Lowry Pueblo great kiva Four Corners Ceramic Art Tile
— a great kiva, sunk into the plain, painted in layers.
Not only on a wall.
“A small pueblo on the Great Sage Plain, the kind of road that turns to dirt before the gate. Forty rooms above ground, eight kivas, and a great kiva sunk underground, built around 1090 and repainted in geometric murals across five layers of plaster. People lived here for a hundred and sixty-five years. They kept coming back, kept building higher, kept painting over the same walls. It sits about a hundred miles north of Chaco, near the northern edge of where the old roads ran. The BLM keeps it quietly. Most days the road in is empty.
Lowry Pueblo great kiva Four Corners Ceramic Art Tile, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
The place, in three passes.
Lowry Pueblo sits on the Great Sage Plain in Montezuma County, Colorado, about forty-five miles northwest of Cortez and near the small farming town of Pleasant View. The site is a three-acre cluster of forty rooms, eight kivas, and one great kiva, built between roughly 1060 and 1170 AD on top of the remains of an earlier pithouse village. It is one of the northernmost large pueblos with Chaco-style architecture, sitting about a hundred miles north of Chaco Canyon. The Bureau of Land Management has held the site for decades, and Lowry was incorporated into Canyons of the Ancients National Monument when that monument was established in 2000. The nearest interpretive center is the Anasazi Heritage Center in Dolores.
The great kiva at Lowry was built around 1090 AD, sunk into the earth, with murals re-plastered and re-painted across at least five successive layers. Excavations led by Paul Sidney Martin of the Field Museum, conducted over five seasons between 1930 and 1934, exposed the geometric patterns and the post sockets that once carried the roof. A great kiva at this latitude is unusual; most kivas at this scale sit closer to Chaco Canyon, where the architectural form first cohered. The pueblo above ground rose to three stories at its peak. The walls are masonry of shaped sandstone, the joints chinked with smaller stones, the same construction logic that runs through Mesa Verde and Hovenweep.
Access is by gravel and dirt road from Pleasant View, rough after rain. The site is open during daylight hours, no fee, and the BLM maintains a small picnic shelter and a pit toilet on the grounds. Lowry has been a National Historic Landmark since 1964 and a unit of Canyons of the Ancients National Monument since 2000. Interpretation lives at the Anasazi Heritage Center in Dolores, southeast of the site. Spring and autumn are the steadier seasons; summer afternoons bring storm cells across the plain, and winter snow can close the access road for stretches. The painted kiva is sheltered by a small ramada, and visitors are asked to keep their hands off the walls.