Marley Makes 3: 24.05.06 Montezuma Castle, Well and Tuzigoot

Goodness! It's been a very busy week! The Verde Ranch Resort where we are staying has food trucks on site several times a week. We couldn't resist trying a blended coffee ice cream with caramel and chocolate and a Reeses peanut butter cup cookie and chocolate chip cookie while we did laundry.

This day we went exploring ancient ruins. First stop, Montezuma Castle.

Southern Sinagua (Sinagua means “without water”) farmers built this five-story 20-room dwelling sometime between 1100 and 1300. It occupies a cliff recess 100 feet above the valley. Early American settlers marveled at the structure. They assumed that it was Aztec in origin, hence the name Montezuma Castle. A short distance west is Castle A. Now badly deteriorated, it was once an imposing 5-story apartment-like building with about 45 rooms. Occupants found reliable water in the creek and fertile land on the nearby terrace.

There are several single rooms in the cliffs as well.

This photo shows more of the single rooms.

The Diorama depicts the following: The top floor is where elderly lookouts sat and watched for danger. The fourth floor shows a mother scurrying to reach her child. The third floor shows an aging man leading his blind wife and women preparing food, making pottery and grinding corn. The second floor shows weavers. The first floor for storage.

MONTEZUMA WELL

Montezuma Well is a limestone sink hole formed long ago, still fed by continuously flowing springs. About 1,500,000 gallons of water emerge each day from an underground spring. The Southern Sinagua irrigated crops with it’s waters. In places, you can see traces of the lime-coated irrigation ditches. The pit house that you can see dates from about 1050. Southern Sinagua dwellings here range in size from one-room houses to large pueblos. Between the years 1125 and 1400 about 100-150 people lived here.

The ruins of several prehistoric dwellings are scattered in and around the rim of the Well. Their inhabitants belonged to several indigenous American cultures that are believed to have occupied the Verde Valley between 700 and 1425 CE(Common Era meaning the same as AD), archaeologists have termed the Southern Sinagua. The earliest of the ruins located on the property (with the exception of the irrigation canal), a "pithouse" in the traditional Hohokam style, dates to about 1050 CE. More than 50 countable "rooms" are found inside the park boundaries; it is likely that some were used for purposes other than living space, including food storage and religious ceremonies.

The "well" measures 386 feet in diameter from rim to rim. It is 55 feet deep and contains a near-constant volume of spring water even in times of severe drought. The water is highly carbonated and contains high levels of arsenic. At least five species, the most of any spring in the southwestern United States, are found exclusively in Montezuma Well: a diatom (a one-celled plant), the Montezuma Well spring snail, a water scorpion, the Hyalella montezuma amphipod (shrimp looking thing), and the montezuma leech (looks just like what it's called).

The temperature of the water is nearly constant at 74 degrees. There are no fish, only fresh water leeches, and a few other microscopic organisms. In 2006 divers report that fine sand boils up in swirling mounds on the bottom of the well. They put cameras, rovers and sensors into the vents and every piece of equipment they put in was pushed back out.

This is the backside of the well where the water flows into the irrigation canal.

Wet Beaver Creek is a surface water that flows past the well. The irrigation channel does not connect to the creek at any point.

The two largest holes in the dirt floor held the main roof support timbers. The holes around the edge show the outline of the structure where wall posts were placed in the ground.

Around the year 650, 1400 years ago, people began settling in the Verde Valley. Among the oldest structures found in the valley are the pithouses, partially buried dwellings that were the most common form of housing across the southwest between about 4000 years ago and 600 years ago.

The houses were oval in form with a vestibule entry on the east side. They had been constructed by making an excavation about eighteen inches deep, lining the bottom and sides of the pit thus made with plaster which became almost as hard as pottery clay, and roofing it over with a framework of poles on which were laid other poles and brush to form perhaps a flat roof with slightly leaning side walls.

A pit house

Lime-coated irrigation ditches

TUZIGOOT NATIONAL MONUMENT

Tuzigoot (Apache for “crooked water”) is the remnant of a Southern Sinagua village built between 1000 and 1400. It sits atop the summit of a long ridge rising 120 feet above the Verde Valley. The original pueblo was two stories high in places, with 87 ground floor rooms. There were few exterior doors; entry was by ladders through roof openings. The village began as a small cluster of rooms inhabited by about 50 persons or 100 years. In the 1200s the population doubled and then doubled again.