show. Welcome to Backcountry, Nevada. Yeah, this is Backcountry, Nevada, isn't it? We are, as is more often than not, when we're recording this podcast, I feel like. Yeah. We're at a rest stop on the side of the highway. It's cool. Yeah. Somewhere between Vegas and Reno. Yeah, yeah. It's a road we've traveled a lot, Highway 95, or US 95, I guess you should say. Yeah.
00:01:14
Speaker
Sometimes you go stretches without seeing anything, and then sometimes you go 100 miles with a semi crawling up your butt. Yep. Yeah, because he can't pass you because you're a big RV. It can be very uncomfortable to have this road. And when you're in a little car, you spend your whole time passing. Right. And it's also equally uncomfortable because it's so scary to pass on these roads.
00:01:35
Speaker
Yes. Now, we're on our way up to Reno where we lived for a while and we have friends and we're going to stay for a few weeks. And for all of those people thinking, because we went through Vegas to get here, all those people thinking, oh, you must just go down to Vegas all the time. No, we started in Nevada this morning near Hoover Dam, and then it's a good seven hours from there, if not eight, to get to Reno. Yes. It is a long, long drive. And that's all through Nevada. Yep. Like middle of nowhere, Nevada.
00:02:03
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. But before we went to Nevada, we were in Arizona. We were. Yeah. And we were kind of stuck there held hostage by RV repair.
00:02:13
Speaker
We were in that RV parking lot, RV repair parking lot for way too long. Way too long. Yeah. But you know, that's part of the lifestyle and sometimes you have to get stuff done. Right. What it did do is give us the opportunity to visit at least one national monument that we didn't think we were going to have time to do. And that combined with one that we managed to visit when we were there, I guess that was in January,
00:02:37
Speaker
We now have a little collection of these really cool places in Arizona that we thought would be really fun to talk about today. Yeah, absolutely.
The Scenic and Historical Verde Valley
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Speaker
So the three that we're going to talk about here are all up north of Phoenix, near Cottonwood, Arizona. The Verde Valley, they call that. So it's a really cool area. It's between, like I said, Phoenix and Flagstaff. So it's kind of that area that
00:02:59
Speaker
You know, this time of year gets a little cold at night and could get some snow occasionally. Flagstaff gets quite a bit of snow. Phoenix gets no snow. And this is kind of somewhere in the middle. You're literally climbing a hill all the way to Cottonwood or coming down if you're coming to Phoenix.
00:03:14
Speaker
So, and there's also great wine out there. It's an American viticultural area as of I think 20, 30 years ago or something like that. Something like that. Yeah. And there's also like other cute towns too, not just like there's Cottonwood, which is a place that we've been to a bunch, but also just a little ways from there in between Cottonwood and Flagstaff is Sedona. I'm sure everybody's heard of that. Yeah. Got those like iconic red rocks and cliffs going on there. Also, if you need your chakras aligned.
00:03:41
Speaker
Just drive by the Starbucks. That is a thing there, too. And then if you go the other direction out of Cottonwood, you get to this really cool mining town way up in the mountains above the valley called Jerome. So lots of really cool towns, a cool vibe in this area. It's become one of my favorite places in Arizona.
00:04:02
Speaker
It was a little shocking to me that it's a place we've been a bunch of times now. And this is the first time we've been to like the national monuments in the area. And these national monuments are for the Native American sites that are really significant in this area.
00:04:17
Speaker
Before we get to that real quick though, I'm really sad we didn't get back to Jerome. I know. Because Jerome is a mining town and they did subsurface at it and shaft mining there. And almost because of that, the mining food that was invented in England, in Cornwall in England, is called the Cornish Pasty. And it's just like this pocket of
00:04:40
Speaker
Pastry with stuff inside of it. And there's a Cornish pasty place up on the hill there that is just ridiculous. It was so good. It's like hipster Cornish pasties, right? Like they had a Thanksgiving one, I think, right? They had a curry one, which was so good. Yeah, super random. But if you have to go through Jerome and need a nice warm meal, it was 20 degrees when we were there. It was so cold and it was delicious.
00:05:07
Speaker
You know who wasn't cold? The Southern Senhagua people at Tuzagoot because of their apartments that they lived in. Well, they might have been a little bit cold. It's not warm there all the time. But they had a good thing going on. Yeah.
Tuzagoot National Monument and the Sinagua
00:05:20
Speaker
Yeah. So the first national monument we're going to talk about is Tuzagoot National Monument. And this one is located just northwest of the Cottonwood, Arizona area that we were just talking about. And like we said, we love it there. So I can't believe this is the first time that we went. But yeah, it was really cool.
00:05:36
Speaker
Well, and it's also really easy to get to. Like there's some of these national parks, there's a lot of hiking, there's a lot of, you know, driving around different places. This thing is literally one thing and it's on a hill and the visitor center is literally built next to it. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, to experience that you really only need an hour or two, because even if you stop and read every sign, you know, it's not going to take that long. So yeah.
00:05:58
Speaker
So, Tuzegud was built by the Southern Senogua people between 1000 and 1400 CE. Well, it was built by them, probably around 1000, and then they maintained it and added to it. Yeah, and added to it. And then we'll talk about this later, but they left around 1400 CE. Yeah. And it's on a ridge that is sort of overlooking the Verde Valley, too. So, it's not on the valley floor. It's up a little ways.
00:06:21
Speaker
Yeah. So just talking about what Verde Valley would have looked like to sort of prehistoric peoples, because there's a long history of occupation in this area. It would have been, and there's paleolithic occupation as well, and it would have been a little cooler and a little wetter back then. And it would have been greener, which is funny because it's called Verde Valley, but it would have been greener and it would have had a lot of pinion pine, shrub, live oak, and juniper.
00:06:45
Speaker
Yeah, there's a lot of scrub brush and sage and stuff like that. There is. Just not a lot. It's definitely not as green as it used to be back in those times. And we do know that there were paleolithic hunter-gatherer-type groups there, because there have been a handful of Clovis points that are found around the valley area. So that would be your 10,000-ish years ago, 10 to 12. Yeah, give or take. Something like that. Yeah.
00:07:11
Speaker
The first permanent settlements in this area, according to archeological evidence, begins around 700 to 900 CE when the Hohokam farmers from the south moved into the valley. There's a ton of Hohokam stuff down near Tucson and that whole area, southern Arizona, a lot of that. So they moved up here and started doing some other stuff.
00:07:32
Speaker
Yeah, their iconic structure that they do is called a pit house. It's like a partially buried dwelling where they sort of dig out into the ground a little ways and then they build the structure over the top of it. And you do find the remains of some of those like Hohokam style dwellings in the valley, which is how they know that they were probably the ones that were there in that timeframe, 700 to 900.
00:07:53
Speaker
Yeah. You start seeing those pit houses all around the Phoenix, Tucson area, Southern Arizona, central Arizona, beginning about 4,000 years ago on up to about 600 years ago. Yeah. So they use them for a really long time. Yeah. But the people that built too is a goop.
00:08:09
Speaker
were different. They migrated from somewhere else probably and they were just a different group of people because they weren't doing this pit house style thing. They started doing these multi-room pueblos and that's what you see at Tuzagoot. And that one in particular was built, they started building it around 1000 CE. And that was the Sonagua people that we're talking about.
00:08:30
Speaker
Yep, the Sinagua people were split into two groups in this area, the Northern Sinagua in Flagstaff and the Southern Sinagua in the Verde Valley area. And the name comes from Sierra Sinagua, which was given to the nearby peaks by early Spanish explorers. It was shortened to Sinagua by Harold S. Colton in 1939 when he assigned it to the group that lived in this area.
00:08:51
Speaker
That's not what they call themselves, of course, but that's the name that stuck from a historical archaeological standpoint. I don't think we know what they call themselves. There's no way we would. There's no way we would know. There's no written records from that time period and no oral history to tell us what their name was. Nothing that we have for that.
00:09:08
Speaker
And I thought it was really funny, too, that the Spanish explorers called it Sierra Sinagua. I guess the mountains don't have a lot of water in them, but down in the valley, where the people live, there's quite a bit of water. And going farther back, you do get colder, you do get wetter. I mean, aside from this one period we'll talk about, and maybe that's what caused this. But generally, those mountains get quite a bit of snow. Yeah, they do. So a lot of snowmelt is coming down into the valley, for sure.
00:09:37
Speaker
So, these like multi-room structures were built all across the Southwest by different cultures and different peoples. And they are sort of broadly similar, but there are regional differences and distinctions. And I thought this was really interesting because it kind of shows a connection between all of these different groups of people and at the same time period too.
00:09:58
Speaker
Some of the other ones that are very similar are like in New Mexico, and we've been to a couple of these places. Bandelier National Monument. The Aztec Ruins National Monument. I don't think we've been there. And the Chaco Culture National Historical Park, which we also have been to. Otherwise known as Chaco Canyon.
00:10:16
Speaker
Chaco Canyon. Yeah. So we've been there. We've seen these places. And so from our own memories, we can remember they do look a little different from what we saw here and over at Montezuma castle, which we're going to talk about next, but same idea, different, slightly different structures, basically.
00:10:32
Speaker
Either way, I think the one commonality amongst all these, and we'll talk about a few other states too, but the one commonality is the rooms are all joined together. It really is an apartment complex. It would have been, I can't imagine it would have been quiet. Just from conversations, it would have been probably pretty noisy, but I would assume that everybody kind of probably went to bed at the same time, you know, because why are you gonna stay up late? They had fires. They could have stayed up later if they wanted to, but what's the point? Anyway, in Colorado,
Tuzagoot's Structure and Trade Networks
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Speaker
You've all probably heard of at least people in this country. In the United States, I've heard of Mesa Verde National Park, another one that is a glaring omission on our national park list. I know, I cannot believe we haven't been there. Yeah. Yeah, shocking. There's Yucca House National Monument, which I'm not sure that I've heard of. And the Canyons of the Ancients, which I have heard of, and I'm pretty sure we haven't been there either. No, I don't think we've been there. We haven't done a lot of time in Colorado. That is something that we're going to have to rectify here in the next time frame that I'm not going to name, because who knows when it'll happen.
00:11:31
Speaker
Two more in Arizona that we've been to are Wupotky and Walnut Canyon National Monuments. We've definitely been there. Although I remember when we went to Walnut Canyon, there was a big boulder over the path and you could only go out from the visitor center. You couldn't go down the path into the canyon. Right. You couldn't. Yeah. Yeah. That's right. So we should probably give that one another visit at some point too. We're not in Arizona anymore though. That's weird. We were in Arizona yesterday. We're not now.
00:11:55
Speaker
Well, we were kind of in Arizona this morning, too. Yeah, we were on the border. When we stepped over the line at Hoover Dam. Right. Yeah. Anyway, there's also Palatki, Sacred Mountain, and then Montezuma Castle. Yeah. So all in Arizona. Yeah. So lots of places to go check out this kind of architecture, if you're interested, and in the sort of southwest-ish area.
00:12:15
Speaker
And like we said, this tells us that these groups were in communication with each other. They traveled between the different communities. They traded between them. And as you might expect, when people are sharing information like that, the construction trends were also shared. And that's why that sort of similar conjoined building style was popular.
00:12:35
Speaker
Now Tuzigoot was the biggest one we've ever seen. Mesa Verde is much bigger, I believe, but it's also cliff-rolling, too. Well, if Chaco Canyon is way big, but in a different way. Pueblo Bonito at Chaco Canyon is the biggest one, and that's definitely...
00:12:50
Speaker
bigger than Tuzigoot, I would say. But either way, it built in the same style. And if I'm not mistaken, Puddle Bonito was, I think I remember searing three to four floors. Yeah, I think so. In some cases, yeah. But Tuzigoot was built in four phases, they think, and it has 87 ground floor rooms all built on this little hill, like a little fortified hill, like we built a fort on today, you know? And then there were about 23 second-story rooms, and they think it could have housed about 225 people at the height of its occupation.
00:13:19
Speaker
Yeah. And one of the craziest things to me about it is that we're walking around, like seeing these really cool walls. And I'm like, where are the doors? Like, how did people get in and out of this? And doing more research, they didn't use doors, not really. There's occasionally an exterior door here or there. And we saw a couple when we were there, but they almost always used entry by ladder through the roof, which is such an unusual method.
00:13:49
Speaker
It's just crazy. Like I love that. It's so different, but it's really cool. And I was thinking about that too. And I think, I mean, it might just be stylistic. That's how they started doing it. So that's how they were doing it. But you know, we might think, where's our windows and things like that? But we also have really good, well insulated windows and they didn't have a way to make a window or to cover a window. And so if you're going to deal with wind and cold and all that stuff, it's much easier to seal up your structure by having just a hole in the roof.
00:14:13
Speaker
And then also your fire smoke can go out that hole and you can, you know, with the mud brick sort of walls, it would have stayed cool in the summertime ish. And then you could have kept it warm by having a fire inside in the wintertime. And you didn't have to worry about any sort of snow coming in and all that stuff. Just cover up the one hole. Yeah, that's probably pretty efficient. Yeah. But it does make me think like if you're under attack, how do you close that hole in the roof?
00:14:39
Speaker
and protect yourself, right? I'm not sure that, I think as a last offense, you would be down inside your hole there, probably the women and children, to be honest with you, but everybody else is out fighting the attack. Yeah. Well, and I guess invasion then would maybe be a better word. It makes me think that this was a mostly peaceful society, probably. If they didn't have to worry about that, then they could build their structures to not be too protective in that way.
00:15:04
Speaker
And since they were so cooperative with the groups around them, then maybe that wasn't really something they had to worry about too much. Who knows? Yeah. They also had a really great clear line of sight in every direction on the ridge and of the valley below. So that would have been really great from a protection standpoint. And then the valley below also provided water, soil for crops like cotton and corn. So it was a very bountiful area as far as that goes. Really a good location.
00:15:31
Speaker
Excavation showed evidence that the Tuzugo community traded across the southwest from the Colorado Plateau as far south as Central America and as far west as the Pacific coast. Yeah, isn't that crazy? Yeah, and that doesn't necessarily mean they went to these places and traded. That just means that there was a trade network of people trading adjacently, and somebody would find something cool and then use that as currency, basically, and trade it along. And then something from the Pacific coast or Central America
00:16:00
Speaker
could make it all the way here. Yeah. So some of the things that they found during the excavation were many, many different pottery styles from all over the Southwest. Every kind you can think of the black on white and the, I think it's black on yellow and like just all kinds of different types. So that clearly showed that they were trading amongst their
00:16:22
Speaker
local people. Yeah. They also found a bunch of obsidian from Mexican volcanoes and obsidian can be chemically sourced. Right. So if you've got a database of obsidian chemical fingerprints, basically, which there are databases like that around, then you can test it and say, oh, this had to come from this volcano. It's like a fingerprint, which is pretty cool. And they also had feathers from Macaws also found in Mexico. Yeah. Yeah. Only found in Mexico, right? Yeah. Only found. Yeah. There's no Macaws in Arizona. No. So yeah, that's crazy.
00:16:51
Speaker
And then the coast was represented by seashells. And I think they're assuming from the Pacific coast. I don't know if that is from the species of shells, so they knew that, or if it was just the closest coast, so that's what they're guessing. But yeah, there's no sea in Arizona, so. Well, there used to be. Well, yeah, not in, you know, 1100. Well, no.
00:17:13
Speaker
But shells don't really go away. There could be shells from 100 million years ago there. Well, that's how limestone's made, too. Right. But I don't think it's that kind of shell. I'm just saying. It could have been shells. Now, they would have had to export something in order to be trading stuff like this, right? So the things that they were exporting were minerals like azurite, copper, and malachite. And then they also had salt, cotton, and textiles that they would have been exporting. Yeah.
00:17:40
Speaker
So, by about 1,400, two's ago, it was no longer occupied. Yeah, we'll talk more about this in Segment 3, but there was basically nobody there that we have evidence for. Now, that's shocking, and again, we'll talk about that a little bit later.
00:17:55
Speaker
I also want to point out that for 400 years, this structure housed people and they maintained it, they did different things. And then it sat for, you know, another 600, 700 years until now when we're looking at it and it's still there, it's still around. I mean, how many people are living in a house right now that's going to be around in 400 years? Probably no one. Totally. The thing that struck me about that is that
00:18:21
Speaker
They always emphasize the abandonment, right? Like all of a sudden they were here and they were living and they were building, you know, the latest evidence of building is like 1380, right? And then 20 years later, they just abandoned it. Why would they walk away? But, but I'm like, like you said, you can't like the 200 to 400 years before that.
00:18:41
Speaker
that's what really matters. It's like you might renovate your home and then move away five years later, right? That doesn't mean that you just abandoned it five years later. It just means that you were working on it and making it better and improving it to suit your life. And then when you were done with it, you moved on. So I think like, I don't think it was as abrupt as it might seem, you know? They just, we'll talk about it more in segment three, but I don't think it was that abrupt, you know? So that's all.
00:19:08
Speaker
Now, when I said the building was lasting, to be fair, by the 1900s, most of the walls had collapsed. But a lot of it was still kind of there, enough that we could tell what it looked like. Yeah, definitely. There was something for them to excavate, and that excavation happened from 1933 to 1935 by Lewis K. Wood and Edward Spicer from the University of Arizona.
00:19:29
Speaker
And that is also where the Tuzugoot name comes from. Tuzugoot is a sort of corruption of the Tonto Apache name Two Diges, or Dig-es. Dig-es, I'm not really sure how to pronounce that. But either way, it became Tuzugoot, and that was the Apache name for the Verde River, and it's usually translated as Crooked Water, so that's where that comes from.
00:19:51
Speaker
All right. And like you were saying, it did last, but it took some excavation to uncover it and show what it could be. And there's a really cool before and after picture on the link where you have this little slider and you slide it back and forth. It shows pre excavation and post excavation and pre excavation.
00:20:09
Speaker
if you weren't an archeologist or had some knowledge that there was a structure there, you almost can't even see it. So it was definitely buried under a lot of soil and it took some excavation to uncover it. I think they did some reconstruction as well back in the thirties. Cause that was like, you know, a thing they did before they realized they shouldn't do that. So yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, this is where all the peasants lived. We'll find out where the noble elite lived on the other side of the brick. That's just a joke. Don't write it back in a minute.
Montezuma Castle: Misnomers and Architecture
00:20:42
Speaker
Welcome back to episode 257 of the archeology show. And we're talking about some national park adventures that we had in Northern Arizona. And the next one is a Montezuma Castle, the poorly named Montezuma Castle. It was neither related to Montezuma nor a castle. No, no, we can just jump right into that. It was the early settlers basically figured it must have been built by the Aztec because it's such a complete and perfect looking structure.
00:21:11
Speaker
And I guess nobody had seen that in the Southwest of the United States, so they thought it must have come from Aztec people. I don't know. So anyway, it was a wrong assumption that a lot of people at that time period made about Native Americans, but the name stuck. So I guess it is what it is.
00:21:27
Speaker
Yeah. It's located north of a little town called Camp Verde on the eastern side of Interstate 17, which runs between Phoenix and Flagstaff, like we talked about before. This is on the other side from Cottonwood. Cottonwood's on the west side. This is on the east side of that highway. And there's also a bunch of cool little wineries down in this area, too. There is. Yeah. It's a really cute little area. Yeah. Seems like it had a lot of early settler activity there as well. Yeah.
00:21:51
Speaker
Montezuma Castle was built by the Southern Sanagro people, which is the same people that built Tuzigoot. I mean, not the exact, exact same people, but they were probably related in some way. They certainly shared information and stuff. They definitely knew about each other. Yeah, they for sure did. And the architectural style is a little bit different, obviously, because Montezuma Castle, if you haven't seen it before, go look at the pictures right now, stop what you're doing. It is so cool. We'll put some in the show notes that we took.
00:22:18
Speaker
some links or I guess some pictures. Yeah, we can put some pictures on the show notes page, but it's a collection of rooms built into the side of a cliff wall. Yeah. It looks like it's hanging in space. It's just so cool and so imposing looking when you walk up to it. Yeah. They're cliff dwellings. Yeah. Yeah. That's what they're called. That's what they're called. So just like Mesa Verde and other places, except on a slightly smaller scale. Yeah. Yeah. This one is a 20 room high-rise apartment.
00:22:44
Speaker
built into the side of a limestone cliff, so it's pretty cool. High-rise apartment is the best description for it, except that the bottom of it doesn't touch the ground. It starts high, and it goes higher from there. The 20 rooms are spread across several stories, and would have housed several families, and you have a note here that we count to five stories? I can't remember. I think either four or five we count to one, because you can't go in it or up to it.
00:23:12
Speaker
For lots of reasons, the National Park Service has it fenced off. Well, there was a lot of vandalism happening a long time ago. Didn't they say back in the 40s or something they closed it off to traffic? It was a long time ago. It was a long time ago, yeah.
00:23:26
Speaker
But a cool thing is on the path kind of leading around there, they built this diorama at that time and it's still there. That is a, you know, somewhat of a replica of what it looks like with the wall there. And then it has a little people there. Yeah. Like a cross section. So you look inside of it. Exactly. Because they weren't allowing people to go in anymore because of vandalism and just the sensitive nature of the walls. And it was probably unsafe. And like, I could see it being really easy to fall. In fact, I'm not sure how you would have a child in that structure.
00:23:54
Speaker
Well, you carry them up until they're ready to climb the ladders themselves. Yeah, obviously. It just seems like super scary and unsafe. But yeah. But yeah, much like, sort of like Tuzigud where you climb down the roof and the ladder. In these you climbed up and there would have been a lower ladder just to get up to like a little platform and then ladders basically taking you all the way to the different levels.
00:24:12
Speaker
Yeah, but it was kind of a similar thing where there's not like doors so much as it is like ladder access into all of these places. Yeah. And it was a hundred feet above the valley. So, you know, ladders were definitely a necessity to get in and out of this place. I can't imagine that they would be able to just like climb by hand. I guess maybe. I mean, it didn't look that hard to be honest with you, but if you've got like a
00:24:35
Speaker
basket full of stuff on your back or something you're probably gonna take the ladder. Yeah and limestone is soft too so it can it could break pretty easily too if you're trying to yeah some limestone is yeah this limestone is yeah it's had in the description so yeah it overlooks a really pretty creek that we got to see while we were walking around it kind of meanders along it's called Beaver Creek
00:24:56
Speaker
And the biggest question that is kind of unanswered is why in the world would they go to the effort of building this really beautiful and well-constructed structure into the side of a cliff? I mean, they built it, what, 700 years ago? 800 years ago? And it still looks almost perfect today. So it's well-constructed. It really did its job, obviously, to still be standing now. So like, why? Why do it?
00:25:24
Speaker
Yeah, so one reason may have been because it faces south, and the southern rooms would have been kept warmer in the winter because the sun was shining all the time. But because of the walls, just like a tuzigoot, it still would have been relatively cool in the summer. You've got to hold basically a little cavern behind you, so that naturally is going to stay a little bit cooler. And you make your own shade, too, with those structure walls and things like that.
00:25:46
Speaker
Also, maybe to protect their dwellings from the annual flooding of Beaver Creek, they didn't want them down there, but they wanted to be close to the water for animals and plants and things like that. And they probably took advantage of that annual flooding for whatever agriculture they were doing down on the valley floor there. I believe cotton in particular needs a lot of water, so the irrigation that they would have been able to do because of that creek would have been very important.
00:26:11
Speaker
Mm-hmm. Yeah, they're also obvious would have been obvious Strategic advantage being up that high as long as you can defend it. Otherwise, you're kind of penned in and have nowhere to go Yeah, you better have enough supplies to hang on if you do get attacked but gosh, it really does seem like these were mostly Peaceful groups of people though, cuz like it doesn't seem like Protection was their first Their first thought when they were building things. So yeah, yeah
00:26:38
Speaker
The structures themselves were built with local materials, like you would think, including wood, local stone and mud mortar. And the limestone cliffs are soft and would split pretty easily. So it would have been fairly easy to remove material as needed to sort of carve out the space that they were using for their rooms that they were constructing. Yeah, they used the natural caves, overhangs, nooks in the cliff and things like that around them to build and create the rooms and to find like the optimal location where they could
00:27:08
Speaker
make something decent. Because if you've got just like a couple little nooks and crannies and you put a wall in front of that, you're just kind of flat up against the wall. And what good is that? Maybe for storage or something, but you're not going to live in there. And they did it all over this cliffside too. Like there's the main castle, quote unquote castle that you see when you're walking up.
00:27:27
Speaker
I don't know about you, but when we were walking up, I almost like I was just sort of like walking along with the trees, whatever. And then all of a sudden I looked to my right and like it's this imposing. I see why they call it at a castle is this imposing structure just like coming out of the wall. It's really cool. But when you walk a little bit further down, there's a spot where this little like information sign
00:27:50
Speaker
tells you to look up and look for a wall and you see one and it sort of seems to be on its own kind of further down from the castle but it is clearly a constructed wall so yeah it's like was there another larger structure that is gone now or were they just throwing little walls into the side of the cliff wherever they could to make storage rooms and stuff like that? I mean no but I'm sure there could have been storage rooms like you said but maybe
00:28:14
Speaker
You know, maybe some people just wanted to live off by themselves. Some rambunctious teenager was like, you know what? I want to build a wall over here. Screw you, mom and dad. I need my own space. You won't let me use the phone. I just feel stifled. You're mean.
00:28:29
Speaker
I'm going over here now. That was gen negative Z. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Who knows? Or maybe it was somebody that was older and just didn't want to live in the community. Maybe it was a place for like a lookout to go and have like a protected spot to hang out while they were looking out for whatever, whatever a lookout would need to be watching for in that, in that circumstance. So I guess that's a possibility too. But yeah, anyway, those little walls were all over.
00:28:57
Speaker
Yeah, one of the reasons this was a national park is because this current structure that we're talking about is one of the best preserved examples of this type of architecture and because it was so well constructed and because it's naturally protected. So it was just a good thing. They weren't without danger for the inhabitants though.
00:29:14
Speaker
Yeah, so Montezuma Castle is the one up in the wall, right? Yeah. But there is another castle called Castle A, and that was actually located at the base of the cliff a short distance past where Montezuma Castle was. And we saw this too, we walked towards it. I think it's a bit reconstructed these days. Some of it is, but most of it's gone.
00:29:36
Speaker
Yeah, most of it's gone. You can see some of the walls where they were there and like the manmade walls against the natural walls. You can see a little bit, but it was once a large structure, but much bigger than the one that is there now with 45 rooms and five stories. So it was huge.
00:29:54
Speaker
But their best guess as to what happened to it is that there was a fire at some point that destroyed the structure and it's just gone now. There's nothing to even excavate, not really.
00:30:07
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I do have more questions about that. I found it hard to find information about Castle A. They barely even mention it on the National Park Service website, and there just wasn't a lot of other resources that I could find. So I am interested to know though, because you could see what looked like almost like carbon staining on the cliff wall, and I'm like,
00:30:28
Speaker
Well, is that where the fire thing is coming from? And if so, was it after people had already abandoned this structure or was it while people were still living there? Can we tell what kind of excavation has been done? I just have lots of questions. I want to know more about Castle A and I wasn't finding that in the bit of research I did, which admittedly was not like super deep. So I would love to know more about that. Right.
00:30:53
Speaker
All right. Well, we mentioned in the beginning that the misnomer of Montezuma Castle and why that was, we kind of jumped the gun on that because we had this note at the end here tied to this note that says, well, you looked into some research and actually Montezuma, that person had lived more than- He's an Aztec leader. An Aztec leader, right. The people had moved on from this site more than 40 years before he was even born. Yeah. So literally had nothing to do with it. It had nothing to do with this. It was just a European thing, European people coming in.
00:31:23
Speaker
I don't think so. And as with Tuzugut, the structure does seem to have been abandoned by 1400 CE as well. And now there's another component to Montezuma Castle called Montezuma Well. And when we come back, we will talk more about that back in a minute. We need a better segue. That was my first time I just kind of went into it.
00:31:44
Speaker
I know. I had something good planned, and then you just kind of did it. Oh, you did? Okay, do yours. No, it's done. No, I'm going to leave it all in. Do yours. Do it. Well, no, I'm done. Oh, God. Back in a minute. Welcome back to Montezoma's archeology show. Montezoma's. Montezoma's? It's Montezoma.
00:32:06
Speaker
So if you've got a castle, you need a source of water. So that's why they've made Montezuma as well. Oh, is that why? Yeah, that's why. Does Montezuma own this well?
00:32:21
Speaker
who hasn't been born yet. Right. He said that he would need a place to, you know, bathe and get his irrigation water. So I understand. Actually, do you want to go on ancient aliens now? And so, yeah, ancient aliens, it's ancient Aztecs. All right. Yeah. And Senoguans. Yeah. So anyway,
00:32:38
Speaker
Right, this is a subunit of Montezuma Castle, the National Park.
The Significance of Montezuma Well
00:32:42
Speaker
National Monument. Sorry, National Monument. And it was located about 15 to 20 minutes north of here, about 11 miles away. So it's not like you could get there in an easy day walking. No, no, that's a long day of walking, for sure. It certainly wouldn't have been a daily source of water for this group. Right, but they had a river in front of them anyway. Right, and as we'll get to in a minute, it seems like it was just yet another community of these people that lived around the well.
00:33:07
Speaker
But it was kind of an oasis in the middle of the desert. It's fed by these continuously flowing springs that are the result of like snow melt out of the mountains. Basically, it's surrounded by lush vegetation. There's wildlife. It's just this like beautiful little oasis. And you can see what people were drawn there. It was cool water shade in the summer. It would have been probably pretty lovely.
00:33:31
Speaker
So how Montezema Well was created was basically water drains down from rain and snow in the Magullian Rim north of the well, which is just a mountain range up there. It takes the path of least resistance as water tempts to do until it reaches the vertical wall of volcanic basalt underneath the well. This acts like a dam forcing the water back toward the surface. Over time this eroded a cavern underground until finally the roof caved in and created the pond that is there today.
00:33:56
Speaker
There you go. Quick and dirty geology. Yeah. And every day the well is replenished with about one and a half million gallons of new water. And you might be thinking, cause if you go and look at the pictures, that pond does not hold a daily influx of one and a half million gallons of new water.
00:34:15
Speaker
And what happens is the water overflows through kind of a long, narrow, subterranean cave. And because it has this outlet, but it's a funnel outlet, basically, again, it's acting like a dam, right? And it keeps the pond essentially the same size, but it gives a relief or an outflow for the water so it has somewhere to go.
00:34:36
Speaker
I'm actually kind of surprised that you wrote one and a half million gallons because, you know, terrestrial measurements are usually done in football fields in this area and water things are usually done in Olympic swimming pools. So how many Olympic swimming pools did it actually hold? This is one and a half million gallons? I have no idea. You need to look that up. Hey Siri, how many Olympic swimming pools is one and a half million gallons of water?
00:35:02
Speaker
Seriously stupid, she doesn't know. That's annoying, but that didn't even come through your microphone. And it did not. All right, so she said she doesn't know to look at my phone. Thanks. Yeah, very helpful. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, the Southern Sonagua people use this whole thing to create irrigation ditches and use the water to irrigate their crops from those ditches.
00:35:20
Speaker
In the well area, there are several prehistoric structures, including an excavated pit house that dates to about 1050 CE. It sounds like that is one of the older structures in the well area. And then there's also a couple other pueblos, those conjoined buildings, and then cliff dwellings too. I saw pictures of cliff dwellings, very similar to Montezuma Castle, but just smaller. One room, two room, three room kind of deals, right?
00:35:44
Speaker
And there's a couple different areas where there's these dwellings and their various sizes and they date from around 1125 to 1400 CE and approximately 100 to 150 people would have lived here during this time.
00:35:58
Speaker
So smaller, but still significant, right? They were known as the keepers of the well. I made that up completely. Yes, you did. Although living around a resource like this, I'm willing to bet that they kind of were keepers of the well. Probably, yeah.
00:36:14
Speaker
They're the ones, if you lived there, you would have been in control of it. You find this amazing resource in the middle of the desert and you control it. You protect it and it is your home. And yeah, they definitely used it. I mean, the irrigation canals that they built or irrigation ditches, you can still see them today. So again, their amazing construction techniques have survived the test of time.
00:36:37
Speaker
Right. The prehistory of this area is obviously being really close by is very similar to Tuzugut and Montezuma Castle. I mean, it's literally the same people, same people, you know, the same cultural group, I should say. Yeah. And then they had the same fate too. They, for whatever reason, stopped living there around 1400. We'll talk about that a little bit here at the end. But the next people to really see this were European settlers named Wales and Jenny Arnold. Yeah. Wales. I don't know. I guess that's the same. Sure. Yeah.
00:37:03
Speaker
They used the prehistoric ditches to irrigate their own land. Yeah, why not, right? It was there already and yeah. So the land sort of jumped around a bit and eventually it landed in the hands of William and Marjorie back in 1889 and they are the enterprising souls who well eventually got it to the National Park Service.
00:37:24
Speaker
But they operated a ranch farm in Orchard, and they realized how cool the well was, and they ended up turning it into a tourist attraction. Right. Yeah, they charged for tours, displayed artifacts, had a picnic area, as well as later adding a campground, a resort where guests could stay, and a Starbucks. So I thought that last part was pretty cool. Yeah, that's a joke. There's no Starbucks there. No, there's not. Don't write. But if it was still around today, there probably would be. Don't write letters. Yeah.
00:37:51
Speaker
They even tried to stock the well with fish, but I guess the fish died as soon as they were introduced. Whatever is in this well was not conducive to fish surviving. So, yeah. Yeah. I wonder if, you know, down in these, down in these lower well environments, they might not have a lot of oxygen in them. Fish still need oxygen in that, like an oxygenated sort of, well, those kind of fish do, right? There's plenty of fish that live way down deep in the ocean that don't really need that. Yeah.
00:38:15
Speaker
And this is water that's melting out of the mountains, right? So I don't know what it's got in it when it gets to the well sage, but it's just probably not conducive to fish that are in a more natural aquatic environment, I guess. Yeah. In 1943, they agreed to sell the land to the government.
00:38:31
Speaker
As is usual, there was probably some kind of government shutdown, and there was no funding. Actually, there was a huge world war going on, so money wasn't being put necessarily towards national parks or monuments. So it didn't happen until 1947. I just thought that whole story was so funny, though, because you hear about so many places of importance in the United States being donated to the government after somebody dies or whatever.
00:38:54
Speaker
Not William and Marjorie though. They got to make a buck off of this, you know, attraction that they've built a business around. So they sold it to the United States government is what it is. You can still see a billion margins. The picnic areas and the historic back ranch house. Yeah. The irrigation canal, I believe is still the prehistoric one that has been used by all the settlers and you know, so yeah.
00:39:21
Speaker
I'm sure they probably had to, you know, refresh it a bit. Yeah, probably 400 years, 600, 500 years of growth in it. The area is still considered sacred by many local tribes, which is not too surprising. I mean, it's still lush, cool haven and otherwise dry desert. And, you know, a lot of Native American groups hang on to their cultural identity and their cultural history by
00:39:43
Speaker
having these culturally significant areas become places that are sacred today to them. Yeah, they can focus their energy and their community towards a place like this. Yeah, they're called in the archeology world, TCPs, tribal cultural properties. And a TCP can be just about anything from a well like this to, not even a well, I mean, this is a pond, to a mountain range.
00:40:08
Speaker
Yeah. Or like Devil's Tower, right? Isn't that considered one by the native groups up there? Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Well, as we have talked about several times over the course of this podcast, the Southern Senaga people were gone by about 1400 CE from this well area as
Why Did the Sinagua Leave?
00:40:25
Speaker
well. They just, they took off. We don't really know why.
00:40:29
Speaker
But we have some ideas and we're going to go through those now here at the end of this podcast. And we'll start with what some of the different Native American clans say, because we're talking about a timeframe that is 700 years ago, right? 600 years ago. So there's a potential for oral histories to be handed down from some of these groups. That's not so long ago that it's not possible that we have a good oral history.
00:40:55
Speaker
I love the Hopi story. Some of the Hopi clans believe that the Senagua were actually their ancestors, and that the Verde Valley villages were stops in a much longer migration to the Hopi mesas that we know today, and they were never really intended to be permanent settlements. So that's sort of the Hopi story.
00:41:17
Speaker
And I love that, because that's entirely possible. That puts a lot of forethought into the way the people were migrating. They always intended to be where the Hopi are today. And I don't know if we can know that for sure, but it is still a story that makes sense in some ways.
00:41:35
Speaker
Yeah, some of the Yavapai Apache tribes that are around today say that not all the Senagua left, but instead integrated with the Yavapai and the Apache that are there today. Makes sense. Or, you know, the last couple hundred years. Which, if I had to guess, is probably more likely the story. Yeah. Makes complete sense, right? Yeah. And then some Yavapai also say that their ancestors left the Pueblos and farms for a more mobile lifestyle of hunting and gathering. And I feel like that kind of makes sense too, which we'll talk about in a minute.
00:42:05
Speaker
Yeah. The Zuni say that some people remain behind, whether because they couldn't travel or chose not to leave. So, you know, I'm not really sure what they like, where they went from there. Maybe they be the Zuni tribes as they are today, I guess, probably today. The monuments are affiliated with many tribes, including those four that we just mentioned. Yavapaya, Apache, Hopi, and Zuni.
00:42:27
Speaker
Now there is some other evidence that kind of ties in with some of these stories, right? So it could be that people left because of climate change. And we talked about this before, but the 1300s was a crazy time in this country and the medieval warm period was ending and the little ice age was beginning. So it was getting colder and drought was happening in the Southwest specifically.
00:42:50
Speaker
So this climate change could have influenced, you know, a change back to a more mobile and flexible hunter gatherer lifestyle because the agriculture that they had become used to just wasn't really working given the climate change that they were experiencing. And that wasn't just here. This was nearly worldwide. Yeah.
00:43:06
Speaker
Yeah, it was everywhere. Like the dark ages of like England happened during this period. Yeah. And we see it in the like Midwestern tribes too. You see this, not downturn, but like abandoning some of the monumental architecture. It's not that they left exactly. It's just that that lifestyle wasn't working anymore given probably the climate change. So they switched and I think it makes total sense that they might've gone back to a hunter-gatherer thing.
00:43:33
Speaker
Chaco Canyon itself was abandoned between 12 and 1400. Yeah, same time period. Yeah. And that fits completely with the Yavapai story. So, you know, if you have some oral evidence to kind of back it up to it, it makes it even seem, you know, more ugly. Yeah. And if their streams dried up, the rivers dried up or something like that.
00:43:52
Speaker
they just didn't have water, then they probably would have gone somewhere else. So maybe the climate changed so much. And over the course of, you know, 50 to a hundred years, they were just weren't able to grow things that they could. And maybe the animals moved on or there just wasn't enough to support the lifestyle and the population. So.
00:44:08
Speaker
And I feel like this whole like migrating in search of resources idea that fits with the Hopi story, right? The Hopi, their story is more like they always intended to be where they are. Whereas I feel like this might've just been like the natural migration of following resources. Either way, it doesn't matter. The same result happened. So that, I think that's really cool how that could potentially fit with their oral history as well.
00:44:32
Speaker
And all of those things could have happened too. With a climate change situation like this, the bands of people could have scattered and done different things based on preference or what was easier in their area or any of those reasons.
00:44:44
Speaker
So yeah. All right. Well, that's it for today's show. We did see some other, not really archeological yet, but historical sites today. Like we mentioned before, we went to Hoover Dam, which was super cool this morning. We did. I hadn't been there in probably 25 years, just driven by it, but yeah, really cool place to go. Very cool. Full of people. Oh my God, it was so crowded. We actually ended up not walking across the dam because it was so crowded. Yeah. All right. Well, it's time to have another glass of wine and get back on the road. Not in that order.
00:45:14
Speaker
Definitely not in that order. Kind of in that order, but separated by like 12 hours. Yes, sure. Yeah. All right. See you next week. Bye.
00:45:27
Speaker
Thanks for listening to The Archaeology Show. Feel free to comment and view the show notes on the website at www.arcpodnet.com. Find us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at arcpodnet. Music for this show is called, I Wish You Would Look, from the band C Hero. Again, thanks for listening and have an awesome day.
00:45:51
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his RV traveling the United States, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, DigTech LLC, Culturo Media, and the Archaeology Podcast Network, and was edited by Rachel Rodin. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com.