Elden Pueblo: A Sinagua Trading Hub at the Foot of the San Francisco Peaks

Just north of Flagstaff, at the base of the San Francisco Peaks, the ruins of Elden Pueblo mark a village that Sinagua people built and occupied from roughly ten seventy to twelve seventy-five. At its height the site housed two hundred to three hundred people in sixty to seventy rooms, making it a substantial settlement by the standards of the Colorado Plateau.

What distinguished Elden Pueblo was trade. Archaeologists have found macaw skeletons that originated in Mexico, shell jewelry from the California coast, and ceramics from dozens of regional traditions. The site sat at a crossroads of exchange networks that stretched across the entire Southwest. Elden Pueblo, which the Hopi call Pasiwvi, is now protected as a heritage site where archaeologists have run public programs. Visitors can walk among the partially excavated rooms and examine the kind of seven-hundred-year-old trade network that connected the ancient world of the interior Southwest. The site was found by Mary-Russell Ferrell Colton, and her husband Harold Colton first called it Sheep Hill Pueblo. In nineteen twenty-six the archaeologist Jesse Walter Fewkes excavated here and shipped skeletons and pots to the Smithsonian, and Harold Colton argued with him publicly in the journal Science and in Arizona newspapers. That fight helped bring about the Arizona Antiquities Act of nineteen twenty-seven and the founding of the Northern Arizona Society of Science and Art.