Salmon Ruins is a small but interesting Ancient Puebloan site close to Broomfield.
Aztec Ruins is also an Ancient Puebloan site but has much more to see including a marvellous reconstructed Great Kiva and interconnected rooms within the Great House to explore.
Shiprock is an impressive volcanic formation, well worth a detour.
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Before leaving Broomfield, where we had stayed in order to visit Chaco Canyon, we visited Salmon Ruins which is on the outskirts of the town. It was an outlier site to Chaco and has all the usual features of a Great House: interconnected rooms - more than 300, small kivas, a plaza and a great kiva. Excellent notes on the buildings are provided.
We spent a bout an hour looking at the Ancient Puebloan Ruins and also briefly visited the replicas of a Navajo sweat lodge, petroglyphs and pictographs, the remains of the Salmon family homestead and the museum. The Salmon family preserved the Great House ruins, protecting them for future generations.
The Great House was occupied from 1088 to 1263 when it was abandoned after a major fire. The building style is similar to the techniques used in Chaco, especially the beautiful smooth stone-built walls with an infill of rubble which allowed the buildings to rise to two or more storeys.
The northern wall of the settlement is aligned to the Lunar Standstill, as at Chetro Ketl in Chaco. The Lunar Standstill cycle takes 18 years and six months to complete and is the time it takes between the moon rising at its point furthest north, furthest south then back to furthest north again.
Though there are now quite a few kivas at Salmon Ruins, originally there was only the Great Kiva in the plaza and Tower Kiva. By 1150 the Chacoans had left the settlement and settlers from Mesa Verde were inhabiting the rooms. These new inhabitants converted , some square rooms into circular kivas.
The pueblo developed around the Tower Kiva which was built in 1088. It had a square firepit behind which would probably have been a deflector, a low wall or stone slab to protect the fire from draughts from a ventilator shaft. aligned with the ventilator shaft and the firepit, but at the other end of the kiva, was a small hole on the ground called a Sipapu. The Sipapu symbolises the hole through which the earliest ancestors of the Puebloans were "born" into this world. THere are also two rectangular floor vaults, one on each side of the firepit. It's not absolutely clear what these were for, possibly as drums to be used during ceremonies. The kiva was accessed via a ladder through a hole in the flat roof.
There are quite a few kivas built by later inhabitants into the square rooms. These were apparently not just used for ceremonial purposes but also for everyday tasks such as grinding grain.
The plaza is large and would have been the site of communal activities such as public ceremonies. Within the plaza is the Great Kiva which had similar features to the Tower Kiva but these have been covered over with soil to prevent deterioration. These include a bench, firepit and two floor vaults. The bases of four roof support columns are still visible.
The Great Kiva had an antechamber which was reached by a stairway. This relatively small room contained three hearths, probably used to prepare food for use in ceremonies.
A Great House with many rooms, several T-shaped doorways, especially onto the central plaza, small kivas and a fully restored Great Kiva on the plaza. The trail guide is very good.
Aztec was named by much later settlers who discovered it in ruins and assumed it had been built by Aztec people from Mexico.
The Great House was the usual D-shape wrapped around the plaza. The straight side of the D was not open but consisted of a line of connected rooms. The Kiva sat centrally in the plaza, close to this boundary.
These are the ruins of Aztec West, there is also Aztec East which is largely unexcavated.
Aztec West is the largest Great House here with three storeys and at least 400 rooms. When found by geologist John S. Newberry in 1859 walls upto 25 feet high in places were still standing and many rooms were undisturbed.
The complex was built around 1100 AD in the Chacoan style. A grand plan for the whole of this settlement close to the Animas River was conceived at the outset. It took around 20-30 years to complete most of the work.1
Aztec Ruins was a Chacoan outlier settlement, influenced by the architecture, crafts and culture of the Chacoans, residing 55 miles south in Chaco Canyon.
The settlement was abandoned in the late 1200s.
We went first to the reconstructed Great Kiva. It was really interesting to see this after seeing so many kiva ruins! It is 40 feet in diameter, partially below ground. There was evidence for everything that can be seen in the Great Kiva, nothing has been added.1
The Great Kiva had two entrances, one in the south side and one through a raised antechamber in the north side. Sets of stone steps led down from the entrances.
This Great Kiva is possibly unique in having an encircling series of exterior rooms reached by timber ladders embedded into the walls with doorways above.
A bench runs around the walls.
There were four pillars to support the timber roof made from alternating masonry and horizontal timber poles. A set of limestone discs were found beneath the bases of the pillars. Limestone is not local so would have been specially brought to the settlement for this purpose.1
A hearth is a typical feature of a kiva along with a hole in the timber roof to allow the smoke to escape. In this kiva, as in others we had seen, for instance at Chaco and Salmon Ruins, there are floor vaults, one either side of the hearth. It is not known what these floor vaults were used for. They could have been used as foot drums with boards over the vaults, dancers on the boards would have made a drumming sound. The vaults are of different sizes so would have made different sounds.1
When the site was excavated bits of reddish and white-washed plaster was found on the original walls which led to the current colour scheme. These colours are typical of the ancestral Puebloan world.
The antechamber has a low painted block set in its floor which has been called an altar. It is painted deep red with a white disc on its surface and three burned timber poles protruding from one side. All of these features were seen in the excavated feature.
Leaving the Great Kiva we set off across the plaza to explore the interconnected rooms.
Within the plaza is another kiva, much smaller than the Great Kiva and not reconstructed.
Like the floor vaults in kivas, T-shaped doorways are a mystery. Often they are associated with entrance to places where ceremonies might be held, such as from antechambers into kivas, or onto central plazas.
A number of burials were found in ground floor rooms accompanied by funerary goods.2
A huge assortment of perishable material was found buried beneath collapsed masonry, preserved due to this protection and the very dry environment.2 This included cotton textiles, leather, and feather items. Also found were sandals and moccasins, woven rush bags and coiled and plaited baskets. Wooden items were also found including reed arrows, digging sticks and prayer sticks. Many remains of foodstuffs were also recovered: black beans, walnut shells, squash and gourd rind - an incredible 200 bushels of loose corn from one room.2
A great deal of broken pottery was also found, many exhibiting styles of other cultures. These were all valuable evidence of the lives of the ancient inhabitants of Aztec Ruins. For instance, the remains of tropical macaws demonstrate that there was trade with Mexico.
The Hubbard Tri-Wall site sits outside the Great House to the north.Tri-wall structures are rare, Aztec has two more, one of which had a fourth wall. It is a type of ceremonial kiva. The space between the outer and middle wall was divided into rooms. It is named after the local family that owned the land in the early part of the 20th century.
The west wall has niches and two bands of green stone. These obviously had some significance for the inhabitants but it's not clear what that is.
On the west side of the site, within the Great House, is a raised area with four small kivas, two of which are keyhole-shaped. This shape is often associated with Mesa Verde, e.g. at Far View SItes.
On our way to Cortez, where we stayed for visits to Mesa Verde, we made a short detour south along U.S. 491 to see Shiprock, an impressive volcanic formation that towers above the surrounding landscape. Shiprock is of great significance to the Navajo people.
