Scott Walton Photographs

Ancestral Puebloans

Spend any time in the desert Southwest and you can't help but see and feel the presence of the ancient Native American people who once lived there. Sometimes refered to as the Anasazi, the Ancestral Puebloans lived in and farmed the Colorado Plateau in the Four Corners region for hundreds of years until roughly the end of the 13th Century when they mysteriously abandoned their homes and way of life and migrated away from the area. All we have left of them and their culture are the intricately constructed stone buildings and cliff dwellings they inhabited and the beautiful rock art they left on the canyon walls. There are tens of thousands of archelogical sites in the Southwest and I've only explored a handful of them, most notably Pueblo Bonito at Chaco Canyon in New Mexico, False Kiva Ruin in Canyonlands National Park and a few locations on Cedar Mesa in Utah.