DONATE TODAY
Trip 1: The A.D. 1200s |
Castle Rock Pueblo Occupied |
The Mystery for Trip 1: Archaeologists are always looking for clues about the past. Gather clues during your trip to the A.D. 1200s to solve this mystery: What happened to the ancestral Puebloan people? |
||
Site Description Castle Rock Pueblo is located in McElmo Canyon in southwestern Colorado. The canyon cuts through layers of red sandstone along the northern edge of the Sleeping Ute Mountain. This part of Colorado is a beautiful high desert area that was home to the ancestral Puebloan people, also known as the Anasazi, for many hundreds of years. |
||
Many people are familiar with the beautiful ancestral Puebloan villages of Mesa Verde National Park. These large, adobe-and-stone villages were built in the A.D. 1200s. They are called cliff dwellings because they are located in cave-like alcoves in the faces of the sandstone cliffs. Cliff Palace is one of the largest and most famous of these ancient villages. Castle Rock Pueblo was built and occupied at the same time as the Mesa Verde cliff dwellings, but the people who built Castle Rock Pueblo did not choose a large alcove for the site of their village. Instead, they constructed their village around the base of the Castle Rock butte. A few buildings were even built on top of the butte. |
||
Castle Rock Pueblo had approximately 40 to 60 rooms. Click here if you would like to see a map. The village also included kivas, towers, and plazas. Based on the number of rooms and kivas at Castle Rock Pueblo, Crow Canyon archaeologists believe that about 75 to 100 people lived in this village. The people of the Castle Rock Pueblo community may have lived in family or clan groups, similar to people living in Pueblo villages today. These families were probably part of a very tight-knit group that worked together to live in this desert environment. |
||
The story of the ancestral Puebloans who lived at Castle Rock Pueblo is told through the objects they left behind and through the oral traditions of modern Puebloan people. Archaeologists study both of these things to learn about the people who lived in the Mesa Verde region long ago. |
||
|
|
|
|
Trip 1
|
Trip 2 
|
Trip 3 
|