The Sinagua at Walnut Canyon

About ten miles southeast of Flagstaff, a canyon drops suddenly into the earth. Walnut Canyon is roughly four hundred feet deep, cut through limestone and sandstone by a seasonal creek that has been running long enough to carve amphitheaters in its walls. Those natural alcoves were exactly what the Sinagua people were looking for when they settled the canyon around eleven hundred CE.

The name Sinagua comes from the Spanish for 'without water,' a name archaeologist Harold Colton gave the people in nineteen thirty-nine, echoing the Spanish name for the nearby San Francisco Peaks. The people they were naming had in fact mastered water: they were skilled dry farmers who grew corn, beans, and squash in a region where rainfall was irregular and the soil forgave almost nothing. Their trade networks reached the Gulf of Mexico and, by some accounts, Central America, exchanging woven cotton and baskets for copper bells, macaw feathers, and shell ornaments.

In the canyon, they built their homes under the overhanging limestone ledges, each dwelling roughly two meters high and six meters long, just large enough for a family's sleeping and cooking needs. The overhang served as both roof and insulation, keeping the rooms cool in summer and retaining heat in winter. There were more than eighty such structures in the canyon.

Around twelve hundred and fifty CE, the Sinagua abandoned Walnut Canyon. No one knows exactly why. Scholars point to drought, to conflict with neighboring peoples, to the slow depletion of local timber that would have powered their fires. Several Hopi clans trace their ancestry to Sinagua communities. What the Sinagua built in the canyon walls they did not destroy or dismantle; they simply left, and the limestone held everything in place until the archaeologists arrived.