engineering

Puye Cliff Dwellings

Puye Cliff Dwellings is a engineering topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Puye Cliff Dwellings rather than just read about it. In short: The Puye Cliff Dwellings are the ruins of an abandoned pueblo, located in Santa Clara Canyon on Santa Clara Pueblo Reservation land near Española, New Mexico. Established in the late 1200s or early 1300s and abandoned by about 1600, this is among the largest of the prehistoric Indian settlements on the Pajarito Plateau, showing a variety of architectural forms and building techniques.

Key takeaways

Puye Cliff Dwellings belongs to engineering; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Puye Cliff Dwellings to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Puye Cliff Dwellings from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

The Puye Cliff Dwellings are the ruins of an abandoned pueblo, located in Santa Clara Canyon on Santa Clara Pueblo Reservation land near Española, New Mexico. Established in the late 1200s or early 1300s and abandoned by about 1600, this is among the largest of the prehistoric Indian settlements on the Pajarito Plateau, showing a variety of architectural forms and building techniques. The site was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1966. The name Puye (Tewa language: pu, “cottontail rabbits,” and ye, "to assemble") possibly suggests a place for hunting rabbits.

Ancient pueblo dwellings The Puye Cliffs complex includes two levels of cliff-dwellings and both surface and cave dwellings. The two levels of cliff dwellings, the mesa top and reconstructed 'Community House' are accessed by paths and about twelve stairways and ladders cut into the side of the cliff. One level of cliff dwellings is over 1 mile (1.6 km) long and the second is about 2,100 feet (640 m) long. The ruins are within the northern end of the Puye Formation, a geologic formation of pyroclastic and block and ash flows exposed east of the Jemez Mountains. The dwellings were carved out of soft volcanic tuff (the Bandelier Tuff) on about a 200 feet (61 m) cliff ridge. The rock is relatively soft and can be excavated using wooden tools. The cliff dwellings held about 740 rooms and ruins at the base of the cliff that likely held additional dwellings. On top of the mesa are cave dwellings of the Pueblo II Era around which a multi-storied puebloan village was built. The south portion of the complex had 173 rooms on the ground floor. The total number of rooms is not known, but would include rooms on the northern side of the complex and the upper levels. In the center of the complex was a large plaza. Between 900 and 1580, up to 1500 Pueblo people lived in the area where they hunted game and cultivated food. Native peoples first settled in the area in the late 10th century of the Pueblo II Era, living in dispersed farmstead dwellings at the east side of the Jemez Mountains. Their settlements increased and changed over time in the Pueblo III Era, when they lived in larger, concentrated villages of Otowi, Puye, Shufinne, Tsankawi, Tsirege, and Tyuonyi. About 1580 (after the end of the Pueblo IV Era) drought finally forced the villagers to leave for locations nearer to the Rio Grande valley. Present day inhabitants of Santa Clara Pueblo, some 10 miles (16 km) to the east, claim to be descendants of the Puye residents. In 1907 Edgar Hewett, with the Southwest Society of the Archaeological Institute of America, excavated Puye Cliffs. It was the first systematic excavation of a prehistoric pueblo in the Rio Grande valley.

Recent history

The cliff dwellings were declared a National Historic Landmark in 1966, under the name of "Puye Ruins." In 2000, a planned burn of trees in Bandelier National Monument burned out of control. The resulting wildfire, known as the Cerro Grande Fire, eventually claimed 46,925 acres (189.90 km2), some 250 houses in Los Alamos, and devastated Santa Clara Canyon. Puye Cliff Dwellings site has been reopened to the public. Current information can be obtained from Santa Clara Pueblo. Tours can be scheduled to explore the cliffs and learn of their history. The site is available to the public within opening hours. Visitors must check in through the Puye Cliffs Welcome Center.

In popular culture The area features extensively in the 1952 film The Atomic City.

Illustrations

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Puye Cliff Dwellings

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Puye Cliff Dwellings claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In engineering, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Puye Cliff Dwellings before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Puye Cliff Dwellings ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Puye Cliff Dwellings

In research: Puye Cliff Dwellings appears in engineering research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Puye Cliff Dwellings in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Puye Cliff Dwellings is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics 12th-century architecture, Archaeological sites in New Mexico, Archaeological sites on the National Register of Historic Places in New Mexico, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Puye Cliff Dwellings outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Puye Cliff Dwellings in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Puye Cliff Dwellings means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Puye Cliff Dwellings out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Puye Cliff Dwellings in simple terms?

Why does Puye Cliff Dwellings matter?

Because it connects several engineering ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Puye Cliff Dwellings?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Puye Cliff Dwellings.