Aztec Ruins National Monument

West Ruin and nearby ruins includes hundreds of small square rooms and kivas (round ceremonial meeting rooms). Some of the pueblos were multistory (3 stories high). Most rooms were probably used as storage, and over time, many had been filled with trash and abandoned (Corbett, 1962). Although the ruin may have had as many as 450 rooms, the community at the pueblo was probably small, but the site served an estimated population of 5,000 distributed along the Animas River Valley (Morgan, 1880).