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destination MONTEZUMA CASTLE and a Nearby Spring-fed WELL Yield Clues to 900-year-old SINAGUA INDIAN Life and Culture

"MOM, IT'S GOOD WE DON'T LIVE WAY UP there," said the boy. "I'd never get my skateboard up to my room."

The 35 or so people who did live in the soaring cliff dwelling some 900 years ago had to use ladders made of poles lashed together with yucca or agave fibers to reach the doorways of their five-story, 20-room pueblo.

One of the Southwest's best-preserved ruins, Montezuma Castle looms 90 miles north of Phoenix and just 2 paved miles off Interstate 17. Tucked in a deep recess beneath a sheltering overhang, it looks down 100 feet onto Beaver Creek and the viewing path.

Near the banks of this stream in the hilly Verde Valley, Sinagua Indian villagers grew corn, beans, squash and cotton. The men used creosote resin for securing arrow points to wooden shafts to make spears for hunting, and they carved turkey callers out of animal bones. They collected salt from near present-day Camp Verde and traded for pottery, copper bells and macaws from as far away as Mexico. The women wove cotton into cloth and ground mesquite beans for dinner. The children played, perhaps with the tiny stone "dolls" archaeologists would later discover. At dusk, the families climbed to their rooms to sleep, never dreaming that white men would someday describe their pueblo as so grand it must have been built by Montezuma, ruler of the great Aztec empire in Mexico.

Despite Montezuma Castle's misleading name, neither the emperor nor his people ever heard of the place. The Sinagua Indians occupied the limestone and mortar "castle" during the 12th and 13th centuries, and Montezuma wasn't born until the 15th century. By then, the Sinagua had moved on, perhaps because of overcrowding, farmed-out land or strife, probably joining up with the Hopis and other pueblo peoples.

Nevertheless, the emperor's namesake, a