Aztec Ruins National Monument

Chaco Canyon

Over two centuries ancestral Pueblo people at Aztec carefully planned and built a settlement that included an array of large public architecture and smaller structures, earthworks, and ceremonial buildings. Aztec’s extended community rivaled Chaco Canyon, 55 miles south, where a network of structures took shape and flourished between 850 and 1130. Aztec’s first inhabitants were strongly influenced by Chaco in architecture, ceramics, and ceremonial life. At first Aztec may have been an suburb of Chaco, an ancillary place that supported Chaco activities. Or it may have been a center in its own right as Chaco’s regional influence waned after 1100. The population at Aztec ebbed at times but persisted through cycles of drought and cultural changes. Even after several generations, the final layout of the community adhered to a master plan set out by the initial builders in the late 1000s. The people left during the late 1200s, leaving behind well-preserved structures and artifacts that tell of their lives in this region. Today many indigenous peoples of the Southwest are their descendants, maintaining strong cultural and spiritual ties to this site.

An Ancestral Community

It is the river that makes this land hospitable. Rising in the San Juan Mountains to the north, the Animas flows across the plains of northwestern New Mexico. Near the modern city of Aztec, early farmers took advantage of its perennial waters. The "ancestral Pueblo" people, as some of their descendants prefer they be called, had long lived in this area and across the Four Corners region. Sometime late in the 1000s a group planned and began to build a large community on rising ground overlooking the river.

By the time building ceased in the late 1200s, the complex consisted of several great houses, tri-walled kivas, small residential pueblos, earthworks, roads, and great kivas. Far from being an uncontrolled urban sprawl, the formal layout of the settlement, purposeful landscape modifications, and the orientation and visual relationships among the buildings all indicate a grand design. Over two centuries it reached its final physical expression – several generations after the blueprint was conceived and building first began.

Most prominent are the great houses – well planned, public buildings of many connected rooms that surrounded a central plaza. Construction of much larger great houses followed. By 1109; the people began harvesting wood from distant sources to build the largest structure, now known as the West Ruin. This great house took its final form by 1130, after two episodes of stockpiling timber followed by intense construction. The West Ruin resembled the great houses built at Chaco and elsewhere in the Southwest. It consisted of at least 400 contiguous rooms of three stories and numerous kivas – circular ceremonial chambers – including a great kiva in the plaza that was used for community-wide events. The thick, tapering walls consisted of a core of roughly shaped stones and mud mortar sandwiched between dressed sandstone masonry exteriors.

Building continued over the next 150 years on the East Ruin, a great house of similar construction and layout as the West Ruin. They raised walls for scores of smaller structures also, and sculpted the landscape. Earth pedestals elevated the larger buildings, berms formally defined the space surrounding them, and many human-built, linear swales called "roadways" radiated across the area.

In its earlier years the settlement was marked by a strong Chacoan influence, and it prospered as a regional administrative, trade, and ceremonial center. Later, despite periodic droughts and the decline of the far-flung Chacoan social and economic system, its regional prominence persisted as construction and remodeling continued in the Chacoan style.

By the late 1200s the people had moved from Aztec and the Four Corners region. A combination of factors influenced their move – drought, depletion of resources, social changes, religious and political issues, and perhaps the allure of other places. They made their way south and southeast to the better-watered country of the Rio Grande drainage and west into Arizona, where their descendants live today. This site is far from forgotten, however. Many American Indians of the Southwest today maintain deep spiritual ties with this ancestral place through oral tradition, prayer, and ceremony.

Exploring Aztec Ruins

Excavating the Ruins

Contrary to the name, these structures were not built by the Aztecs of central Mexico. The Aztecs in fact lived centuries after the building of this ancestral Pueblo community. Inspired by popular histories about Cortez’s conquest of Mexico and thinking that Aztecs built the structures, early Anglo settlers named the site Aztec. The nearby city eventually took its name from the site.

The first visitor of record was Dr. John S. Newberry, a geologist, in 1859. He found the West Ruin, the largest of the structures at Aztec, in a fair state of preservation, with walls 25 feet high in places and many rooms undisturbed. From the rubble scattered about, he concluded that a large population had once lived here. Newberry saw the ruins before vandals and looters got to them over the next half century. When the anthropologist Lewis H. Morgan investigated the site in 1878, he noted that a quarter of the pueblo’s stones had been carted away by settlers for building material.

A few years later a local teacher and his students saw things their more experienced predecessors had missed. Breaking through a wall, they found a room with human burials and well preserved objects. Other material soon vanished as local explorers broke into rooms untouched for centuries. Not until 1889, when the West Ruin passed into private ownership, did the building become relatively safe from looting. In 1916 the American Museum of Natural History began sponsoring excavations. Seven years later the West Ruin became a national monument. In 1988 the boundaries were expanded to include much of the extended Aztec community.

Earl H. Morris’s archeological work at Aztec will be remembered as long as there is interest in the prehistoric Southwest. He was 25 when he headed up the first systematic dig at Aztec for the American Museum. He spent the next seven seasons excavating and stabilizing the West Ruin, the great kiva, and a few rooms in the East Ruin. He made many finds and was the first to propose that there were two distinct periods of occupation by the ancestral Pueblo. In the 1930s Morris returned to Aztec and supervised the reconstruction of the great kiva, based on his findings during excavation. National Park Service archeologists continued stabilization work and limited excavations after Morris moved on.