Cool Arizona Places: Kinishba Ruins

Kinishba Ruins is a sprawling, 600 room great house archaeological site in eastern Arizona and is administered by the Southern Athabaskan-speaking White Mountain Apache Tribe of the nearby Fort Apache Indian Reservation. As it demonstrates a combination of indigenous Mogollon and Anasazi cultural traits, archaeologists consider it ancestral to the peoples of both the Hopi and Zuni cultures.

Kinishba is located at 5,000 feet above a pine-fringed alluvial valley, near Whiteriver, Arizona, the seat of government for the White Mountain Apache Tribe. The first European to write about it was Adolph Bandelier in 1892, who was a pioneering archaeologist. From 1931 to 1940, the archaeologist Dr. Byron Cummings, Director of the Arizona State Museum and head of the Department of Archaeology at the University of Arizona, led a team of archaeology students and Apache over several seasons to excavate and restore Kinishba. He named the site, derived from the Apache words: ki datbaa, meaning "brown house." The teams also built a pueblo-style museum and visitor's center, as Cummings envisioned it as a destination to help with economic development of the area. Cummings hoped Kinishba would be declared a national monument and taken under National Park Service management, but did not succeed in this.

Historians have devoted a great deal of ink to the Apache wars, mostly focusing on the Chiricahua Apaches of southern Arizona. But a group of Western Apaches allowed American soldiers to build a fort near what is now Whiteriver in the White Mountains. Fort Apache, a military post from 1870-1922, played an important role in the conflict. You can tour some of the historical buildings and learn about Apache life at a museum just a few steps away. About 5 miles away is the Kinishba ruin, a pueblo village that dates to about 1250. It had two or three stories, hundreds of rooms, and is believed to have housed as many as 1,000 people.

All of these large villages were built up from apartment-style room blocks, laid out to define communal courtyards or plazas. The Kinishba pueblo is composed of nine major building mounds, the remains of masonry room blocks, with some three stories tall. There were two large apartment blocks, and several smaller buildings, with two communal courtyards. The masonry walls are unique for their double-walled construction: one side is faced and the other made of rubble. The rooms averaged 12' by 14', with a fire-pit in the center. Scholars believe that most families occupied two rooms, one for living quarters and one for storage.

Location: Seven miles west of Whiteriver Arizona, off AZ 73 on Fort Apache Indian Reservation. 520-338-4625

Website: http://www.nps.gov/nr/travel/amsw/sw12.HTM

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