Around AD 1250, families came together around the head of Sand Canyon to build a large and compact village. A thick, one-story-tall, U-shaped wall surrounded hundreds of square rooms, round kivas, and community structures including a plaza, a large D-shaped structure, and a great kiva.

The village seems designed for defense--perhaps due to regional strife over dwindling resources. A spring was at the heart of the village, giving residents exclusive access to their all-important water source. The thick stone outer wall had small, angled peepholes and a few doorways. the towers built against the outside face of the wall also provided good lookouts that could only be entered from inside the village.

By AD 1275, Sand Canyon Pueblo was about three times the size of Cliff Palace (the largest pueblo in Mesa Verde National Park). Some 600 people--healthy, judged by the standards of their time--had lived for a generation or more in the village. They depended on rain-fed cornfields. The corn fed families and their sizable flocks of turkeys.

AD 1276 saw the onset of a severe, long-term drought. Corn crops were poor or failed completely. Elk and deer were scarce, so they hunted rabbits, rodents, birds, and even carnivores. Some villagers migrated shortly after the drought set in; others stayed, trying to outlast the harsh conditions.

Sometime after AD 1277, Sand Canyon Pueblo suffered a devastating attack, probably by other Pueblo people competing for meager, declining resources. Many residents were killed and soon after, the survivors migrated from the region. The spirits of the ancestors have been the pueblo's only occupants for more than 700 years.

When is a "Kiva" not a Kiva?

Contrary to popular belief, most ancient "kivas" were not exclusively religious structures. Kivas in modern Pueblos are truly sacred spaces and are used mainly for ceremonies. But the round, sunken rooms here (and in many other Ancestral Puebloan archaeological sites) contain pots, tools, and other common household items--clear signs of daily domestic activity. Nearly every hearth at Sand Canyon Pueblo was found in a "kiva," not in the rectangular rooms above ground. They were centers for family life, especially during cold seasons.

Large Canyon Rim Village

The large thirteenth-century village of Sand Canyon Pueblo, containing 420 rooms and 90 kivas is known as a canyon-rim community because it is wrapped around the upper edge of a deep canyon and embraced a natural spring. Plazas, great kivas, and D-shaped structures were often incorporated into large sites like Sand Canyon Pueblo and served as places where villagers from the surrounding area could gather for public ceremonies and community activities. Other common elements include north-south orientation, a peripheral enclosing wall, and a bilateral layout with two parts of the site separated by a drainage. Sand Canyon Pueblo clearly demonstrates a change from the building of earlier homes near agricultural fields to constructing larger, planned village sites around springs. Population during Pueblo III times was probably at its highest from AD 1225-1250, but tree0ring dates indicate that some construction continued into the 1270s. Migration out of the area may have been ongoing for 30 years, but then accelerated, and by AD 1285 the Ancestral Puebloans had moved south into northern New Mexico and Arizona.

The Sand Canyon Pueblo Project

The Sand Canyon Pueblo Project involved a partnership between the Bureau of Land Management and Crow Canyon Archaeological Center with generous private and public funding. After almost 25 years of planning, excavation, analysis, report writing, and curation, Crow Canyon staff created a detailed account of the ancient village and its residents. Their findings shed light on the rapid depopulation of this area around AD 1285.

All artifacts, samples, and records resulting from excavations at Sand Canyon Pueblo are curated at the BLM Anasazi Heritage Center in Dolores, Colorado, and are available for study.