Ancient Peoples of the Canyon Country

People have lived in the canyon country around Moab for for many thousands of years. The earliest inhabitants moved through the Colorado Plateau in small family groups, following game and gathering wild plants across a territory they knew with precision. Around two thousand years ago, people in this region began farming, planting corn and squash in the river bottomland and building storage structures in the cliff overhangs above the canyon floors.

The Moab area sits at the meeting point of two distinct ancient cultural traditions. The Fremont people, who lived in central and eastern Utah from roughly the early centuries of the common era until about thirteen hundred, built small villages along river valleys and left behind rock art featuring distinctive human figures with tapered limbs and elaborate headdresses. The Ancestral Puebloans, whose great communities were centered farther south at Mesa Verde and Chaco Canyon, also left granaries and pit houses in the cliff faces of the canyon country near Moab.

By around thirteen hundred of the common era, both cultures had largely withdrawn from southeastern Utah. Climate change, sustained drought, and social disruption pushed people toward other regions. The Ute people, who were living in the canyon country when Spanish and American explorers arrived in the seventeen hundreds and eighteen hundreds, have lived in the region since about the time the earlier cultures were departing, and built a distinct civilization of their own.

The rock art panels that visitors encounter near Moab layer all of these periods one above another: Fremont figures, Ancestral Puebloan images, and later Ute additions, a visual archive written across the same canyon walls over several thousand years.