Navajo National Monument

Three cliff dwellings tucked into remote sandstone canyons, abandoned around 1300 and left largely undisturbed for six centuries, preserving one of the most intact windows into ancestral Puebloan life in the American Southwest.

Beginning around 1250, ancestral Puebloan people, sometimes called the Kayenta Anasazi, built Keet Seel, a village of more than 160 rooms tucked into a sandstone alcove, followed by Betatakin, a smaller dwelling begun around 1267 whose Navajo name means 'ledge house.' At its peak, Betatakin housed roughly 120 people within a single massive natural alcove, its rooms stacked against the curved sandstone wall.

By around 1300, both major dwellings had been abandoned, likely the result of a prolonged regional drought combined with the resource depletion that came from decades of farming and wood-gathering in a fragile desert environment. The sites remained largely undisturbed afterward, protected in part by their remote canyon locations, until American archaeological expeditions documented them in the early 1900s.

President Theodore Roosevelt designated Navajo National Monument in 1909 under the Antiquities Act, protecting Betatakin, Keet Seel, and a third, smaller dwelling called Inscription House, which has been closed to visitors since 1968 due to structural concerns. The monument lies entirely within the Navajo Nation, and both Navajo (Diné) and Hopi peoples recognize the ancestral Puebloan builders as connected to their own histories in the region.