Montezuma Village preserve was added to the Conservancy’s list of archaeological preserves through a bargain sale-to-charity purchase agreement (part donation, part purchase) with the land owners. It is an approximately 85 acre Ancestral Puebloan village located at the northern end of Montezuma Canyon in southeastern U
tah. The Conservancy has been negotiating the acquisition of the site with several family members for the past forty years.
Montezuma Village is a large prehistoric Ancestral Puebloan community center. It was visited by explorers and archaeologists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the early 1960s the late archaeologist Ray Matheny of Brigham Young University (BYU) documented the entire village, recording ninety-one sites located on a one mile stretch of the canyon. Most of the village is located on the land included in the purchase, and a small portion of it is on adjacent land owned by the Bureau of Land Management. A few additional prehistoric structures associated with the site lie on on adjacent land owned by neighbors.
In August 2024 members of The Archaeological Conservancy staff joined archaeologist Winston Hurst and Andrew Cross, a back country guide and explorer with the purpose of exploring and documenting the Montezuma Village site on film. A virtual tour of the site was compiled and shared by Andrew on his Desert Drifter YouTube channel. Interested followers were (and still are) encouraged to contribute to the Conservancy to ensure the preservation of more sites in the future.
