Montezuma Castle & Well04-23-2009
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Motezuma Castle perched high above the Verde Valley floor.
Cliff structures have survived better than those on mesa's such as Tuzigoot...
For scale: a park ranger ascends a ladder to do some archeological...
| Montezuma’s Castle is a cliff dwelling about 12 miles from Tuzigoot further down the Verde River. The same people inhabited this dwelling as were living in Tuzigoot and over the same time period of 1000 to 1400 CE. This cliff house contained 19 rooms and was 4 stories high. Probably about 35 to 50 people lived here at any one time. It is estimated that about 8,000 people lived in the various small villages scattered throughout the Verde Valley at the height of the 400 years they were here. At the base of the cliff are the remains of a much larger collection of rooms that probably housed several hundred people. This cliff is along side the Verde River which was important for growing corn, squash, beans and cotton. People who lived in cliff houses built in existing caves and usually used ladders to get in and out. This afforded extra security in case of attack… simply pull up the ladder and then drop rocks down on the attackers. Of course, it was hard work carrying all the rocks, logs and mud up to the cliff side cave to build the walls of the structure. The name Montezuma Castle and Montezuma Well were given by the Spaniard explorers when they came across these deserted ruins in the late 1500’s. They mistakenly thought that this marked the northern reaches of the Aztec empire which they had suppressed in Central America. However, Montezuma (the Aztec emperor) had nothing to do with these people or these dwellings. Unfortunately the name has stuck. It was also not a Castle. We now call these people the Sinagus (Spanish for without water), since they lived in such a dry climate and we have no way of knowing what they called themselves. This area of the world was first populated 14,000 years ago by ancient man. At that time, wooly mammoths and saber-toothed tigers roamed what is today the American southwest and west coast. It was a much wetter climate. These very ancient people came across from Asia over the Bearing Straight which is the point in northwestern Alaska that reaches closest to Asia-Russia and during the last Ice Age was crossable on foot. The ancestors of the Sanigua people represent a second crossing probably around 4,000 years ago and possibly came by crude boats. These people went on to become the indigenous populations throughout the Americas (North, Central and South America). Montezuma’s Well is another cliff dwelling about 4 miles up the Verde River from Montezuma’s Castle. This one in a huge natural well created 2 million years ago when a limestone cavern collapsed. Fresh water still rises up into the well at a rate of 1.4 million gallons per day and runs out of the cauldron through a crack in the side. The Sinagua people built cliff dwellings in the walls of the well and along its inside shore. The dug a canal for the water escaping on the other side of the crack and used this as a source of irrigation. For more on Tuzigoot, Montezuma’s Well & Castle and the Sinagua people visit www.nps/tuzi and www.nps/moca. |
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