Sand Canyon Pueblo Four Corners Ceramic Art Tile
— the village that left, the spring that stayed.
Not only on a wall.
“On the rim of a horseshoe canyon west of Cortez, where the spring at the canyon head once held a village of more than four hundred rooms. The people built around the water, and around 1280 they went south to the Rio Grande valley, to the Hopi mesas, to the villages still there today. The walls have come down. The kivas are filled with their own collapse. The spring still flows. From the trail above, the ground holds the shape of what was there. The wind moves through the sage.
Sand Canyon Pueblo 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.
Sand Canyon Pueblo sits on the rim of a horseshoe-shaped canyon in southwestern Colorado, about twelve miles west of Cortez and inside Canyons of the Ancients National Monument, the most archaeologically dense piece of public land in the United States. The pueblo wraps the head of the canyon at roughly 6,500 feet, where a spring still flows. Built and occupied in the mid-to-late 1200s by Ancestral Puebloan farmers, the people whose descendants now live at the Hopi mesas, Zuni, and the Rio Grande pueblos, the village held more than four hundred rooms, around ninety kivas, fourteen towers, and a great kiva. The Bureau of Land Management administers the site; the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center, just up the road in Cortez, led the excavation.
The walls are dry-laid sandstone, coursed blocks of the local Dakota and Burro Canyon formations, shaped with stone tools and set with adobe mortar. The masonry at Sand Canyon belongs to the McElmo phase, the late thirteenth-century style of the central Mesa Verde region: tight-coursed, two-stone-wide walls with finished interior faces. After the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center's excavation between 1983 and 1993, the trenches were backfilled to protect what remains, and the canyon head now holds the footprint of the place above ground, room blocks against the cliff, kivas in the middle, towers at the edges, and the great kiva at the lowest point above the spring. Most walls stand only a course or two above the rubble of their own collapse.
By around 1280, the village was empty. The whole central Mesa Verde region lost its population within a single generation, with tens of thousands of people walking south to the Rio Grande valley and southwest to the Hopi mesas, where their descendants still live. Tree-ring records from the period show a long drought, but archaeologists now think the departure was as much social and ceremonial as climatic, part of a broader reorganisation of the Pueblo world. Walking the Sand Canyon Trail today, a six-mile loop maintained by the Bureau of Land Management, the loudest thing is the wind moving through pinyon and juniper. The canyon held a village of close to a thousand people and the walls are mostly down. The spring is still there.