Pueblo Architecture

Pueblo architecture is the traditional building style of the Pueblo peoples of what is now the southwestern United States, especially New Mexico, with roots reaching back to the Ancestral Puebloan builders of the Pueblo I period, from roughly 750 to 900 CE. It is most commonly built from adobe, sun dried mud brick, though stone was used where it was available, with flat roofs supported by wooden beams called vigas and smaller cross beams called latillas laid above them. In larger Pueblo communities, individual dwellings are often stacked together in multistory terraces with setbacks between levels, arranged around shared courtyards or plazas that also contain kivas, partly underground circular rooms built for ceremonial use. When Spanish colonists reached the region beginning in the late 1500s, they adopted local Pueblo building methods for their own structures such as haciendas and mission churches, while the Pueblo people in turn adopted Spanish innovations including the technique of manufacturing standardized sun baked adobe bricks; adobe's thermal mass also gave Pueblo buildings a practical advantage, absorbing the sun's heat by day and releasing it slowly at night to soften the desert temperature swing.