Kinishba Ruins, AZ

After exploring Fort Apache today, we made our way to the nearby Kinishba ruins.

Kinishba is a large pueblo ruin containing nine masonry buildings constructed between 1250 and 1350 A.D. by the pre-Columbian Mogollon culture. The pueblo is situated on the upper end of a grass covered valley and originally had 400-500 ground floor rooms standing two or three stories high. At its peak, Kinishba may have housed up to 1000 occupants. The pueblo was vacated in the late 14th-early 15th centuries for unknown reasons.

From 1931 to 1940, the archeologist Dr. Byron Cummings, Director of the Arizona State Museum and head of the Department of Archeology at the University of Arizona, led a team of archaeology students and Apache over several seasons to excavate and restore (rebuild) 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. In 1964, the NPS designated the site as a National Historic Landmark, by which time it had fallen into disrepair.

To access the ruins, you leave the main road and drive approximately 2 miles on a primitive road past some ranches and modest homes. You eventually arrive at a very small parking lot. There is no-one around to keep an eye on visitors to the ruins: anyone can scramble around and cause more damage, remove stones, etc. We ran into a couple other people when we first got there but they were on their way out. It was very quiet and bit creepy.

In my opinion, Dr. Cummings did more harm than good. First of all, his team rebuilt the pueblo based on their best guess of how it was originally constructed. In so doing, they almost certainly altered the pueblo so the ruins are no longer authentic. And they did a structurally poor job: the ruins had survived at least 600 years, but the rebuild did not last 30 years. To top it all off, the well-intentioned Cummings made the location of Kinishba known... and now visitors explore unsupervised, sometimes causing more damage. Lynda and I both thought it was a sad situation.

See some photos below.

After leaving the Kinishba Ruins, we made our way back to Show Low via Highway 73 to Highway 60. This was also a very pretty drive.