It’s hard to tell in this photo, but essentially this is a cliff dwelling, where the Ancestral Pueblo people lived. They carved into the porous volcanic rocks to construct rooms used for sleeping, cooking, and storing food. The Ancestral Pueblo people hunted the land for game, such as bison, deer, rabbit, but mainly they were farmers, relying on rains for successful crops. As the region fell into a drought, these dwellings were abandoned for better water resources along the Rio Grande sometime around 1550AD.