Some nine hundred years ago, life at a rock shelter centered on stored corn, seasonal gathering, hunting, gardening, pottery making, painting, and toolmaking. The smell of burning pinyon filled the air, and a family still ate corn meal mush from the previous season's harvest as fall approached and the time neared to gather pinyon nuts and walnuts. In the shelter's shade, a young woman coiled clay into a bowl while her grandmother painted a bold black design on a clay jar. Two men returned to the cliff carrying bows and arrows along with rabbits and a turkey, hoping to kill a deer as well. In the flood plain below, a woman tended a garden of large corn plants after a wet summer. An older man painted a lizard-man on the shelter ceiling and said that this was the way people looked in the beginning, while below the shelter a young boy practiced making an arrow point by striking rock against rock.