Pueblo Architecture
Pueblo architecture refers to the distinctive built environments created by various Native American cultures in the southwestern United States, particularly noted for their organized aggregate settlements that blend residential and communal spaces. This architectural tradition emerged during five main periods from approximately 750 to 1600 CE, yet its conceptual elements date back even further. Prominent cultural groups associated with Pueblo architecture include the Anasazi, Hohokam, and Mimbres/Mogollon, each contributing to a rich tapestry of designs influenced by their unique ecological and social contexts. The architecture often features multistoried structures made of adobe or stone, with characteristics such as T-shaped doorways, ventilation holes, and a focus on communal gathering areas. Notable examples include the Great Houses of Chaco Canyon and the multistory dwellings at Mesa Verde, which reflect an evolution of urban planning centered on environmental adaptation and community organization. The term "pueblo," coined by Spanish explorers, encapsulates the shared living units and public architecture that fostered social cohesion within these communities. Overall, Pueblo architecture is a testament to the ingenuity and cultural heritage of the Native American peoples of the Southwest.
Pueblo Architecture
Pueblo architecture includes the most conspicuous built structures and environments of the geographic southwestern United States. Although pueblo occupation is normally subdivided into five main pueblo periods (I-V) that span from about 750 and 1600 CE, many of its conceptual ideas are earlier. The diverse ecological zones of the Southwest are also home to a rich group of cultures whose history spans 3,000 years. Within the region, there are three main cultural groups, but with many distinct cultural subgroups. These are: the Anasazi in the area where Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Utah converge (the so-called Four Corners Region); the Hohokam in southern Arizona; and the Mimbres/Mogollon in southwestern New Mexico into parts of the Mexican Sonora Desert. There was a connectedness among the cultural groups that affected the ebb and flow of change with regard to identity, migration, and status, which in turn affected the built environment.
Background
Between 850 and 1150 CE, Chaco Canyon witnessed a construction boom of Great Houses. Skilled builders constructed a dozen of these huge, symmetrical stone structures consisting of numerous rooms (as many as seven hundred) stacked as high as five stories, and containing open courtyards, terraces, and perhaps towers. Among these architectural spaces were round rooms below ground used for ceremonial purposes (kivas). Although Great Houses were not pueblos, but rather palaces for high-status families, their conglomerate form shares many traits with pueblo architecture. Along with some two hundred substantially smaller Great Houses placed at strategic points along the Four Corners, the Chaco elite tried to control the regional territory. In many ways Chaco was a failed experiment in urbanism. Rather than the densely packed urban form of typical cities—indeed of the conceptual premise of pueblo cities—Chaco was a sprawling urban form that took advantage of the landscape (a virtual mega-courtyard).
The site of Casas Grande (also known as Paquime) dates to between 900 and 1500 CE, with an apogee around 1300 CE, and is located in northwestern Mexico (now in the present-day Mexican state of Chihuahua). Casas Grande was at the nexus of two cultural and architectural traditions (i.e., pueblo and Mesoamerican). At Casas Grande multistoried apartments built of sun-dried adobe bricks formed a large pueblo planned around residential units, and open plazas. Public ceremonial spaces included Mesoamerican-style ball courts and platform mounds. The architectural features, together with pueblo construction, belies the importance of Casas Grande as a transmitter of ideas to Native American groups in the United States, not only in the Southwest, but also to other important centers such as Cahokia (near St. Louis, Missouri).
The term "pueblo" was first used by Spanish explorers in the sixteenth century to describe conglomerate apartment-style dwellings they saw in Arizona and New Mexico. This type of architecture, however, was not always employed across these populations, nor did it emerge fully formed or in a single constructed space. What is key to the pueblo is that it is a purposefully built series of spaces in conjunction with households that employ living units and share common gathering spaces (public architecture), differentiated from dwellings by their scale, layout, and features. The act of building public architecture confirmed community membership and reinforced social organization.
Overview
Regardless of the specific form of pueblos, they consist of organized aggregate settlements that combine both residential and public spaces. Larger populations necessitated greater resources, especially food, and the collective effort to control and regulate water resources provided incentives for living together in large communities. By 500 CE in the Sonora Desert region of southern Arizona, large semi-subterranean one-room dwellings (pit houses) or a Native American version of wattle-and-daub (vertical wooden poles with mud mortar) construction (jacal style) were already common. These dwellings were either clustered together around a large central courtyard or plaza (e.g., Valencia Vieja, 450–650 CE) or organized into small groups around several modest sized plazas (Alkali Ridge site 13, 760–790 CE).
In northwest Mexico and the Southwest of the United States, hilltop communities with terraces or stone walls called cerro de trincheras appear across the whole history of Native American human occupation down to at least 1450 CE. The higher dwellings on the cerro de trincheros (e.g., Magdalena Valley, Sonora, Mexico, 1300–1450 CE) provided a dominate view of the valley below, as well as access to light. These offered a similar community approach as that exhibited in the traditional pueblo.
Around 1300, many northern settlements were abandoned in favor of the settlements in western New Mexico and around the Rio Grande on the present-day border with Mexico. Large multistoried dwellings emerge in the canyon shelves (e.g., Mesa Verde, Arizona), on the canyon floors (e.g., Bandelier, New Mexico), or at canyon heads (e.g., Sand Canyon, Colorado). These multistoried pueblos were constructed from stones that were shaped by chipping away at the surface, leaving a distinctive texture. Other features of the architecture include sharp square corners, holes in the ceiling for ventilation and access, T-shaped doorways, and an orientation towards the south or southwest in order to take advantage of the winter sun.
Bibliography
Heitman, Carrie C., and Stephen Plog, eds. Chaco Revisited: New Research on the Prehistory of Chaco Canyon, New Mexico. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 2015. Print.
Lekson, Stephen H., ed. The Architecture of Chaco Canyon, New Mexico. Salt Lake City: U of Utah P, 2007. Print.
Markovich, Nicholas C., Wolfgang F. E. Preiser, and Fred G. Sturm, eds. Pueblo Style and Regional Architecture. New York: Van Nostrand, 1992. Print.
Morrow, Baker H., and V. B. Price, eds. Anasazi Architecture and American Design. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 1997. Print.
Pauketat, Timothy R. ed. The Oxford Handbook of North American Archaeology. New York: Oxford UP, 2012. Print.
Royea, Michael. The Grand Circle Tour: A Travel and Reference Guide to the American Southwest and the Ancestral Puebloans. Woodstock: Countryman, 2014. Print.
Riggs, Charles R. Architecture of Grasshopper Pueblo. Salt Lake City: U of Utah P, 2011. Print.
Wilshusen, Richard H., Gregson Schachner, and James R. Allison, eds. Crucible of Pueblos: the Early Pueblo Period in the Northern Southwest. Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at UCLA, Monograph 71. Los Angeles: Cotsen Inst. of Archaeology P, 2012. Print.
Young, Lisa C., and Sarah A. Herr, eds. Southwestern Pithouse Communities, AD 200–900. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 2012. Print.