December 16, 2020
The town of Los Alamos lies upon the slopes of a living supervolcano called the Valles Caldera, at a crisp High-Desert elevation of 7,300 feet above sea level. The modern town is barely a century old, but the nearby cliff villages were built more than a thousand years earlier by the Tewa, who carved homes into the caldera’s cliffs Bandelier Tuff, the chalky volcanic stuff is called, in honor of the archaeologist Adolph Bandelier’s work here in the late 1800s.
You can walk among these skull-eyed cliff dwellings preserved since 1916 within Bandelier National Monument and appreciate the then-novel approach of Bandelier, who combined “historical research, folklore, mythology, native traditions, ethnography, ethnohistory, and archaeology” in an early effort to remove European-American assumptions about New World culture, as so much more can be discovered with an open mind.