Historic Resource Study, Valles Caldera National Preserve, National Park Service

Norris, Frank; Elliott, Michael

doi:10.36967/2300569

Management Summary: The document that follows is a historic resource study of the Valles Caldera National Preserve, managed by the National Park Service. The preserve is a nearly 90,000-acre block of land in the heart of the Jemez Mountains of New Mexico. It is a collapsed volcano, or caldera; a high-elevation environment consisting of large grasslands, or valles, surrounded by and interspersed with massive volcanic domes of rhyolite. The preserve has been the scene of human activities for at least the last twelve thousand years. These activities focused initially on obsidian procurement and stone tool production, and hunting and gathering. Native Americans began farming in the lowest-elevation reaches of the preserve by as early as the 1400s CE (common era). The preserve is an important sacred landscape for many tribes today. The area was granted to a New Mexico family named Baca in 1860 as part of a judgment to settle land grant issues in the Las Vegas, New Mexico area. The same family was awarded four other areas, or floats, of the same size elsewhere in New Mexico, and in Colorado and Arizona. The first area that the family selected was the one in the Jemez Mountains, thus the name Baca Location Number 1 for that part of the grant. The Baca Location Number 1 was sold and bought a number of times before coming into federal ownership in 2000. It began as a sheep and cattle ranch. By the middle of the twentieth century, other activities such as logging, mining, geothermal exploration affected the landscape, and now, as a unit of the National Park Service, the preserve is open to tourism and recreation. A historic resource study is a standard document used in the National Park Service to provide a historical overview of a park or region and to identify and evaluate, in terms of the National Register of Historic Places, the significance of a park's cultural resources within historic contexts. The document provides this information and makes recommendations for National Register evaluations and nominations.

Historic Resource Study, Valles Caldera National Preserve, National Park Service

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