Local lore says that in ancient times when pueblos groups traveled south, they would meet in the Frijoles Canyon and made an agreement. Tyuonyi translates to agreement or covenant. The ancestral Puebloans constructed the Tyuonyi Pueblo, located on the Pajarito Plateau, in the late 14th century and continued to occupy the area for the next two centuries. Although the canyon was abandoned by the early 17th century, a number of the local pueblos claim ancestry of the people who built and lived in the Bandelier area.

Tyuonyi was an approximately 400-room town with dwelling between one and three stories high. The ground floor rooms were most often windowless. The entrances were located on the roof with the only access being ladders. This construction made the area easier to protect. Often the children, pregnant women, and older members of the community lived at the Tyuonyi Pueblo because of the strategic construction.

Frijoles Canyon offered a fertile land with a reliable source of water, the Rito de los Frijoles, the river that runs through the valley of the canyon. This provided a location for the natives from the surrounding area fleeing draughts in the mid 1300s.

Today, the archaeological remains of the pueblo are only shin high, but show the location of three kivas, ceremonial rooms, and the layout of the other buildings. In 1916, President Woodrow Wilson established Bandelier National Monument, named after Adolph Bandelier, the first archaeologist to study the dwellings, to protect the ancestral Pueblo sites.