The Main Quadrangle of Pecos from its southern rubble mound during Adolph Bandelier’s inventory of the site. (George Benjamin Wittick, 1880. Photograph. Laboratory of Anthropology.)
The Main Quadrangle of Pecos from its southern rubble mound during Adolph Bandelier’s inventory of the site. (George Benjamin Wittick, 1880. Photograph. Laboratory of Anthropology.)
The extant and buried architecture and middens of Pecos Pueblo. (Center for Architectural Conservation, 2025.)
The Center for Architectural Conservation (part of the Preservation Research Collaborative at Penn) is authoring a historic structures report on the Indigenous architecture of New Mexico’s Pecos Pueblo. Located southeast of Santa Fe and managed by Pecos National Historical Park, the pueblo rose to prominence in the Ancestral Puebloan world between 1350 and 1540 C.E. as a locus for pre-colonial trade networks, primarily between the Ancestral Pueblos of the Southwest and the tribes of the Great Plains. As a result, Pecos generated enormous economic and military power in the region.
At its peak, Pecos housed close to 2,000 people in a three- to four-story quadrangular structure surrounding a central plaza, but slowly depopulated as a result of starvation, disease, and violence resulting from the Spanish colonial regime. The structural remains and artifacts left in place, however, attracted archaeologist Alfred V. Kidder to the site in 1915, and catalyzed his pioneering excavations using the stratigraphic method, revolutionizing archaeological research and defining modern excavation methodology for the field. Today, the rubble remains of the pueblo, along with the neighboring Spanish mission, are preserved as a National Park Service site in which visitors explore Pecos’s Indigenous history and learn about Spanish colonization of the region.
The historic structures report for Pecos Pueblo will provide Pecos National Historical Park with an encyclopedic volume of the pueblo’s development through time, its archaeological and conservation history, the present condition of its architecture, and a long-term preservation plan for the site. In conjunction, digital resources—including a database of the pueblo’s conservation history, rectified photographs of extant wall surfaces, a point cloud of the site’s architectural arrangement, and high-accuracy architectural basemaps—have been produced to ensure the park has adequate and updated documentation of its extant cultural resources. These project results aim to provide the park with both guidance and data to inform preservation decision-making that shapes the future of Pecos and the communication of its value.
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