Monument of the people: The ancestral home of many New Mexico pueblos, Bandelier takes its name from the archaeologist who fought for its preservation

The Ancestral Puebloans in New Mexico once called an area on Pajarito Plateau in the Jemez Mountains home.

In 1916, the federal government designated it part of the national park system and christened it Bandelier National Monument in order to preserve the Native American archeological sites there.

Monument of the people: The ancestral home of many New Mexico pueblos, Bandelier takes its name from the archaeologist who fought for its preservation

The moniker can be misleading because unlike other Native settlements in New Mexico, it’s not named for the ancient pueblo people who lived there, but for Adolph (sometimes spelled as “Adolf”) Bandelier, the Swiss American archaeologist and historian who researched it and fought for its preservation.

The nearly 34,000-acre site near Los Alamos that straddles Sandoval and Los Alamos counties features at least 3,000 archaeological sites, the most noticeable of which are the cave dwellings. The cliff homes are a marvel to observe. From a distance, they appear like a series of windows and doors. The site also has petroglyphs and several other ancient structures, including kivas.

Pueblo people have called the Southwest, including what is now New Mexico, home and most likely descended from the groups of hunters and gatherers who came here over 10,000 years ago, according to the National Park Service. The pueblo people in and around Bandelier farmed, planting crops of maize, beans and squash on mesa top fields. They also hunted for deer, rabbits and birds to supplement their diets. It’s even believed they had domesticated dogs they used for hunting and to provide companionship.

By 1550, the Ancestral Pueblo people moved their communities to areas along the Rio Grande. According to NPS the modern day pueblos of Cochiti, San Felipe, Kewa (formerly called Santo Domingo), San Ildefonso, Santa Clara and Zuni have strong ties to Bandelier. The park service works with each to make decisions that affect what they consider ancestral homelands.

The monument also has an important tie to modern-day American history. It was part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Depression-era New Deal, which created the Civilian Conservation Corps in 1933 via the Emergency Conservation Work Act. It provided federal funding to put people to work on public projects.

Bandelier was one of those projects. It had been transferred from the U.S. Forest Service to the NPS in 1932. The Civilian Conservation Corps built a road in Frijoles Canyon, installed trails and erected a visitor center and a lodge.

A May 1916 essay by Frederic J. Haskin titled “A Great American” was featured in several newspapers, including The Lexington Herald. It discussed the proclamation issued by President Woodrow Wilson setting aside the land for a national monument. It was he who named it for Bandelier, a man who was little known by the public at that time, according to the article.

“To all but a few Americans, the name of Bandelier means little or nothing,” the story said. “Yet Adolph Bandelier was one of our great men, a man whose career was as colorful and adventurous as that of some medieval knight … (Bandelier) occupied a unique place as an American historian and American author.”

Bandelier was born Aug. 6, 1840, in Bern, Switzerland, and died two years prior to designation of the monument in his name. He immigrated to the United States with his family when he was 8-years-old. Bandelier was meant to go into the family banking business, but a friendship with famous American anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan changed the course of his life, according to the NPS. He was already 40-years-old when he traveled to Santa Fe in 1880 to pursue his new love of anthropology. He would live in Arizona and New Mexico from 1880 and 1886, making several expeditions to the Pajarito Plateau.

“Bandelier laid the foundation for a real history of our Indian and Spanish Southwest,” the 1916 story continued. “He lived among the Indians for years … sharing their language, adopted by them into their tribes. He had the mind of a scholar and a scientist with the temper of a pioneer.”

At the time, studying American Indians was not considered by some an important endeavor, but he eventually convinced the Archeological Institute of America to sponsor his study of Indian tribes in the Southwest, according to NPS. The men of Cochiti Pueblo acted as his guide as he explored the area now named for him.

Bandelier used his experience and knowledge to write “The Delight Makers,” a fictionalized version of life on the Rito de los Frijoles, that was published in 1890 to little fanfare. It gained popularity long after his death and is still available to purchase on major book sites.

Bandelier’s studies took him all over the Americas. His first wife Josephine Huegy died in 1892 while the couple was in Lima, Peru, conducting research for the American Museum of Natural History. It’s there he met his second wife Fannie Ritter, a linguist enthralled by his work who was 29 years his junior. The couple married in December 1893 and worked alongside each other until his death. Ritter, like Bandelier, was a native of Switzerland, but she had grown up in Lima. A scholar in her own right, she helped him excavate sites in South America and was fluent in French, Spanish, Italian and English, and could speak several dialects of the Native Indians in South America.

In 1914, Bandelier went to Seville, Spain, to study early Spanish records of the Americas. He died and was buried there, but that was not to be his final resting place. His remains were exhumed in 1977 and his ashes spread at the Bandelier National Monument in 1980.

The Santa Fe New Mexican had this to say about him in February 1916 when the monument was created: “The name is proper recognition of a man to whom New Mexico and the world are indebted.”

Curious about how a town, street or building got its name? Email columnist Elaine Briseño at ebriseno@abqjournal.com as she continues the monthly journey in “What’s in a Name?”