Nothing gets my little one’s imagination going like an abandoned building. He loves ghost towns, old mines and pueblo ruins; something we have in abundance here in the Southwest. While we have by no means visited all the cliff dwelling sites here in Arizona, we have certainly been to our fair share. After completing trips to Montezuma’s Castle, Tuzigoot and Walnut Canyon, I decided it was time to do a little experiment to help Jack understand the challenges the Sinaguan peoples faced when building their structures.

The structures at Montezuma’s Castle and Montezuma’s Well are built on natural limestone ledges using mud and stone. Additional support was added using large beams from Arizona Sycamore trees.

Main structure at Montezuma’s Castle

The Tuzigoot Pueblo on the other hand was built on a limestone ridge overlooking the Verde Valley. The rooms were constructed of limestone and sandstone rocks, held together with mortar.

View from the top of the reconstructed house.

At Walnut Canyon, the Sinaguans used alcoves as their base of construction. This gave them a premade floor, ceiling and back wall. The front and sides were constructed in a similar manner and with similar materials to the others.

One of many structures you will see on the Island trail.

The experiment is easy. Build a cliff-type structure using basic ingredients. We chose M&M’s, both regular and peanut butter, chocolate frosting, graham crackers and a few pretzels. The graham crackers were to simulate the alcoves of Walnut Canyon. The M&M’s were stones and the frosting was mortar (mud).

We began by trying to replicate the pueblo at Walnut Canyon. I quickly discovered that the top cracker would not stay put no matter how much frosting and patience I employed, so we left it off until the walls were sufficiently high to support the roof. Jack chose to build his walls with the smaller chocolate M&M’s and I used the peanut butter ones.

Once that one was completed we tried our hands at a Tuzigoot style pueblo. About the 4th course, the walls started to collapse, even if we offset the candies. We used the pretzels on top to simulate the branches of the roof, but could not make a second story.

Walnut Canyon – the walls were more stable.
Tuzigoot – the middle wall was falling as I took the photo.
A fun and tasty project!

Our Conclusions:

  1. The smaller chocolate M&M’s were easier to build with because they had a more uniform shape.
  2. The Walnut Canyon style of dwelling was easier to build because it had a solid support system in place.
  3. More mortar was not necessarily better (just tastier)

Click the links to see the short video of our experiment or the hike in Walnut Canyon. We upload a new #shorts science video every Sunday on our Youtube channel Jack and Mama