The Bandelier National Monument

Near Los Alamos, New Mexico

There are several places in the American Southwest where ancient peoples built homes and villages in a cliff. The best known (to Americans anyway) being what is now Mesa Verde National Park in the southwest corner of Colorado. Here is my Substack post of that place:

There is another set of cliff dwellings, which is partly fake, at Manitou Springs, Colorado:

Both of the above were built in sandstone cliffs, using bricks made of adobe.

In the hills below Los Alamos, New Mexico is a town of cliff dwellings that are different: they were hollowed out from a cliff made of volcanic tuff.

I have spoken of tuff many times in past Substack posts. It is made of volcanic ash that, in most cases, was still partly molten when it settled to the ground - meaning that the particles of ash welded to each other as they settled.

It is strange stuff that erodes strangely, making the grotesque shapes of the peaks in Colorado’s San Juan Mountains, for instance, which are mentioned in this post:

The San Juans were formed well after the Rockies were, by a different process and made of different materials (volcanic lava, ash and tuff) than the Rockies; they are steep, rugged and young.

The tuff in this part of New Mexico came from the Valles Caldera, one of the world’s six supervolcanos whose crater is nearly 14 miles across, that erupted only 1.2 million years ago — which was the day before yesterday in geological time.

Here is an interesting post on Substack Notes about the Valles Caldera.

Now, one of the interesting properties of tuff is that it is full of holes:

Cliff of volcanic tuff in Bandelier National Monument

FULL of holes! Geologists say that these were bubbles of gas that became trapped when the layer of hot, semi-molten ash was cooling and not yet fully formed.

The other distinguishing characteristic of tuff is that it isn’t very … tough. It erodes easily, and it’s easy to “work,” in the same sense as woodworking.

So, a small creek cut down through this layer of 1.2 million year old tuff, carving out a small canyon. And ancient people coming through this place found a canyon, made of cliffs with holes that are easily enlarged, with water in the bottom. A perfect place to build homes and plant crops. Which they did. They carved out homes in the cliffs -

One of the cliff dwellings at Bandelier National Monument

and built pueblos down in the flat area made of bricks that were carved from tuff.

Tourists walk through the pueblo village at Bandelier National Monument

Here’s a closer look at the ruins of the pueblos:

Pueblos. Made from bricks of tuff instead of adobe.

Several of the cliff dwellings are open to the public for inspection and exploration.

Dudes checking out a cliff dwelling at Bandelier National Monument

It was definitely an interesting day.