Description

People have lived in Tonto Basin, located near Lake Roosevelt, Arizona, for thousands of years. Prehistoric peoples, Apaches, and European settlers have all called it home. One of these groups, known by archeologists as the Salado, built the cliff dwellings you see today. A construction sequence of the Lower Cliff Dwelling gives details about how the rooms were built.  Around 1300 CE, a small community of Salado people constructed two dwellings in shallow caves overlooking the portion of the Salt River that is now Roosevelt Lake.

The Lower Cliff Dwelling contains a few partially intact roofs. These are the original roofs. A roofed breezeway divides the dwelling in half, perhaps serving as a divider for two different family groups.

Most of the rooms contained hearths, which suggests that a single family would have lived in each room. You can still see soot from their fires blackening the alcove above the dwelling.

Construction on both the 20-room Lower Cliff Dwelling and 40-room Upper Cliff Dwelling began about 1300 CE. To build the dwellings, rocks were easily gathered from the cave floor and surrounding hillsides to for the walls. Other materials, such as pine and juniper roof beams, had to be carried down from the surrounding mountains.

The size of the Lower Cliff Dwelling was limited by the shape of the cave in which it was located, which is 40 feet high, 85 feet long, and 48 feet deep. Each family occupied one room, with a fire pit in the floor and a hatchway to access the second story and roof. Ceilings and walls still bear smoke stains made by cooking fires.

According to archeologists, the Salado culture arose from a combination of the migrant Ancestral Puebloan populations from the Colorado Plateau, the Mogollon, and the Ancestral Sonoran Desert People (Hohokam).  The term Salado comes from the Spanish name Rio Salado, or the Salt River, which runs from the White Mountains in eastern Arizona through the Tonto Basin to its confluence with the Gila River in central Arizona.

Salado describes the prehistoric cultural group living in the Tonto Basin between 1250 CE and 1450 CE, but also encompasses a particular group of artifacts, architectural styles, and a belief system exemplified by Salado symbols and images.