These cliff dwellings stood for about 500 years and nearly came apart in eight. People had lived in Arizona’s Tonto Basin for thousands of years. By the late 1200s, communities were farming along the Salt River and building homes into the cliffs above it. The dwellings still standing today were built in the 1200s and occupied until around 1450. Archaeologists use the name Salado for the people associated with these communities, but that wasn’t what they called themselves. Their culture developed in an area where traditions from ancestral Sonoran Desert and Ancestral Puebloan peoples came together. Their descendants still live in Arizona today. Then everything around the dwellings started changing. Ranchers and soldiers arrived in the basin in the 1800s. In 1903, construction began on Roosevelt Dam just a few miles away. Workers and visitors climbed into the centuries-old dwellings and removed artifacts as souvenirs. Theodore Roosevelt declared the site Tonto National Monument in ...