Montezuma Castle National Monument

Montezuma Castle is a cliff dwelling facing Beaver Creek, near Camp Verde, Arizona. It sits about 90 feet up a sheer limestone cliff, in a natural alcove that shelters it from the weather, which is one reason it is among the best-preserved cliff dwellings in North America.

Its floor space spreads over five stories. The Southern Sinagua built the walls from limestone chunks found at the foot of the cliff and from mud mortar mixed for different jobs, and they roofed the rooms with timbers, mainly Arizona sycamore. People most likely climbed in on portable ladders, which also made it hard for enemies to get inside.

The name is wrong twice. European-Americans who saw the ruins in the 1860s tied them to the Aztec emperor Montezuma, who had no connection to the place, and the building may have worked more like an apartment block than a castle. Many tribal groups have their own names for it in their own languages.

Radiocarbon dates from several construction beams show the dwelling went up between 1125 and 1173, with additions in the last decades of the 1200s. It held no more than about 30 people in at least 20 rooms. Beside it stood a larger dwelling known as Castle A, with an estimated 45 rooms. Little survives of it beyond stone foundations.

Castle A burned at some point between 1375 and 1395, and both dwellings were emptied soon afterward. Drought, resource depletion, conflict and that fire are possible reasons. The people did not mysteriously disappear: they moved to other villages, and many Native American communities today trace their ancestry to people who lived here. Many of them dislike the word abandoned, because it suggests the place was forgotten.

Looting hit the site hard in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It was declared a national monument on December 8, 1906, one of the four original national monuments, and the National Park Service has managed it since 1916.