Kinishba Ruins

Kinishba Ruins is a sprawling, 600-room great house archaeological site in eastern Arizona and is administered by the Southern Athabaskan-speaking White Mountain Apache Tribe of the nearby Fort Apache Indian Reservation. As it demonstrates a combination of indigenous Mogollon and Anasazi cultural traits, archeologists consider it ancestral to the peoples of both the Hopi and Zuni cultures.

Kinishba is located at 5,000 feet above a pine-fringed alluvial valley, near Whiteriver, Arizona, the seat of government for the White Mountain Apache Tribe. The first European to write about it was Adolph Bandelier in 1892, who was a pioneering archaeologist. From 1931 to 1940, the archeologist Dr. Byron Cummings, Director of the Arizona State Museum and head of the Department of Archeology at the University of Arizona, led a team of archaeology students and Apache over several seasons to excavate and restore Kinishba. He named the site, derived from the Apache words: ki datbaa, meaning "brown house." The teams also built a pueblo-style museum and visitor's center, as Cummings envisioned it as a destination to help with economic development of the area. Cummings hoped Kinishba would be declared a national monument and taken under National Park Service management, but did not succeed in this.

In 1964, the NPS designated the site as a National Historic Landmark, by which time it had fallen into disrepair. The ruins received limited cleanup and restoration in 2005-2007.