Hovenweep National Monument preserves six major Ancestral Puebloan village groups in the canyon country of southwestern Colorado and southeastern Utah. Human use of this landscape reaches back to Paleo-Indian and Archaic times, but most surviving masonry pueblos and distinctive stone towers were built between about 1230 and 1275, when roughly 2,500 people lived here within the Mesa Verde branch of the northern San Juan Pueblo world. These communities relied on careful water management, farming, and multipurpose tower structures, some aligned with solar events. Climatic stress and population pressure likely contributed to abandonment in the late 13th century, and the area later gained federal protection after documented looting and vandalism.