Initial language selection is based on your web browser preferences.
Explore the Aztec Ruins National Monument in New Mexico and imagine the lives of the ancestral Pueblo people who used to live here. Ancestral Pueblo people, whose relatives are the modern Pueblo Native American people still living in the Southwest USA, built Aztec Ruins about 900 years ago. Like our big cities today, Aztec Ruins were probably a place where lots of people gathered for religion, trade, and politics. Archeologist Earl Morris, the original excavator of the Aztec Ruins site in 1921, returned in 1934 to restore the great kiva to what was thought to be its original form. It is a very impressive structure and gives an idea of what kivas might have been like in the days when they were occupied.