Ancestral Puebloans
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50 free Ancestral Puebloans trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
The Ancestral Puebloans, long known by the outsider name Anasazi, built some of the most striking architecture in North America: multi-storey great houses at Chaco Canyon and stone towns tucked into the cliffs of Mesa Verde. They farmed a high, dry plateau for more than a thousand years, traded across vast distances and watched the sky closely. This quiz collects the fun facts people most often look for: how the cliff dwellings were built and found again, what was grown, hunted and traded, what the ceremonial rooms and rock art meant, and why the Four Corners emptied in the late 1200s. Every answer comes with a short explanation. It suits students, teachers, road-trippers planning a visit to the Southwest parks and anyone curious about the ancestors of today's Pueblo peoples. The first questions are the friendliest; the later ones reward real enthusiasts.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The name Anasazi, which many Pueblo people reject, comes from which language, where it means 'enemy ancestors'?
Navajo
Navajo is the source of Anaasází, a label the rancher Richard Wetherill picked up while exploring Mesa Verde. Today's Pueblo peoples prefer the term Ancestral Puebloans.
Q 02Traces in pottery at Pueblo Bonito show that Ancestral Puebloans imported which tropical delicacy from 1,200 miles away?
Cacao
Cacao, the bean behind chocolate, was identified in 2009 on sherds from Pueblo Bonito. It grows only in the tropics, so every bean reached Chaco Canyon through long-distance trade with Mexico.
Q 03Which bird did Ancestral Puebloans at Mesa Verde domesticate, turning its feathers into warm blankets?
Turkey
Turkey was the bird of choice: by the 13th century it had replaced deer as the main source of meat at many Mesa Verde sites. Its bones were shaped into awls and needles.
Q 04Rancher Richard Wetherill first saw Mesa Verde's Cliff Palace in 1888 while out searching for what?
Stray cattle
Stray cattle led Wetherill and his brother-in-law Charlie Mason to the mesa top that December. The dwelling they spotted had been empty for almost 600 years.
Q 05Which civilisation did 19th-century settlers wrongly credit with an Ancestral Puebloan great house in New Mexico?
The Aztecs
The Aztecs lived far away in central Mexico, but the mistake stuck. The site is still called Aztec Ruins National Monument, and the town beside it is Aztec, New Mexico.
Q 06Mesa Verde, the Colorado park famed for Ancestral Puebloan cliff dwellings, has a Spanish name meaning what?
Green table
Green table describes the juniper and piñon forests that cover the high ground. Geologists note that the landform tilts to the south, which makes it a cuesta and not a true mesa.
Q 07Which natural disaster hit the Four Corners in the late 1200s as Ancestral Puebloans left Mesa Verde for good?
A severe drought
A severe drought gripped the region from 1276 to 1299, ending some 700 years of farming on Mesa Verde. Archaeologists call those dry decades the Great Drought.
Q 08Astronomer A. E. Douglass first gave firm dates to Ancestral Puebloan ruins by studying what in their wooden beams?
Tree rings
Tree rings grow wide or narrow with each year's rainfall, so Douglass matched the patterns in ancient beams against dated timber. His unbroken record eventually reached back to the year 700.
Q 09Which humpbacked flute player, a fertility figure, appears in Ancestral Puebloan rock art across the American Southwest?
Kokopelli
Kokopelli is said to chase away winter with his flute and bring on the spring. His hump may recall the sacks of goods that travelling traders carried on their backs.
Q 10Which US president approved the creation of Mesa Verde National Park to protect its Ancestral Puebloan cliff dwellings?
Theodore Roosevelt
Theodore Roosevelt approved the park in 1906, the first one created to protect a place of cultural significance. Two women, Virginia McClurg and Lucy Peabody, led the long campaign for it, earning it the nickname the Women's Park.
Q 11Which state meets Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico at the Four Corners, the heart of the Ancestral Puebloan homeland?
Utah
Utah contributes its south-eastern corner to the homeland, which also took in north-eastern Arizona, north-western New Mexico and south-western Colorado.
Q 12What name is given to the round, often underground ceremonial rooms at Ancestral Puebloan sites such as Cliff Palace?
Kiva
Kiva roofs at Cliff Palace rested on six upright stone pillars called pilasters. The site holds more than twenty of these rooms, most with a firepit and a vent to draw in fresh air.
Q 13Which crop joined beans and squash as the Three Sisters that fed Ancestral Puebloan farmers at Mesa Verde?
Corn
Q 21Which New Mexico pueblo, known as Sky City for its mesa-top setting, has been lived in since at least the 1100s?
Acoma
Acoma is one of the oldest continuously inhabited communities in the United States. Its own people place the founding of their mesa-top town in the 11th century.
Q 22Which Arizona people, whose town of Oraibi dates to around 1100, call the Ancestral Puebloans Hisatsinom?
Hopi
Hopi speakers use Hisatsinom to mean 'ancient people'. Oraibi is one of the oldest continuously inhabited settlements in the United States.
Q 23Which leader sent runners with knotted cords to the pueblos to time the 1680 revolt against Spanish rule in New Mexico?
Popé
Popé told each pueblo to untie one knot every morning and to rise when the last was gone. The Spaniards stayed out of New Mexico for twelve years.
Corn changed everything: growing it turned the region's semi-nomadic hunter-gatherers into settled farmers long before the first stone pueblos rose.
Q 14Pueblo Bonito, the largest great house in Chaco Canyon, was laid out on a plan resembling which letter?
D
D-shaped plans were a Chacoan favourite, shared by neighbouring Chetro Ketl. Pueblo Bonito held about 800 rooms and rose four and five storeys high in places.
Q 15More than 15,000 beads and pendants of which gemstone accompanied two burials at Pueblo Bonito in Chaco Canyon?
Turquoise
Turquoise was worked into beads in workshops across Chaco Canyon, where about 200,000 pieces have been excavated. It served as grave goods and ceremonial offerings.
Q 16Which brightly coloured tropical birds, native to lands far to the south, were traded to Pueblo Bonito in Chaco Canyon?
Macaws
Macaws are no part of the Four Corners environment, so finding them at Pueblo Bonito proves trade with distant regions. Seashells found at Chaco tell the same story.
Q 17Early Ancestral Puebloans wove their sandals from the tough fibres of which spiky-leaved desert plant?
Yucca
Yucca fibres also went into blankets, combined with rabbit fur for warmth.
Q 18The earliest Ancestral Puebloans are named for their skill at which craft, practised long before pottery arrived?
Basket weaving
Basket weaving gave the Basketmaker culture its name, thanks to the many baskets found at sites 2,000 to 3,000 years old. Fired pottery reached these people only later.
Q 19After leaving the Four Corners, many Ancestral Puebloans resettled along which river, still lined with pueblos today?
Rio Grande
Rio Grande pueblos such as Cochiti and San Ildefonso have been lived in ever since. That is why their people say the Ancestral Puebloans never vanished but simply moved.
Q 20World Heritage Sites credited to the Pueblo peoples are Mesa Verde, Chaco Canyon and which still-inhabited adobe town?
Taos
Taos residents trace their oldest standing building to around the year 1000. More went up in the late 1200s and early 1300s, and families still live in the adobe blocks today.
Q 24Spanish explorers named the Pueblo peoples after their style of dwelling, using a Spanish word with which meaning?
Village
Village is the meaning of pueblo, a word the explorers applied first to the compact stone and adobe towns they found and then to the people living in them.
Q 25Before stone pueblos, early Ancestral Puebloans lived for centuries in which homes made of brush, logs and earth?
Pithouses
Pithouses were dug into the ground, so the soil around them kept out the winter cold. At Mesa Verde they were later given over mainly to community ceremonies.
Q 26Hundreds of images pecked into Newspaper Rock by Ancestral Puebloans and earlier peoples are known by which term?
Petroglyphs
Petroglyphs are cut into a rock surface, whereas pictographs are painted on. Newspaper Rock carries over 650 designs, the oldest about 2,000 years old, and Ute and Navajo carvers added more in later centuries.
Q 27Ancestral Puebloan buildings from Chaco Canyon to Mesa Verde are known for doorways built in which distinctive shape?
T-shaped
T-shaped doorways and windows were a favourite motif from Chaco Canyon's great houses to Mesa Verde's cliff dwellings. Some archaeologists read the shared shape as a sign of Chaco's lasting influence.
Q 28A dagger of light crossed the centre of the larger spiral at Chaco Canyon's Sun Dagger site on which annual date?
Summer solstice
Summer solstice was the day the dagger cut through the spiral's centre, an effect first recorded by artist Anna Sofaer. It ended when visitors' footsteps caused one of the three stone slabs to shift.
Q 29A cliff painting near Peñasco Blanco in Chaco Canyon may record the sighting of which sky event in July 1054?
A supernova
A supernova appeared that month, bright enough for Chinese astronomers to record it in daylight. Its scattered debris is what telescopes now show as the Crab Nebula.
Q 30Which Mesa Verde cliff dwelling do visitors reach by a 32-foot ladder before crawling through a narrow tunnel?
Balcony House
Balcony House held 38 rooms and probably sheltered up to 30 people on its high ledge. Rangers call the visit the most adventurous cliff dwelling tour in the park.