The culmination of 15 years of collaborative research between Canyons of the Ancients National Monument and the University of Colorado Denver now lives in the monument’s museum in Dolores.

The exhibit, “Sand, Stone and Songs: Ancient Lessons from a Living Landscape,” opened Feb. 5 at the Canyons of the Ancients Visitor Center and Museum, and it documents six ancient Puebloan hamlets throughout the Montezuma Valley.

The monument partnered with the University of Colorado Denver’s Center of Preservation Research to digitally document prehistoric architecture.

The result was detailed architectural drawings for the Historic American Buildings Survey available in the Library of Congress.

Canyons of the Ancients expert Vince MacMillan was the lead archaeologist on the project.

The floor plan renderings were created from on-the-ground surveying transformed into 3D digital data through such methods as terrestrial photogrammetry.

MacMillan’s team sought grants from various organizations such as the Bureau of Land Management and the State Historical Fund to complete the project.

The Lowry Pueblo near Pleasant View, which is thought to have once had about 40 rooms and eight kivas, was the most complex to document, he said.

It’s remarkable for MacMillan to see all of the drawings lining the walls in a cohesive space.

“It’s pretty gratifying because I feel like that program – we’ve actually done justice to those sites themselves,” he said.

MacMillan hopes visitors will appreciate the attention to detail in the drawings and the care it takes to preserve the historical sites.

But he also wants people to know that the drawings capture only one aspect of the Indigenous cultures preserved in the ancient dwellings.

“They’re really important Indigenous resources, and they’re very sensitive in that this is one tool that we use to try to understand some of the knowledge and the wisdom that the Indigenous cultures that created those amazing structures – just trying to understand just one aspect of it and using this one tool to do it,” he said.

Partnerships with local tribal communities have been instrumental in building understanding of the sites, MacMillan said.

In total, the Canyons of the Ancients monument is thought to have 30,000 sites, according to the BLM.

The exhibit only had a soft opening because of COVID-19, MacMillan said, but he hopes for more public programming in the summer, when he has planned presentations with architects on the project.