Honanki Heritage Site: The Largest Cliff Dwelling in Red Rock Country
Near Sedona, Arizona
A few miles from Palatki rises its larger companion, Honanki, Hopi for bear house. The same archaeologist, Jesse Walter Fewkes, studied and named it in eighteen ninety-five, and a tree ring pulled from one of its roof beams dates to the year twelve seventy-one. The Sinagua occupied Honanki from roughly eleven thirty to twelve eighty, and at its height it was one of the largest cliff dwellings in red rock country, with something like sixty to seventy ground floor rooms and perhaps two hundred people living against the cliff.
After the Sinagua moved on, the Yavapai and Apache used the site, adding their own paintings to walls already crowded with older art, images that together stretch across centuries. Honanki is easier to reach than Palatki. There are no reservations required, and a short self guided loop takes you past the rooms and the pictographs, though the rough forest road usually calls for a high clearance vehicle or one of the pink jeeps that have carried visitors into this backcountry since nineteen sixty.
Standing here, you feel how long people have called these cliffs home.
