Why Was Montezuma Castle Mysteriously Abandoned?

Montezuma Castle is a marvel of Native American engineering—an ancient, five-story complex built into a towering cliffside in the Arizona desert. First constructed around A.D. 1125, the 20-room dwelling was continuously occupied for nearly 300 years by people usually identified as Sinagua (from Spanish for “no water”). However, the name Sinagua doesn’t describe a group of people. It is an archeological designation, explains Matthew Guebard, an archeologist with the National Park Service.  

The artifacts and architecture of Montezuma Castle record a distinct culture labeled Southern Sinagua that flourished in the Verde Valley of central Arizona more than 600 years ago. But there are still many unanswered questions about the people who lived in this cliffside complex and why it was abruptly abandoned around A.D. 1400.

“The archaeological record at Montezuma Castle is only showing us the things that people left behind,” says Guebard. “So many questions remain: Were there multiple groups living together? What languages were they speaking? How were they interacting with other groups in the valley?” 

To answer those questions, Guebard reexamined records from the first archaeological excavations at Montezuma Castle in the 1930s and compared them with oral histories passed down for centuries by Southwestern tribes like Hopi, Apache and Yavapai. What emerged is a story of climate stress and conflict that likely brought the occupation of Montezuma Castle to a violent end. 

Cliff dwellings are found throughout the Southwest, most famously at Mesa Verde National Park in Colorado. Both Mesa Verde and Montezuma Castle were designated national parks in 1906, but archaeologists didn't recognize how impressive these multistory cliffside structures are until decades later.  

“Montezuma Castle is a masterwork of engineering and architectural design,” says Guebard. “There was so much thought that went into designing it and a lot of intentionality with the building materials and how they were used.” 

There are 20 rooms in Montezuma Castle spread across five levels. The dimensions of the floors and rooms are dictated by the curve and overhang of the 150-foot limestone wall. The roofs and floors of the cliff dwelling were made from timber logs sealed with mud and dry grass. And the walls—some as tall as 30 feet—were built from stone covered with layers of mud and smooth plaster, probably painted in different colors.  

With thick walls and small doors, Montezuma Castle was designed to maintain a comfortable temperature even during the hottest and coldest weather. Scenically, the view from the top-floor “parapet” takes in the entire valley. 

Given its protected location in a cliff overlooking the valley, Montezuma Castle was clearly built with defense in mind. “You have to use sets of ladders to get up there,” says Guebard. “There's no other way to get inside.” 

The Verde Valley is an oasis in an otherwise parched and forbidding Arizona landscape. Fed by natural springs and creeks, it was once a prized location for a farming village. At its peak in the 14th century, it’s estimated that between 3,000 and 4,000 people lived in the Verde Valley.  

The people who built Montezuma Castle understood that in times of drought and climate stress, outsiders might try to take their land. According to archaeological evidence and stories passed down by tribal elders, that might be what happened in 1400.  

Right next to Montezuma Castle are the ruins of another cliff dwelling known as Castle A. Both structures were built and occupied around the same time, but while Montezuma Castle is still largely intact, Castle A was destroyed by a catastrophic fire at the end of the 14th century.  

When archaeologists first excavated the ruins of Castle A in the 1930s, they concluded that the structure had been abandoned “for considerable time” before fire toppled the building. Their reasoning was that thick layers of silt were present in some of the collapsed rooms, a sign they had been empty for years before the fire.  

But that logic isn't consistent with what archaeologists now understand about the traditional Pueblo architecture of the Southwest, explains Guebard.  “When people were living in Pueblos like [Castle A], not all the rooms were occupied at once,” he says. "People might live in a room for several years, move out, dump some trash in it, then put a floor over the trash and move back in. Rooms have really complicated histories.” 

After carefully reexamining photographs and data from the original excavations, Guebard believes that Castle A and nearby Montezuma Castle were still occupied when fire destroyed the building. Some rooms were filled with everyday objects like cooking pots and corn grinders—a sign that occupants left in a hurry. The most striking evidence was a full skeleton found on the floor of a collapsed room.  

“Why [the original archaeologists] didn’t incorporate that into their interpretation, I don’t really know,” says Guebard, “But it seems like that would be an important piece of the story.” 

As part of his research, Guebard used a technique called archaeomagnetic dating to pinpoint the fire's timing to a narrow window around 1400. Evaluated with the other evidence, the archaeological data points to a sudden, violent event that destroyed Castle A and forced the abandonment of Montezuma Castle.  

But Guebard acknowledges that archaeology is only one way of understanding the past. Scholars have also found that traditional oral histories often contain a historic core. Several modern clans of Hopi, Yavapai and Apache Indians all trace their histories back to events that occurred at Montezuma Castle. 

In 2013, Guebard interviewed the late Floyd Lomakuyvaya, a Hopi priest who would make an annual pilgrimage to Montezuma Castle. Lomakuyvaya remembered his uncle saying that the cliff dwelling was once occupied by ancestral Hopi, but the site was raided by outsiders who shot fire-tipped arrows at the castle.  

“[Our ancestors] got the ladders and they pulled them up and they just stayed in there,” said Lomakuyvaya. “And all these invaders were down at the bottom where all the fields were.” 

In the Hopi stories, the raiders of Montezuma Castle were identified as Apache (modern tribal designations didn’t exist in the 14th century). Vincent Randall, an Apache elder, shared another side of the story with Guebard. According to Randall’s grandfather, it was the cliff dwellers who started the “disagreement.” In response, the Apache formed an alliance with the Yavapai and “evicted” the Hopi from Montezuma Castle by “burning them out.”

Guebard published his findings in 2016, noting that the correlation between the archaeological record and traditional histories is striking. “It's not often that you find stories that have been curated for hundreds of years that match up with archaeological data from a specific site,” he says.

According to Hopi oral histories, the people who fled Montezuma Castle migrated north to join other groups that settled in the Hopi Mesas of northern Arizona.

Montezuma Castle had been unoccupied for centuries when President Teddy Roosevelt turned the area into a national park in 1906, but not everybody agrees with the notion that the site was “abandoned.”  

“People weren't living in Montezuma Castle after the 14th century,” says Guebard, “but our tribal partners are always telling us these places are not abandoned. Nobody forgets about them. People may not be living in them full time anymore, but people still tell stories and sing songs about them. It's part of their history and who they are.” 

Today, the Montezuma Castle monument is affiliated with several tribes, including Yavapai, Apache, Hopi, Zuni and the Four Southern Tribes of Arizona.