During Paleozoic time, the paleotectonic and sedimentation patterns of the southern Ancestral Rocky Mountains extended southward through New Mexico and Arizona into adjacent parts of Chihuahua and Sonora. During Cambrian-Middle Devonian time, this was a particularly stable part of the North American craton. Slow deposition of shelf clastics and dolomitic carbonates was interrupted by several long erosional hiatuses. Major tectonic features first appeared in Late Devonian time, and at least one depositional basin formed west of the Defiance-Zuni uplift. Thin Lower Mississippian shelf carbonates and evaporites covered nearly the entire region.

The most significant tectonic activities started in late Chesterian time and extended with increasing magnitude until the end of Wolfcampian time. Local basins and uplifts date from this interval and occurred in two belts. One belt was about 80 mi (130 km) wide along the western sides of the Diablo and Pedernal uplifts and along both sides of the Uncompahgre uplift. Another belt extended northwest from the Pedregosa basin into southeastern Arizona. Major tectonic events initiated the Morrowan, Atokan, and Missourian epochs and occurred twice in the Wolfcampian. Leonardian, Guadalupian, and Ochoan epochs were times of tectonic stability. During the Leonardian, sediments from the Uncompahgre uplift gradually covered all the other uplifted blocks. The timing of these Paleozoic tectonic e ents suggests a cause and effect relationship with plate tectonic histories that brought North America and northern Europe together in Late Devonian time (Acadian orogeny) and Euramerica and northwestern Gondwana together in Late Mississippian through Early Permian time (Appalachian orogeny).