Kinishba Ruins is a 600-room Mogollon great house archaeological site in eastern Arizona and is administered by the White Mountain Apache Tribe.

Long known to the Apache people of the region and alleged to have been visited by Conquistadors, the site was first written about in English in 1892, when pioneering archaeologist Adolph Bandelier described the ruins.

[3] Scholars believe that Kinishba may have been the pueblo Chiciticale referred to in narratives of the 1540–41 Spanish expedition led by Francisco Vásquez de Coronado.

The site is easily accessible in comparison to the other 20 or so large (150 or more rooms) Ancestral Pueblo village ruins in the Fort Apache area.

Estimates suggest the ruins were built and occupied from the 12th to 14th centuries as part of the ancient population boom within the Mogollon Rim region and beyond.

[4] The Kinishba pueblo is composed of nine major building mounds, the remains of masonry room blocks, some of which were originally three stories tall.

They are proximate to expanses of land suitable for dry maize farming, and they have ready access to domestic water, tabular sandstone or limestone, and ponderosa pine.

From 1931 into the 1940s, Byron Cummings of the University of Arizona led a team of students and a varying workforce of 10 to 27 White Mountain Apache to excavate and restore the site.

[3] He used a variety of funding means, including his broad network of supporters and the Civilian Conservation Corps and Bureau of Indian Affairs (which administered the Fort Apache Agency), to pay for workers and materials.

Chester Holden, David Kane, and Turner Thompson were Apache men who spent at least five seasons at the site and became strongly attached to the preservation project.

Built during the Great Depression, the museum was intended also as a place for the Apache to sell their contemporary arts and crafts, and to provide continuing employment for tribal members.

Cummings was a scholar-entrepreneur, who "combined archaeological research and training; intertribal and interagency collaboration; historic preservation; and museum, community, and tourism enterprise development" in the first project of its kind in Arizona.

[5] The park includes a 288-acre (117 ha) National Historic District, with 27 buildings dating from the US Army's use of the fort during the Apache Wars.

The tribe has provided explanations of the history of the Mogollon Rim Pueblo, as well as the historic and contemporary White Mountain Apache.