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Aztec Ruins National Monument, NM
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Follow ancient passageways to a distant time. Explore West Ruin, a center of ancestral Pueblo society that once housed over 500 masonry rooms. Look up and see original timbers holding up the roof. Search for the fingerprints of ancient workers in the stucco walls. Listen for an echo of ritual drums in the reconstructed “Great Kiva.” Adventure into the past.

Early settlers mistakenly thought that people from the Aztec Empire in Mexico created these striking buildings. They named the site “Aztec,” a misnomer that persisted even after it became clear that the builders were the ancestors of many Southwestern tribes. The people who built at Aztec and other places throughout the Southwest were called “Anasazi” for many years. Archeologists had adopted a word from the Navajo language, that they understood to mean “old people,” and then popularized its use. Most Pueblo people today prefer that we use the term “ancestral Pueblo” to refer to their ancestors. 

Aztec Ruins, built and used over a 200-year period, is the largest ancestral Pueblo community in the Animas River valley. Concentrated on and below a terrace overlooking the Animas River, the people at Aztec built several multi-story buildings called “great houses” and many smaller structures. Associated with each great house was a “great kiva”—a large circular chamber used for ceremonies. Nearby are three unusual “tri-wall” structures—above ground kivas encircled by three concentric walls. In addition, they modified the landscape with dozens of linear swales called “roads,” earthen berms, and platforms.

An interesting 700 yard trail leads visitors through the West Ruin, an excavated great house that had at least 400 interconnected rooms built around an open plaza. Its massive sandstone walls tower over 30 feet. Many rooms contain the original pine, spruce, and aspen beams hauled from distant mountains. Archeologists excavated and reconstructed the Great Kiva in the West Ruin plaza, and it now evokes a sense of the original sacred space.

Aztec Ruins National Monument connects people of the past with people and traditions of today. Many Southwestern American Indians today maintain deep spiritual ties with this ancestral site through oral tradition, prayer, and ceremony. The site offers visitors opportunities to learn about these remarkable people and their descendants and to forge connections with the monument’s timeless landscape and stories.