Adobe Pueblo Houses

What an adobe pueblo house is

An adobe pueblo house is a Pueblo dwelling whose walls are earth.

The Pueblo peoples of what is now New Mexico and Arizona built in coursed earth for centuries, then in moulded adobe brick after the Spanish introduced the wooden mould in the sixteenth century.

The defining trait is communal form. Rooms accumulate sideways and upward into a single connected structure rather than standing as separate houses.

• Load bearing walls of sun dried adobe, plastered in earth and renewed each year
• Flat roofs on peeled timber vigas, with the roof of one room serving as the terrace of the next
• Rooms stepped back in tiers, historically entered by ladder rather than a ground level door
• Plazas and kivas at the centre of the settlement, not private yards

Adobe vs pueblo: what is the difference

Adobe is a material. Pueblo is a tradition. The two words answer different questions.

Adobe names the sun dried earth brick, and plenty of adobe houses are not Pueblo at all: the rancho adobes of California and the Territorial houses of the Rio Grande are adobe without being Pueblo.

Pueblo names both a people and a settlement form, and a Pueblo building is only an adobe pueblo house when it is actually built of earth. The confusion is why the two terms are so often searched together.

• Adobe answers what the wall is made of
• Pueblo answers who built it and how the community is arranged
• A building can be adobe without being Pueblo, but a classic Pueblo dwelling is adobe

Living communities, not ruins

The distinction that matters most is between inhabited pueblos and archaeological sites.

Taos Pueblo is a living community with an unbroken record of occupation, maintained by the people who live in it, which makes it one of the longest continuously occupied settlements in North America.

Acoma Pueblo, the Sky City on its mesa top, holds the 1629 mission church of San Esteban del Rey inside the village and shows the Puebloan and Spanish traditions in one complex.

Where to see adobe pueblo houses

This catalogue documents 214 adobe properties across ten states.

New Mexico holds 58 and is the heart of the living Pueblo tradition, with Taos, Acoma, and the pueblos of the northern Rio Grande. California holds 106, though its adobe is largely rancho and mission rather than Pueblo.

Pueblo Revival, the early twentieth century style that borrowed the Pueblo look for new buildings, accounts for 40 properties here and is documented separately in its own field guide.