Visiting an Ancient Home Wayside

Visiting an Ancient Home Wayside

NPS Photo/ B Smith

Quick Facts

Amenities

1 listed

Historical/Interpretive Information/Exhibits

Visiting an Ancient Home

Welcome to the Lower Cliff Dwelling, the ancestral home of many Native American people.

Help protect this cultural site:

(Image of prohibition sign depicting a hand preparing to touch an object.)
Avoid touching and leaning on walls. These fragile walls are 700 years old.

(Image of prohibition sign depicting a dog paw print.)
Keep your pets outside the dwelling. Pets leave behind scents that attract other animals.

(Image of prohibition sign depicting food and drink.)
Eat outside of the dwelling. Food attracts rodents that dig under the walls.

From the rocks to the plants, everything must stay where you find it. Every object helps to tell the story of the Monument. It is unlawful to take or deface any object from a National Park Service site. (36 CFR 2.1).

Angeline Mitchell 

(Image of Angeline Mitchell.)
Angeline Mitchell, the first school teacher in the Tonto Basin Area, is accredited with the first written record of this cliff dwelling in the year 1880. She describes in her journal the magnificent structures she and her students explored, noting the construction style of the dwellings, and imagining the lives of the ancient people who called this place home.

"It seems so strange to be chatting and laughing so gaily in a house built unknown centuries ago by people unlike us in appearance but who had known joy and grief, pleasure and pain same as our race of today who knows them, and who had laughed, cried, sung, dance, married, & died, mourned or rejoiced away in this once, populous town, or castle, or whatever one would call it!" - December 12, 1880.