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Like most Sierra Madre cliff dwellings, Las Ventanas is constructed of adobe, which is made by pouring mud into plank frames and ramming it into wide courses. The builders repeated the process to raise each story’s walls five or six feet high. Many of these dwellings feature large, T-shaped doors, unusual portals to which their builders may have ascribed ideological or political importance, and whose possible significance drew me to the Sierra Madre. Outside the town of Madera in the Sierra Madre, some 130 miles west of Chihuahua City in northern Mexico, canyons cut deep into the mountains. Here, in caves and alcoves and on ledges high up the canyon cliffs, the white walls of ancient dwellings stand out against green scrub.

But in Cave Valley we walked easily into the big dwellings in Olla and Rincón Caves. The granaries that stored critical food reserves are located everywhere in the valley, conspicuously placed along the fronts of the caves, and not behind dwellings in the secure rear of the alcoves. And some cliff dwellings are located near contemporary villages that lie on the valley floor, suggesting the people living in the Sierra Madre were not worried about defending themselves.

The Ancient Cliff Dwellers of Mesa Verde by Caroline Arnold

Cave Valley is a broad fertile bottomland flanked by 150-foot-tall bluffs stretching two miles along the Río Piedras Verdes. Its agricultural potential attracted not only the ancient cliff dwellers but, much later, a small farming settlement of nineteenth-century Mormon immigrants. In 1952, 37-year-old archaeologist Robert Lister led a dozen University of Colorado students into Cave Valley, where they located 10 caves that had seemingly been picked clean by looters. Lumholtz had complained of “relic-hunters” when he visited Cave Valley a half century earlier. But Lister’s team unearthed many more artifacts, which are now housed at the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History.

Lister and his crew’s most significant excavations were in Swallow Cave, high on the bluff across the river from Cave of the Olla. There, Lister dug a small trench right next to a single remnant of wall and found a floor, beneath which was the burial of an adult woman interred with an early, pre-Paquimé red-on-brown pot. The discovery of a burial containing an artifact predating the rise of the great city suggests that some of the cliff dwellings may have been built before Paquimé was established. That possibility is also literally written on the roof of other caves, such as Cave of the Olla, where outlines are visible of earlier “ghost walls” that do not align with the cliff dwellings that can be seen there today.

Stereoview Cliff Dwellers Canyon Mesa Verde CO Colorado Photo Canon Vintage

Or they may have been way stations along trade routes, given the remains of tropical macaws and large quantities of exotic Mesoamerican goods such as elaborate copper artifacts found at Paquimé. Perhaps the highly visible granaries were a welcome sign for hungry travelers. And, after the fall of Paquimé around 1450, which may have been violent, some of the considerable Casas Grandes population surely sought refuge in the barrancas of the Sierra Madre. There they might have found shelter in cliff dwellings with their familiar T-shaped doors, which were perhaps the last and most spectacular expression of a long history that began in Chaco Canyon and ended at Paquimé.

One of the first was Carl Lumholtz, a Norwegian explorer in the employ of the American Museum of Natural History. Lumholtz explored the Sierra Madre in the 1890s and photographed a large T-shaped door at Las Ventanas. I’d studied the images in Lumholtz’s book, Unknown Mexico, and this big, bold T-portal intrigued me. Perhaps, over the many decades the dwellings were occupied, their purpose shifted. Gamboa suggests the pre-Paquimé cliff dwellings might have been built in the early thirteenth century, after an influx of new people arrived from the north fleeing violence. They may have built these dwellings as defensible homes—like those of Mesa Verde a few decades earlier—until the rise of Paquimé put an end to unrest.

My Book Notes

Built on a collection of 40,000+ popular, high-quality books from 250+ of the world’s best publishers, Epic safely fuels curiosity and reading confidence for kids 12 and under. Discusses the Native Americans known as the Anasazi, who migrated to southwestern Colorado in the first century A.D. Most of the dwellings in Mesa Verde are built in shallow parts of the rock, and are able to hold only two or three rooms. But Cliff Palace, which was built up over the course of the 1200s, is much larger. You can listen to audiobooks purchased on Google Play using your computer’s web browser.

They moved from a strictly hunter-gatherer culture to one increasingly dependent on agriculture, growing beans and domesticating animals like turkeys. The more they farmed, the more water they needed, and they built dams, walls and other basic irrigation systems. In the Mesa Verde National Park in Colorado, one of the most amazing sights in the United States is dug into the side of a mountain. They have no roofs, but the structures are protected by the overhanging cliff. Eight centuries after their construction, they are in excellent condition—and remain one of the most intriguing archaeological sites in the country.

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I noted that T-shaped doors existed at all three sites, but I wasn’t sure what to make of them, or how they related to social hierarchies. After all, T-doors have been found at many sites beyond the respective capitals—most obviously at cliff dwellings in Mesa Verde and the Sierra Madre. But at Aztec Ruins and Mesa Verde, and in the Casas Grandes region, the T-doors were “democratized” and used in residences where both high-status and common people lived. The T-doors of Chaco and Mesa Verde ceased to be made in the Pueblo area after 1300.

Las Ventanas is the largest of that group, and one of the largest ever built in the Sierra Madre. In places it was two stories tall, the second-story walls reaching the cave’s roof. Where the second-story walls have collapsed, their outlines remain on the smoke-blackened ceiling, like ghostly negative wall plans.

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But after a few miles, those roads turned into narrow dirt logging tracks, twisting and turning in and out of barrancas. Lumber trucks surprised us around too many curves, but our local drivers knew their business and we arrived intact, with a slight surplus of adrenaline. Caroline Arnold always loved books, but as a child she never thought of writing as a career.

T-shaped doors are prominent not just at Paquimé and the Sierra Madre cliff dwellings, but also at Ancestral Puebloan sites in the Four Corners region, where Colorado, Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico meet. I thought this curious distribution, with such a great distance between the two concentrations of T-shaped doors, had to be meaningful. By 1200 A.D., the Ancestral Pueblo people began building their homes into the cliffs.

Bandelier National Monument, Santa Fe National Forest, New Mexico

Once we had reached Las Ventanas, we discovered that sometime since Lumholtz took his photographs, the right side of the large T-door had toppled. But its left side still stands, preserving its shape, with which I was very familiar from years of archaeological work at sites 500 miles to the north, in the American Southwest. A book that does not look new and has been read but is in excellent condition.

At a cliff dwelling known as Rincón Cave, Lister’s students pieced together half of a Casas Grandes pot—one of the few bits of direct evidence that the cliff dwellings were contemporary with Paquimé. Lister also investigated a sizable cliff dwelling with prominent T-doors known as Cave of the Olla. This site’s most striking feature is a graceful onion-dome-shaped central granary, probably the best-preserved example in the Sierra Madre. After our scramble to reach Las Ventanas, we visited more cliff dwellings in the headwaters of the Papigochic River, known locally as Río Aros, at the southern edge of the Casas Grandes region.

Ancient Cliff Dwellers

These sprawling dwellings, some of which had as many as 100 rooms, were the forerunner to the later cliff dwellings. As agricultural life began to be more centered on recently-introduced cotton, and the communities’ artisans became more advanced in pottery, the cultural life of the community focused around the kivas. Cliff Palace and the other cliff dwellings were constructed by the Ancestral Pueblo people, a group comprised of several Native American tribes whose descendants include the Hopi, Zuni and Acoma people. We were joined by archaeologist Eduardo Gamboa of Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History, who directed a decade-long study of 180 cliff dwellings in Chihuahua. He is currently writing what will surely be the definitive study of these fascinating sites.

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We roped down a steep chute to Cueva de la Serpiente, the Cave of the Serpent. The site’s 14 rooms fill a cave that tunnels through a rocky buttress that projects out from the canyon wall, which gives the cliff dwelling both front and back entrances. The more approachable entrance has a big T-door framed by a painting of a serpent, now faded to a few traces of pigment.