Water, shelter, building materials, arable land, and other environmental conditions made the Verde Valley an ideal place to live. Montezuma Castle was part of a larger community that included rooms there and in Castle A. The loose stones at the top of the small hill are the remnants of eight to ten pueblo rooms. Because of the valley’s bountiful resources, scattered small farming villages developed from roughly 600 to 1100, followed by larger settlements like the Castle complex. By 1200, communities extended all along the Verde River and its tributaries, whose floodplains supported crop cultivation. These drainages also served as travel corridors, connecting perhaps 6,000 people in the valley to large populations to the northeast and south. In choosing where to live, people used the natural landscape to their advantage and built a variety of dwellings. In earlier times, pit houses, semi-subterranean homes, were common. Later, small alcoves like those at Montezuma Well were walled off for dwellings and storage. Mesas and hilltops provided space for large pueblos like Tuzigoot, and farmers built informal structures near their fields for shelter during planting and harvest. Around 1300, the Verde Valley had at least 40 large villages, related dwellings, and farmlands, forming a complex settlement network. Much of this record of human activity is now lost to land development, erosion, and major flood events. The rebuilt pueblo at Tuzigoot National Monument and the dwellings at Montezuma Well were in use at the same time as the Castle, and all were part of the Verde Valley’s network of settlements around 1300.