The Cliff Ruins of Canyon De Chelly, Arizona: Sixteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1894-95, Government Printing Office, Washington, 1897, Pages 73-198

Canyon de Chelly cuts deep into the high desert of northeastern Arizona, a place where ancient people built their homes into cliff faces thousands of feet above the canyon floor. This 1897 report, prepared for the Smithsonian's Bureau of Ethnology, represents one of the first systematic archaeological studies of these remarkable structures. Cosmos Mindeleff documents the remains of what his contemporaries called the 'cliff dwellers' - the ancestral Puebloans who occupied this landscape for centuries before European contact. He traces the history of exploration in this remote and once-dangerous region, recreating the wonder of early visitors who first glimpsed these ruins from canyon overlooks. The text examines how geography shaped every aspect of Pueblo life, from water access to defensive positioning to the very layout of rooms carved into the sandstone. This is Victorian-era science at its most ambitious: a serious attempt to reconstruct an entire civilization from its architectural fragments. For readers today, it offers both a fascinating historical document and a window into a landscape and people that were already vanishing when Mindeleff wrote.