The Grand Canyon is one of the most celebrated geological wonders on Earth. But it is also a book of human history: its cliffs shelter thousands of archaeological sites, its caves have protected populations for millennia, and its summits have served as ceremonial places for peoples whose descendants still live in the region. New research is revisiting the story of the first inhabitants of this extraordinary landscape.

Native American Heritage Month celebrations at Grand Canyon National Park
Native American Heritage Month celebrations at the Grand Canyon. Eleven tribal nations today maintain historical, cultural, and spiritual ties to the canyon. Credit: National Park Service / Wikimedia Commons

Recent studies of speleothems (stalagmites and stalactites), sedimentary DNADNAThe molecule carrying genetic information, used to reconstruct kinship between species.→, and fossilized charcoal recovered from cave strata have pushed back human occupation of the area to more than 12,000 years before the common era. ClovisClovisA Palaeoindian culture of North America (c. 13,000 years ago), recognizable by its fluted stone points; long believed the oldest on the continent, no longer so.→ culture projectile points found in several rock shelters confirm that hunter-gatherersHunter-gatherersA way of life based on hunting, fishing and gathering wild resources, without farming or herding; it dominated almost the whole of human history.→ were already traversing the Colorado River banks at the end of the PleistocenePleistoceneThe geological epoch of the great ice ages (c. 2.6 Ma–11,700 BP), spanning most of human prehistory.→, when megafaunaMegafaunaThe very large animals (mammoths, giant ground sloths, etc.) of the Pleistocene, most of which became extinct at the end of the last ice age.→ (mammoths, mastodons, American camels, and horses) still populated these latitudes.

The Ancestral Puebloans: builders of the canyon

The best-documented period of human occupation at the Grand Canyon corresponds to the Ancestral Puebloan culture, often known by their Navajo name Anasazi (the ancient enemies). Between 500 and 1150 CE, these populations built hundreds of structures into the canyon's cliffs and plateaus: hanging granaries, cliff dwellings, watchtowers, and circular ceremonial kivas carved into the rock.

Walhalla Plateau at the Grand Canyon, ancestral archaeological site
The Walhalla Plateau on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon sheltered an ancestral Puebloan village active between the 10th and 12th centuries. Ruins of stone structures remain visible there. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

The Walhalla Plateau on the North Rim offers one of the best-preserved examples of this occupation. Excavations there have uncovered polychrome ceramics, knapped flintFlintA hard, brittle siliceous rock, knapped by prehistoric people to produce blades, points and sharp tools.→ tools, and remains of cultivated crops (corn, squash, beans), demonstrating that these populations practiced intensive dry farming at altitude, complementing hunting and gathering in the canyon depths.

Hopi, Havasupai, Navajo: a living continuity

Contrary to a common misconception, the Grand Canyon was never truly abandoned. The Hopi consider certain canyon sites as the ancestral kivas of their clans and still make annual pilgrimages there. The Havasupai, whose name means "people of the blue-green waters," have lived in the only reservation located inside the canyon, at the bottom of Havasu Canyon, a tributary of the Colorado, for at least 800 years continuously.

View of the Walhalla Plateau at the Grand Canyon
The Grand Canyon contains thousands of archaeological sites in its cliffs, caves, and plateaus. Aerial archaeology and LiDARLiDARLaser-based remote sensing (from "Light Detection And Ranging"): a sensor fires light pulses and measures the echo's return time to map a surface in three dimensions. Mounted on a plane or a drone, it slips through gaps in the canopy and reconstructs the bare-earth relief, revealing structures invisible beneath vegetation.→ have identified hundreds of new structures in recent years. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Recent genetic analyses published in Nature Human Behaviour provided decisive confirmation of this continuity: the genomes of current Hopi and Havasupai populations show direct lineage from the Ancestral Puebloan cultural carriers, without major population replacement over the past 1,500 years. This finding challenges theories that postulated a demographic collapse or population substitution during the "great drought" of the 12th century.

Archaeology and contemporary stakes

Archaeological research at the Grand Canyon now operates within a legal and ethical framework profoundly transformed by the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA, 1990). This American law requires public institutions to return human remains and sacred objects held in their collections to indigenous communities. Several tribal nations have thus recovered hundreds of ceremonial objects and ancestral remains that were removed during 19th and 20th century excavations.

View of Walhalla Plateau from the heights of the Grand Canyon
The Walhalla Plateau viewed from the North Rim heights. The elevation and difficult access have contributed to the preservation of ancestral archaeological sites in this sector. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Today, excavations at the Grand Canyon are conducted in close partnership with the eleven tribal nations claiming ties to the site. This collaboration has transformed the methodology: oral traditions and ecological knowledge of indigenous communities now guide field surveys, and the interpretations offered to national park visitors increasingly incorporate the perspective of the peoples who inhabited and sanctified this landscape long before the arrival of Europeans.