Tag: Yavapai County

Cliff dwellings.

Top  The “castle” structure at Montezuma Castle National Monument in Yavapai County, Arizona. Miners and soldiers who visited the site in the 1860s mistakenly associated the site with the Aztec ruler Montezuma, and the name stuck. The multiple-dwelling structure was built by Sinaguan people around 1200 CE, and has no direct association with Mexican Indian cultures.

Bottom  Cliff swallow nests, built of mud in a crevice in the white Verde Formation limestone at Montezuma Castle National Monument. Like the ancestral Native Americans who built in the rocks and caves here, the swallows enjoy easy access to the Verde River for building materials, forage for food, and shelter in the rock overhangs. 

Cliff dwellings.

Top  The “castle” structure at Montezuma Castle National Monument in Yavapai County, Arizona. Miners and soldiers who visited the site in the 1860s mistakenly associated the site with the Aztec ruler Montezuma, and the name stuck. The multiple-dwelling structure was built by Sinaguan people around 1200 CE, and has no direct association with Mexican Indian cultures.

Bottom  Cliff swallow nests, built of mud in a crevice in the white Verde Formation limestone at Montezuma Castle National Monument. Like the ancestral Native Americans who built in the rocks and caves here, the swallows enjoy easy access to the Verde River for building materials, forage for food, and shelter in the rock overhangs. 

I have a lifelong love of dioramas, going back to the shoebox worlds I would make on rainy weekends at my grandmother’s house. She was an elementary school teacher, and had a practically unlimited store of paper and glue and ideas and patience for keeping young children occupied. My diorama making reached its peak in fourth grade at Olive Branch School, when I crafted a relief map of the geologic provinces of Virginia with salt dough and tempera paint. A masterpiece!

These photos are of an actual masterpiece of the art. In 1951 public ladder tours of the cliff dwellings at Montezuma Castle National Monument in central Arizona were discontinued to prevent further damage to the ruins. The National Park Service Museum Laboratory in D.C. made this cut-away model to give visitors a sense of what the interior of the structure looks like, and offer an interpretive glimpse of what life was like for its inhabitants. 

At historical sites dioramas sometimes become important artifacts in their own right, preserving the best understanding of events or of the archaeological evidence at hand at the time, and rendering the cultural assumptions of the era when they were made in 3-D. 

I have a lifelong love of dioramas, going back to the shoebox worlds I would make on rainy weekends at my grandmother’s house. She was an elementary school teacher, and had a practically unlimited store of paper and glue and ideas and patience for keeping young children occupied. My diorama making reached its peak in fourth grade at Olive Branch School, when I crafted a relief map of the geologic provinces of Virginia with salt dough and tempera paint. A masterpiece!

These photos are of an actual masterpiece of the art. In 1951 public ladder tours of the cliff dwellings at Montezuma Castle National Monument in central Arizona were discontinued to prevent further damage to the ruins. The National Park Service Museum Laboratory in D.C. made this cut-away model to give visitors a sense of what the interior of the structure looks like, and offer an interpretive glimpse of what life was like for its inhabitants. 

At historical sites dioramas sometimes become important artifacts in their own right, preserving the best understanding of events or of the archaeological evidence at hand at the time, and rendering the cultural assumptions of the era when they were made in 3-D.