Shallow tributaries run through the wide and deep canyons into the San Juan River.

[3] Although Hovenweep National Monument is largely known for the six groups of Ancestral Puebloan villages and its kiva, there is evidence of occupation by hunter-gatherers from 8,000 to 6,000 B.C.

The ruins were already known to the Ute and Navajo guides who considered them haunted and urged Huntington to stay away.

The name is apt as a description of the area's desolate canyons and barren mesas as well as the ruins of ancient communities.

[37]In 1917–18, ethnologist J. Walter Fewkes of the Smithsonian Institution included descriptions of the ruins in published archaeological survey reports, and recommended the structures be protected.