The Archeological Ruins - A Cave, Walls and a House

A Cave, Walls and a House

In the ravine, about three quarters of the way from the floor of the canyon to the rim, there is a cave.  It has been declared an archeological site by the state archeological office. It is listed as an Apishipa site and it is typical of such cave sites in eastern Colorado and western Oklahoma.  It faces south, as they almost always do, has a spring at the entrance and a smoke hole at the rear of the cave.  There are matates in the living rock of the cave.  But there is eveidence of much older use as well, I think.  There are petroglyphs, of the dot and ring sort that are found in paleolithic sites. 

There is a natural amphitheater in the rock above the cave and it was renowned locally as a place to find arrowheads.  They have been pretty well mined out by now, but we still find scrapers and lithics and the occasional broken mano.   The state archeologists who surveyed the cave in the 1970's did not look anywhere on the property except the cave, and they missed a lot.  On the rim there are beautiful standing masonry walls that are also Apishipa.  I took photos into the state archeology office and they identified them and added them to the file.

There is and in-tact Apishipa building, a one-room dwelling with a storage room on the east side, that the state archeologists identified as Apisipa. It is made of both living rock and beautiful, rubble-filled masonry walls. In the early twentieth century it was used by American setters as the foundation for their house.  Because of this modern use, the state archeologists approved our plans to use it as a camping cabin, which we have done.  We did this without disturbing the existing masonry construction at all.  We simply anchored the roof to a concrete footing that sits on top of the masonry and living rock walls, held by gravity.

This is an amazingly cool space in the summer and delightfully warm in the winter.  Things that we left in the cabin during the winter never froze, because the floor and the back walls are living rock.  And in the summer, if we closed it in the morning, it would stay at least 20 degrees cooler than the outside temperature during the heat of the day.  It is believed that the people who built this had a portable roof system that they brought with them when they stayed here and took away with them when they left.  It was a seasonal dwelling that was probably used in the spring, when crops would be planted in the canyon, and again in the fall when it was time to harvest.  The cabin is comfortable for us all year round. 

The Apishipa and Antelope people lived in this area and further east in what is now Texas and Oklahoma at the same time as the Ancient Puebloans were living in the Four Corners area.  They disappeared at about the same time as the Ancient Puebloans, around 1200 AD,  for reasons that are not fully understood.  It was a century of persistent drought in the area, but there were probably other factors as well.

If anyone reading this has more unformation on these ruins, or information on the Apishipa or Antelope cultures, I would love to find out all that I can.   A chapter of the Pueblo Archeological Society came out for a visit and some of the experts in that group thought our ruins had been mis-identified as Apishipa, and that they are actually Antelope.  The woman I spoke to at the Denver state archeology office did her doctoral research on the Apishipa and she seemed quite sure that they were Apishipa.  But things change in archeology, I know, as new information is discovered.