Bureau of Land Management officials unveiled a commemorative poster celebrating the 15-year anniversaries of Canyons of the Ancients National Monument and the National Conservation Lands system.
The dozens of fans who attended Tuesday were served up speeches, cake and coffee at the Anasazi Heritage Center.
Vince MacMillan, the monument’s lead archaeologist, spoke of the early discoveries that led to the preservation of the monument’s 178,000 acres, which contain the highest-known density of archaeological sites in the nation.
In 1776, a Spanish expedition from Santa Fe stopped in present-day Dolores, and climbed the hill where the heritage center is today.
“Since that August day, almost 239 years ago, the landscape laid out before us in Montezuma County has become one of the most extensively studied archaeological landscapes in the world, one of the cornerstones of the BLM’s National Conservation Lands and the scene of many more ‘firsts’ in the field of archaeology,” MacMillan said.
In 1874, William Henry Jackson, a pioneer in early photography, took the first photographs of ancestral Puebloan cliff dwellings in the monument’s Sand Canyon complex.
When Jackson’s work was presented at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia two years later, it “ignited massive interest” in the ruins of Southwest Colorado.
In 1889, Goodman Point Pueblo was the first site set aside by the United States for research.
In 1908, Cannonball Pueblo became the first to be legally excavated after the passage of the American Antiquities Act.
In the 1930s, Paul Martin revolutionized the use of film for documenting the ruins of Lowry Pueblo.
Museum curator Bridget Ambler said the monument is special for researchers because it highlights the historic Neolithic transition into pueblo farming villages.
The ruins and artifacts are kept alive by their connections to modern Native Americans, Ambler said, and the archaeology gives the community a special identity.
“You can find solitude on the monument, and because it is self-guided, it gives visitors the feeling they are discovering something new,” Ambler said.
Since the formation of the monument in 2000, the BLM has surveyed 25 percent of the landscape, documenting 3,000 archaeological sites, adding to the 5,000 already identified.
MacMillan emphasized that the monument has preserved valuable lessons of Native Americans’ hunting, agriculture, geology, botany, ceramics, hydrology, astronomy and architecture.
Free copies of the poster featuring Saddlehorn Pueblo can be obtained at the Anasazi Heritage Center.
