Agate House

The Ancestral Puebloan people who built this eight-room pueblo laid their walls from chunks of petrified wood, mortaring the glassy, colored logs with mud sometime between roughly A.D. 1050 and 1300. The pueblo sits on a low rise above the grasslands, and what stands today is a 1930s partial reconstruction over the excavated footprint. Archaeologists found little household debris and no kiva, which suggests people lived here only briefly. A house of gems, later visitors called it, though the builders would have known it simply as shelter raised from the stone forest at hand.

What the plaque says

A House of Gems. This structure, called Agate House, is a partial reconstruction of an Indian pueblo built here almost ten centuries ago. Indians built dwelling walls like these of petrified wood sealed with mud mortar. Archeologists believe the original eight-room pueblo was built between A.D. 1050 and 1300., The absence of a kiva (underground ceremonial chamber) and the relatively small amount of cultural debris found at Agate House indicate a brief occupancy. Reconstruction of its room occured after archaeological excavation in 1934.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Petrified Forest National Park — 15 mi
  Two hundred million years turned to stone — and a Route 66 ghost
• Holbrook — 18 mi
  A Santa Fe railroad town once too tough for women and churches, now the seat of Navajo County, gateway to the Petrified Forest, and home to the concrete teepees of the Wigwam Motel.

More markers nearby

• Agate Bridge — 7.2 mi
• Pioneers of Paleontology — 11 mi
• Newspaper Rock Petroglyphs — 11 mi
• Summer Solstice Marker — 12 mi