The Conservancy has entered a bargain sale-to-charity purchase agreement (part donation, part purchase) with the owners of Montezuma Village, an approximately eighty-five-acre property located at the northern end of Montezuma Canyon in southeastern Utah. The Conservancy has been negotiating the acquisition of the site with several family members for the past forty years.
Montezuma Village is a large prehistoric Ancestral Puebloan community center. It was visited by explorers and archaeologists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the early 1960s the late archaeologist Ray Matheny of Brigham Young University (BYU) documented the entire village, recording ninety-one sites located on a one mile stretch of the canyon. Most of the village is located on the land included in the purchase, and a small portion of it is on adjacent land owned by the Bureau of Land Management. There are also a few prehistoric structures on adjacent land owned by neighbors.
