Cliff Homes and Canyon Life

As recently as the mid-1200s, families lived, worked, and played in Walnut Canyon, tending crops on the rim, traveling to gather food, and collecting water from the canyon bottom as part of their daily routine. Walnut Canyon's farming community flourished between roughly 1125 and 1250, during a time when people across the Southwest were united by corn cultivation and village life, though their architecture, pottery, and tools differed across space and time. Archeologists used these differing traits, which occurred in patterns on the landscape, to describe and label cultural traditions such as Ancestral Puebloan (Anasazi) and Sinagua. Walnut Canyon, with its compact villages of adjoining, rectangular room blocks called pueblos by the Spanish and its plain brown pottery, lies within the heart of the Sinagua tradition.

Arizona · United States