Antelope Cave is located on the Uinkaret Plateau, northwestern Arizona. The site likely represents a sporadically-occupied hunting and processing locale during Archaic, Basketmaker, and Pueblo periods. Recent radiocarbon dates of samples from the 1959-60 UCLA excavations place the major Ancestral Pueblo occupation of the cave between 680 AD and 960 AD.

The area around Antelope Cave has no water and few plants that can be used for fuel for cooking, and paleoenvironmental data for the area suggests that conditions were similar during the occupation of the site, if not worse. The closest water source is Ruesch Spring, 3.5 miles away, while the closest trees are junipers several miles away!