The Hovenweep National Monument consists of the ruins of six Pueblo (or Anasazi) ancestral villages located on the border between southwestern Colorado and southeastern Utah in what is now the United States. Home to approximately 2,500 people who built an impressive array of structures, including unusual square and round towers, D-shaped houses, and ceremonial kiwis around 1150-1300, Hovenweep was abandoned around 1300 under mysterious circumstances. Known to the Jute and Navajo tribes for centuries, the ruins that now make up Hovenweep National Monument were "rediscovered" by William D. Huntington and a group of Mormon pioneers in 1854. They became a U.S. National Monument in 1923 at the request of U.S. President Warren G. Harding.
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| Hovenweep National Monument |
Geography and prehistory
The name "Hovenweep" means "desert valley" in the Paiute/Ute language. The six ruins that make up Hovenweep National Monument are located very close to the southern borders of the US states of Colorado and Utah. The nearest cities to the ruins are Cortez, Colorado, and Blending, Utah, and the ruins are located on Mount Cajon in the Great Plain of the Sages.
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| Hovenweep National Monument |
The six ruined villages cover an area of 32 km (20 miles), forming a cluster of six scattered acres of Ancient Pueblo Ruins. Four of them - Holly, Horseshoe and Hackberry, Cutthroat Castle and Goodman Point - are located in Colorado near or in Paiute / Ute lands. The other two - Square Tower and Cajon - are located in Utah, not far from Navajo lands.
Archeology confirms that humans have inhabited the region around Hovenweep for almost 10,000 years. Between the canyons and on the tops of the mountain ranges in Hovenweep and its environs there are countless Paleo-Indian sites. Nomadic Native American tribes often visited Mount Cajon to hunt wild game and gather food on a seasonal basis. Pine-juniper forests still grow in abundance in the vicinity of Hovenweep.