Village on the Rio Puerco

Village on the Rio Puerco. . The village on the Rio Puerco (Puerco Pueblo) is a prehistoric settlement built of shaped sandstone blocks by ancestral Puebloan people. It was inhabited between A.D. 1250 and 1380. At its peak the pueblo had over 100 rooms, with a possible population of 200 people. During the village’s occupation, fields of corn, beans, and squash sustained by the summer rains would have filled the river’s floodplain., Puerco Pueblo was not isolated in space or time. The river provided a travel corridor across the grasslands of the Colorado Plateau. Large and small communities existed up and down the Rio Puerco and Little Colorado River (shown on the map below right). Puerco Pueblo would have been visited by travelers and traders from far outside the ancestral Puebloan cultural area who brought different types of pottery and goods, as well as new ideas to the residents of Puerco (see map below left). Researchers study these types of interactions through the wide variety of artifacts and rock art found in or near the village., Archeologists have excavated only about a third of the site, some of which has been backfilled to preserve the fragile remnants of walls and floor features. Take a walk past the remnants of masonry walls and imagine the dynamic community that once existed here.