El Morro National Monument Inscription Rock

El Morro National Monument Inscription Rock is a New Mexico historical marker in Cibola County.

NM Highway 53 -- Ramah -- at entrance to monument

Get directions ↗Start a road trip Historical trails

This cuesta has long been an oasis to the travelers who left their mark upon it. A reliable waterhole hidden at the base of a sandstone bluff made El Morro (the headland) a popular refuge for hundreds of years. Native Americans, Spanish explorers and missionaries, and American soldiers and pioneers carved over 2,000 signatures, dates, messages, and petroglyphs. Atop the cuesta are the remains of the fourteenth-century pueblos of Atsinna and North Atsinna where the ancestors of today’s Puebloan communities once lived.

The Historic Preservation Division notes that its marker spreadsheet may be out of date and in places inaccurate, and that it does not know where every marker now stands. These pages carry the spreadsheet’s record; a marker listed here may have moved or may no longer stand. the program’s page ↗

TodayHistorical map

Slide toward Today to fade the historical sheet and see the modern map underneath.

David Rumsey Map Collection, Stanford Libraries

Historical maps covering this location

1876 · Territory of New Mexico (David Rumsey Map Collection, Stanford Libraries)
1889 · New Mexico. (David Rumsey Map Collection, Stanford Libraries)
1892 · Wingate, New Mexico (USGS Historical Topographic Map Collection)
1925 · Arizona, New Mexico (David Rumsey Map Collection, Stanford Libraries)
1927 · State of New Mexico. General Land Office. (David Rumsey Map Collection, Stanford Libraries)

Arizona, New Mexico, 1925, covering the location of El Morro National Monument Inscription Rock, with a pin at the marker's coordinates — Arizona, New Mexico, 1925, covering this location. David Rumsey Map Collection, Stanford Libraries. The pin is ours, placed from the marker's coordinates.

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For example, one family's tree showed the Articles of Confederation marker in Pennsylvania standing under a mile from where William Gabby lived in the 1760s.

What that marker records spans 1777 to 1789, overlapping William Gabby's years there.

From one family's 77-marker roster

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The marker isn't at this spotOur pin may be off. If you know where it stands, tell us.I couldn't find the markerWe record what the source recorded. We have not been to look.The sign reads differentlyThat would be an error, and we can pass it to the program.The historical map looks wrongThe period map behind the pin, not the marker itself.Something else

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Marker data: Official Scenic Historic Markers program, New Mexico Historic Preservation Division, Department of Cultural AffairsMarker texts come from the Division’s published marker spreadsheet, reproduced with the Division’s written permission. Where that spreadsheet records a coordinate, the pin is the Division’s own; where it records only a highway and mile marker, an address, a junction or a named place, or where its coordinate contradicts its own highway, mile and county, the pin is ours, resolved on public road and place data and marked approximate.

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