Mysterious Megaliths in Montezuma Canyon

William Henry Jackson photographed Montezuma Canyon’s Coal Bed Village in 1875. Earlier in his career, he had also photographed Yellowstone’s landscape as a member of Ferdinand V. Hayden’s geologic expedition. With five or more assistants and pack mules to help haul his equipment, Jackson photographed the West all the way from Yellowstone and the Tetons to Arizona. Despite the challenges inherent in exploration, he used at least three cameras and plate sizes, including a stereographic camera, an 8x10 inch plate-sized camera, and an 18x22 inch plate-sized camera. He also used a dark tent to develop photographs on site.
In 1870, he made a foray into Utah as part of a government expedition, again headed by Hayden who was in charge of the U.S. Geologic Survey of the Territories. They began in the Unita Mountains and eventually traveled south as far as the Grand Canyon. Along the way, they explored Montezuma Canyon where Jackson photographed Coal Bed Village, one of the largest Ancestral Puebloan dwellings in Utah. The village was strategically located at the confluence of Montezuma Creek and Coal Bed Creek. He described a “series of large stones set upon end and projecting 5-7 feet above the surface” (“Montezuma Creek Data Sheet,” San Juan County, Public Lands Planning Department).
Montezuma Canyon is a large, north-south canyon east of Blanding with many Ancestral Puebloan ruins and artwork. It also contains modern “cave dwellings” with a few houses built into the sandstone caves as well as fertile farms, vineyards, and rangeland. Ted and I have explored this canyon over the years and have seen many fascinating ruins and artwork, including steps carved into the rocks which lead up to shallow alcoves. However, my biggest surprise occurred at Coal Bed Village with its megaliths.
My hubby’s Canon camera and our Samsung phones are a far cry from Jackson’s cumbersome cameras and dark tent. However, I probably felt as much awe as he did in 1875 when I snapped my digital photographs. We were alone and saw no evidence of the efforts being made by Brigham Young University, Weber State University, and New Mexico State University to document the site and its artifacts.
Coal Bed Village is located on what is now School Trust Land. During the last 50 years, the area has experienced severe erosion. In an effort to slow the erosion, Trust Lands put a fence around the area to keep out cattle and earlier this fall planted seeds to promote ground cover. BYU has studied the site since the 1960’s, but three years ago, fearing the effects of drought and erosion, Trust Lands asked BYU, WSU, and NMSU to help with the excavation and documentation of the site through their archaeological field school programs. However, the mystery of megaliths remains.
As William Henry Jackson noted, the free-standing stones are about five feet tall and lined up in a row. Megaliths are not unknown in ancient Puebloan architecture, but they haven’t been written about much. In an abstract of a paper presented in 2022 at the Society for American Archaeology titled, “Megaliths and Monumental Architecture at Coal Bed Village, an Ancestral Pueblo Site in Southeastern Utah,” the authors state that the megaliths might have been part of great houses. The Ancestral Puebloans built great kivas and houses during the Chacoan period, roughly between the Ninth and Twelfth Centuries CE. The great houses truly were monumental buildings, sometimes five stories high with as many as 800 rooms, thick walls, and small windows. Often the Puebloans aligned them with the sun, moon, and four directions.
According to the Puebloan stories of origin, after they emerged into this world, the Fourth World, they began a series of migrations to the north, south, east, and west, searching for the “middle place” where they could settle. In the article, “Pueblo Architecture and Its Relationship to Place,” Cassandra Smith says, “The lower half of the Pueblo cosmos is often envisioned as a terraced bowl (the earth) with another bowl (the sky) inverted atop it. Together, the two bowls form the sphere of the universe . . ..” Located in the village plaza, she writes, is the “earth navel” which is the “axis mundi—a sacred site of both emergence and return that joins the underworld, the middle place, and the upper world” (Smarthistory: The Center for Public Art History). Obviously, Coal Bed was a place they could settle, build homes and monumental buildings, set the megaliths in place, farm, and thrive in a sacred landscape.
Archaeologists are as unsure of the meaning of the 35,000 ancient European megaliths as they are about the ones in San Juan County. We’ll probably never know the real reason the Ancestral Puebloan people lined up a series of stones in their Coal Bed Village, but as Ted and I walked the trails around the site, silent now in the late fall, the mystery of the ancient peoples seemed to whisper around us, a mystery which William Henry Jackson captured so well in his 1875 photograph.
Another great photographer, Ansel Adams, described well the wonder I felt that day in Montezuma Canyon. “We all move on the fringes of eternity,” he wrote, “and are sometimes granted vistas through fabric of illusion. Many refuse to admit it: I feel a mystery exists. There are certain times, when, as on the whisper of the wind, there comes a clear and quiet realization that there is indeed a presence in the world, a nonhuman entity that is not necessarily inhuman” Ansel Adams, Mary Street Alinder, Ansel Adams: An Autobiography, 333).