Bandelier's Ancestors

The cliff above you has holes in it. The holes are not natural. They were cut by hand, using stone tools, into volcanic tuff so soft that a person can scratch it with a fingernail. The rooms carved into the cliff face and the masonry pueblos built against it were inhabited between eleven fifty and sixteen hundred of the Common Era, a period of roughly four hundred years.

Then the people who lived here left.

Archaeologists describe what happened next as a voluntary migration, driven by drought, resource depletion, shifting political alliances, and the gradual movement of population centers toward the Rio Grande valley. The phrasing "voluntary migration" contains a kind of ambiguity: voluntary in the sense that no single catastrophic event drove anyone out, but also voluntary in the way that leaving a place where the springs have dried and the firewood is gone is voluntary.

The people who left Frijoles Canyon did not disappear. Their descendants are the Pueblo peoples of Northern New Mexico and Arizona. The Eight Northern Pueblos Council, which represents Tewa-speaking Pueblo nations including Ohkay Owingeh and San Ildefonso, considers Bandelier part of their ancestral homeland. The park's interpretive materials reflect this connection, noting that contemporary Pueblo communities maintain oral traditions about the canyon settlements and their relationship to living Pueblo identity.

Walking down into Frijoles Canyon is walking into the domestic life of communities that still exist two hundred miles away. The kiva depressions in the canyon floor were ceremonial spaces. The smoke-blackened ceilings in the carved cliff rooms are from cooking fires. The petroglyph panels along the canyon walls include imagery that continues in Pueblo artistic tradition.

The ancestors of living people made this place and left it. The separation is four hundred and fifty to eight hundred years old, depending on the room. It is not long.