Just east of Highway 17 south of Sedona in the Verde Valley lies two really great archaeological spots that early American explorers assumed were Aztec in origin, hence the name Montezuma Castle and Montezuma Well. Both are very short walks to ruins and infrastructure that still marvels us today.

Montezuma Castle (.3 mile hike roundtrip) is a five story, 20 room dwelling that sits like a defensive structure in a cliffside cave. It’s absolutely worth the quick pitstop and walk.

Just up the Highway you’ll find Montezuma Well, a spring fed limestone sink lake that has ruins around it. Again, it’s worth the visit and short hike around. It can be 20° cooler by the water, which absolutely helps on a hot summer day.

From my podcast episode: Montezuma was the Aztec leader when the Spanish got to the future site of Mexico City, which was at that time called Tenochtitlan, and like Aztec National Monument, a lot of European people named things in the American Southwest after the Aztecs because they couldn’t believe the Indians who inhabited the area, or Indians at all really, but they refused to believe the natives could have built the structures they were seeing. The European immigrants were partially correct, but for very wrong reasons. The Navajo and Apache didn’t build the ruins the immigrants were seeing but their neighbors ancestors (the Hopi’s ancestors) did. But of course, if the Sinagua and Anasazi spoke a Nahua related Uto-Aztecan language, then the Aztecs didn’t build them but their distant cousins sure did.

Matt Guebard, an archaeologist with the National Park Service did some further studies on the burned ruins and buried bodies uncovered decades ago at the Castle and when he did he found that the story of a peaceful end and ritual fire of the site needed to be amended. He’s interviewed in a piece by Blake De Pastino for Western Digs magazine where he quotes Guebard:

“But a closer examination of previous research done on those remains revealed that the dead had sustained trauma before their deaths, as evidenced by cut marks on their bones, burn marks, and fractures in three of the four skulls. We learned that the interior portion of each fracture displayed evidence of singeing on live bone,” Guebard said. “So, the sequence of events seems to be blunt trauma followed closely by burning. It is also interesting to note that all of the remains with reported evidence of trauma and burning were found in a single grave.”

Archaeologists aren’t sure who set the fire or why or who burned but if the pattern I outlined in the episodes over the Ancient Ones, that patter being the Anasazi Migrants coming in, overstaying their welcome, and then being burned, sometimes alive, in a fire of corn, if that pattern is regional, it sure seems to fit at the Castle as well.

That being said, it may not have been the Anasazi migrants who burned or set the fire, but instead, Apache migrants who arrived two hundred years before the Apache were thought to have arrived in the area from up north. That interpretation was gleaned by using some Apache oral traditions but, using oral traditions in archaeology can be a slippery slope. Often helpful and sometimes useful and always important to take into account but to rely upon them, that can be tricky. I’m not totally sure the Anasazi migrants had anything to do with burning Montezuma’s Castle but I am totally sure that their previous arrival and then departure of the Anasazi into the area made the Sinagua, just like it made their Mogollon Salado neighbors, but the Anasazis ultimate migration out of the area led the people in Arizona like the Sinagua and Salado to start building much more defensively with massive walls and hard to reach strongholds we call castles today.

For more information on these people, listen to my podcast series.