Post by Bob Tregilus

51d

Always fun romping around in the canyon country of SE Utah. You never know what secrets (well, they use to be secrets) one might find.

#Canyon #Desert #Archeology #Abandoned #Ruins #Photography #Darktable

A color landscape photo of a reddish tan sandstone alcove where a small ancient Native-American ruin is built. There's lots of large rocks sticking out of the ground in the foreground. In the back of the alcove are four structures built of native sandstone stones that resemble bricks. The largest one in the back of the cave has a door with roof poles sticking out of the front wall. Two others on the left side are jumbles brick like stones. In front of the one with the door is a round ring of stones. In the center, two poles stick out which is a latter for people to climb down into the room below ground level.

ALT

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51d

@elaterite

Wait - I thought that was one of those photos taken by the Mars rover... and they'd found evidence of life.

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51d

@elaterite
And people lived there! Amazing. Did they have a place to grow crops, farther away? This is all stone, sand, dust. What's the interior like? Are there photos and articles, maybe even diaries, that document how they lived?

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51d

@pascaline Pretty much yes to all your questions. They farmed on top of the mesas & sometimes in the canyon bottoms. Lots of books on the topic of the cliff dwellers & what became of them. People lived in the canyons off & on for over thousand years. The last batch to live there was ~1200CE. Most research suggests it was a time of great struggle with warring tribes &c., & then famine that drove them out. Here's a photo from inside the round kiva (where the two latter rungs stick out) at night.

A color photo of the inside of a cliff alcove showing three Native-American ruins at night. Each has an artificial light near the opening to make it look like people are living there like they did a thousand years ago. There are two in the back of the alcove that a square structures made of native sandstone bricks with door like openings in the front. A third is to the right where a wood latter extends out of an opening in the ground.

ALT

A color landscape photo of the inside of a kiva at night. It is a round underground structure with a roof made of crisscrossing logs with a latter in the middle sticking out of a hole in the roof. There are cubbyholes in two places in the wall behind the latter. The roof is dark from the soot of burning fires inside the kiva.

ALT

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51d

@elaterite
Thanks, this is so interesting!
Wow. The life they had, it must have been hard.
I wonder if this kind of dwellings could somehow be revived.