Aztec Ruins National Monument
National Monument · Aztec, New Mexico
Nineteenth-century settlers assumed the ruins on the Animas River had been built by Aztecs, which they had not, and the name stuck to both the town and the monument. What is actually here is a Chacoan great house of around four hundred rooms raised between about 1100 and 1130 on the Chaco template, later reoccupied by people from the Mesa Verde region who rebuilt and repartitioned it. The reason to come is the Great Kiva: excavated by Earl Morris in the 1920s and fully reconstructed by him in 1934, it is the only restored great kiva anywhere in the national park system that visitors can walk down into, roofed and floored as it would have been. Elsewhere on the half-mile trail you pass through original rooms with 900-year-old roof beams overhead, and a band of green sandstone laid deliberately into the west wall for no structural reason anyone has explained. Salmon Ruins, an unreconstructed great house, is ten minutes away, and the two in either order teach each other.
725 Ruins Road, Aztec, New Mexico, 87410, United States
Open daily 9 AM - 5 PM. Closed Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year's.
Aztec Ruins National Monument on Spottos · Explore more places on Spottos