Just below Wupatki Pueblo, a low stone wall encloses a sunken, oval-shaped basin. Excavated and reconstructed in 1965 by the National Park Service, this is Wupatki’s ball court, a site where the pueblo’s residents played the ritual games of Arizona’s Hohokam people and ancient Mesoamerican cultures. It’s the northernmost such structure ever found.
Recent rains have transformed the ball court’s normally dry, bare earth into an ephemeral pond. Tipped by small purple flowers, clusters of silverleaf nightshades sprout through shallow water colored red by the sandstone dirt. The ball court now resembles a floating garden, and if the water lingers long enough or additional monsoon rains fall, it might soon come alive with small toads and three-eyed crustaceans commonly known as dinosaur shrimp, which hatch from buried eggs that can lie dormant for decades.
The brief burst of life is a reminder: Wupatki endures as a living place.
Celebrating its centennial this year, Wupatki National Monument is best known for the remains of pueblos built more than 900 years ago, including the three-story, 100-room structure that gives the monument its name. Less than an hour’s drive, but nearly a millennium away, from downtown Flagstaff, the monument is a place to discover a Southwestern community where, for decades, people dry-farmed corn, beans and squash while trading with distant tribes.
From Wupatki, the cinematic view sweeps across desert grasslands, dried almost to white and studded by widely spaced junipers, and ranges from the silhouette of the San Francisco Peaks to the distant shadows of the Hopi mesas. There’s virtually nothing to remind you of 2024, and the view is unchanged from the one described nearly 90 years ago by Courtney Reeder Jones. In 1938, she moved to Wupatki when her new husband, David, began serving as the monument’s custodian — the equivalent of a modern-day Park Service superintendent.
“It really was beautiful country,” she wrote in an unpublished memoir quoted in the book Letters From Wupatki. “There was gorgeous red rock with black cinders, plus the beautiful gray-green bushes, and a volcano that we could see out of one window was a lovely plum color. We could sit on the rock at the top of our ladder and look out across the Painted Desert, which was always changing colors whenever there were clouds.”
The view is timeless, and the monument’s multi-room pueblos — including Wupatki, Citadel, Lomaki and Wukoki — survive from a distant past almost beyond our comprehension. But 13 federally recognized tribes remain connected to the monument’s structures, as well as its 35,222 acres of grasslands, sandstone outcrops and volcanic fields laid down by the eruption of nearby Sunset Crater.
Hopi clans have deep ancestral ties to the pueblos, while the Pueblo of Zuni’s oral traditions prominently feature the Wupatki area. The monument borders the Navajo Nation, and as recently as the past decade, one last Navajo family remained on the land.
Now the program manager for the Park Service’s Washington Tribal Historic Preservation Office, Lloyd Masayumptewa has worked at national monuments throughout Northern Arizona: Wupatki, Navajo, Walnut Canyon and Sunset Crater Volcano. He’s served as superintendent at Hubbell Trading Post National Historic Site and, most recently, at Montezuma Castle and Tuzigoot national monuments. But as a member of the Hopi Water-Coyote Clan with a background in archaeology, Masayumptewa has ties to Wupatki that are both personal and professional.
“When I was a kid, we went through there at least a couple of times that I recall,” he says. “The elders in the village would talk about these places where our ancestors migrated through, lived for a while and then moved on from before eventually coming to what is called the center of our universe, which is out on Hopi [tribal land].
“Being out at these places makes me feel whole. Because the connection to our people is immense, and that connection is alive. We’ve never forgotten.”
Although Wupatki’s documented human history dates back at least 13,000 years, the U.S. government knew little about the region until 1851, when U.S. Army Corps of Topographical Engineers officer Lorenzo Sitgreaves set out on the first systematic survey of the area. His primary mission was to assess the navigability of the Zuni River as part of a route to California.
While the expedition failed to establish that route, Sitgreaves and his men completed other research. As the expedition continued west, they noticed evidence of past human occupation. First the expedition identified old trails and began to spot increasing numbers of potsherds before passing the modest remnants of structures. Then, after traversing the cinder fields of Sunset Crater, the expedition arrived at Wupatki Pueblo.
“In a number of places, we passed the ruins of old Pueblos,” expedition naturalist Dr. Samuel Washington Woodhouse wrote. “One of these [was] built on a ridge. They were four stories high and built of red sandstone cemented with clay. The joists were of cedar, and most of them rotten. Nearly all the walls [have] fallen. The metates or stones on which they grind their corn were still to be seen, and much broken pottery.”
Around 1085, Sunset Crater — known to the Hopis as Palatso, or “Red Hill” — erupted and spewed lava 850 feet into the air, creating a cloud of ash that rose 5 miles into the sky. Lava and volcanic ash covered a 900-square-mile area in a region then only populated with scattered settlements. If we’re accustomed to thinking of natural events of this magnitude as endings, the eruption at Sunset Crater marked a beginning. Because Wupatki is a kind of anti-Pompeii.
While Mount Vesuvius ended life at that city, Wupatki would flourish in the generations after Sunset Crater’s eruption, seeing the construction of pueblos far more impressive than any structures previously built in the area. The eruption coincided with a period of increased rain, and the volcanic ash and cinders left an inches-deep layer of cover that held moisture better than the area’s bare sandstone, enhancing farming prospects.
More than 2,000 people lived within 50 miles of Wupatki during a heyday that lasted for more than a century. A document for the Getty Trust’s Ancient Worlds Now initiative concluded that “there was no other pueblo like Wupatki. It was in all probability the tallest, largest, and perhaps the richest and most influential pueblo in the region.”
Nearly 175 years after the Sitgreaves expedition, park ranger Lauren Carter leads the way through Wupatki Pueblo. The day is warm, but a steady breeze keeps things cool as a hummingbird moth briefly lights atop my hat.
Unlike such nearby cliff dwellings as Montezuma Castle and Walnut Canyon, Wupatki Pueblo isn’t tucked into an alcove; instead, it rises in an exposed area. But its builders did take advantage of a natural sandstone outcrop, which they used as the pueblo’s structural backbone.
Separate from Indigenous oral traditions, Wupatki’s story is quite literally told in fragments: in the fine volcanic gravel strewn across the landscape; in the slabs of Moenkopi Sandstone, Kaibab Limestone and basalt used to build the structures; and in the bits of pottery still strewn around parts of the pueblo.
Stopping at one mound, Carter says, “This hill is a midden pile. Like a trash pile, but if you look closely, there are pottery fragments. The whole hill is just filled with artifacts. But if there’s no reason for us to collect anything, the thinking is, ‘Let’s preserve things as they are.’ ”
Carter says the monument protects nearly 2,700 archaeological sites — everything from toolmaking sites, to spots where someone might have accidentally dropped a pot, to the pueblo, to the impressive petroglyph panels at Crack-in-Rock and Horseshoe Mesa. “The history here is so rich that there’s simply not an inch of ground that hasn’t had a human foot on it,” she says.
For much of its history, Wupatki was a ceremonial and trade center, a place where cultures converged. It sat near or along ancient travel routes, including the Little Colorado River, and trails between the Hopi mesas and the high country of the San Francisco Peaks. The turquoise, shell jewelry and remains of scarlet macaws — Wupatki had the most skeletal parrot remains of any Southwestern site — suggest how extensive the trade network was.
As revealed by both intact pottery and broken fragments, Wupatki had no dominant ceramic style and instead reflected the influences of three Southwestern cultures: the Sinagua, Cohonina and Kayenta peoples. The pueblo’s masonry shows varied influences, too.
“The masonry is one of the pieces of evidence that this was a big trading center for ideas and objects,” Carter says. “Because some of the rooms have the one line of different kind of rock, which is a Chacoan influence, as well as stone chinking within the walls. But not all of them do. And so, yeah, there’s definitely a mixture of architectural styles.”
Wupatki’s flowering was relatively brief — probably less than 150 years. At one time, a false narrative — that Ancestral Puebloans had mysteriously disappeared from such villages — took hold. But the likely actual story of Wupatki’s abandonment is far less exotic: The climate became drier, farming grew more challenging, and residents gradually moved to places with more favorable conditions.
For some 500 years, into the 19th century, Wupatki remained unoccupied, except for the Hopi and Havasupai traders and hunters who occasionally passed through. By the time John Wesley Powell visited in 1885 and described the pueblos in his 1891 account Explorations in Stone Villages, Navajo sheepherders had settled in the Wupatki area after returning from the notorious Long Walk, when the American government forcibly relocated tribal members to marginal lands in New Mexico.
By the early 1900s, Wupatki drew the attention of archaeologists, notably Dr. Jesse Walter Fewkes of the Smithsonian Institution’s Bureau of American Ethnology. He mapped and identified most of the major structures. But around that time, pothunters intent on selling artifacts increasingly violated the sites. As described by Lisa Rappoport, who edited Letters From Wupatki, other plunderers sometimes lined up pots crafted hundreds of years earlier and used them for target practice. And bootleggers fired their stills by burning roof timbers stripped from the pueblos.
In one account, a medicine man told the wife of Navajo herder Peshlakai Etsidi that “her recurring bad dreams and ongoing illnesses were the direct result of the disturbed ancestral spirits, whose graves were being progressively uncovered by white pothunters and amateur archaeologists.”
Wupatki’s growing vulnerability inspired Fewkes, Museum of Northern Arizona founder Harold Colton and archaeologist J.C. Clarke to push for national monument designation. With support from Flagstaff residents, some of whom saw Wupatki’s potential for tourism, President Calvin Coolidge officially established Wupatki National Monument in December 1924. “The new reservation … contains two groups of prehistoric ruins built by the ancestors of one of the most picturesque tribes of Indians still surviving in the United States, the Hopi or People of Peace,” the Department of the Interior declared.
Elias Butler
Even under Wupatki’s new status, it was a very different era in historic preservation. Carter points out sections where the pueblo’s walls were reconstructed using concrete, instead of mortar. And she shows the nearby “apartment” where David and Courtney Reeder Jones lived in their first years at Wupatki. In a decision unimaginable by today’s standards, the Park Service converted two pueblo rooms into the custodian’s residence.
Within the 900-year-old walls, the couple are the picture of domestic bliss in photos of an apron-wearing Courtney cooking in the kitchen and David working at a living room desk. “This is such a nice little house in the ruin,” Courtney wrote in 1938. “We will take pictures of the inside soon so you can see the ‘oldest inhabited house in the United States.’ ”
Keeping up with these Joneses wouldn’t have been especially difficult. The couple climbed a ladder to enter the apartment through a 4-foot-tall, “T”-shaped doorway. “They used propane for the stove and had no running water,” Carter says, “but at that time, the spring was still flowing, so water was available nearby. No electricity, though.”
The Joneses later moved into the Stone House, a low-slung Pueblo Revival structure designed by noted Park Service architect Cecil Doty. The rustic house — part of a national historic district that includes the Doty-designed, 1960s-vintage visitors center built during the Park Service’s Mission 66 initiative — manages to have an almost modernist look. Despite the comforts it would offer, David wrote, “We shall not move out of the quarters in the ruin without misgivings.”
While the Joneses befriended their Navajo neighbors, American Indians had no voice in the monument’s management. Jones’s successor as custodian quickly ordered virtually all Navajos off the land. Stella Peshlakai Smith, Wupatki’s last remaining Navajo resident, was born before the monument was established and had a lifetime residency permit. Her death in recent years ended one part of the monument’s history.
“In the past, the parks generally did what they wanted to do and disregarded the concerns of the tribes,” Masayumptewa says. “They developed visitor centers and put in sidewalks without considering burial sites. The National Historic Preservation Act of 1966 was the catalyst for making sure that we do consult with tribal governments. Now, the tribes can work with the parks to find alternatives. Not only that, the parks can better obtain tribal stories and then tell a more accurate story about these places.”
Wupatki’s century as a national monument, then, is but one brief chapter in an ancient story that continues to unfold.
“I hope visitors appreciate who lived at Wupatki,” Masayumptewa says. “Just how long people have been in the area, and an understanding that their descendants are connected to these places. A lot of Pueblo folks are still around. This is where our clans came from. They’re the reason why we are alive, why we’re here today.”
To learn more about Wupatki National Monument, call 928-679-2365or visit nps.gov/wupa.