A Colorado historian is leading a team to survey the historic inscriptions on the ceilings of the 900-year-old ruins in northwestern New Mexico.
The Farmington Daily Times reports Fred Blackburn and his team will study lengthy messages — or graffiti — left at the Aztec Ruins National Monument to shed light on how others saw the engineering marvel.
Blackburn wants to know the stories of those folks and add historical context to their inscriptions in as many cases as possible.
The Aztec Ruins National Monument is made of 400 masonry rooms and is an ancestral pueblo structure that dates to the 11th to the 13th centuries.
White settlers named it after mistakenly believing it was built by Aztecs from central Mexico.
