Tuzigoot National Monument United States

Legendary

A hilltop pueblo built by the Sinagua people around 1000 AD.

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The people who lived here didn't use doors on the ground floor. They climbed ladders up to the roof and dropped down into their rooms through holes in the ceiling.

Their village sat on top of a rocky ridge in central Arizona, about 120 feet above the Verde River. From up here, they could see anyone coming from miles away.

The builders were the Sinagua people. Their name comes from Spanish words meaning "without water," because they were farmers who grew crops in a dry land with very little rain.

They built Tuzigoot between about 1125 and 1400. Stone by stone, room by room, it grew into a village two or three stories tall.

At its biggest, the pueblo held about 110 rooms. It's the largest and best-preserved Sinagua village in the whole Verde Valley.

Families here grew corn, beans, and squash in the fields along the river. They were also traders, part of a network that stretched across much of what is now Arizona and beyond.

The name Tuzigoot came later. It's an Apache word meaning "crooked water," after a curving lake nearby that was once a bend in the river.

Around 1400, the Sinagua left the Verde Valley. Nobody knows exactly why, though drought and changing times may have pushed them to move.

For centuries, the ruins sat buried in dirt on a hilltop. Then the Great Depression changed that.

In 1933, the government started programs to give jobs to people who needed work. Archaeologists Louis Caywood and Edward Spicer led local workers in digging out the pueblo.

A copper mining company owned the land. It sold the site to the county for just $1 so the work could go ahead.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt made Tuzigoot a national monument on July 25, 1939.

Walk the short path up the ridge and climb to the top of the restored room for views over the Verde Valley. Visit the museum to see tools, pottery, and jewelry found in the pueblo's rooms. Then look out over Tavasci Marsh below, where birds gather along the old bend of the river that gave Tuzigoot its name.

Sources: Britannica, Archaeology Southwest, and Wikipedia.