Pueblo Grande De Nevada

Long before Las Vegas, a city stood here. For over a thousand years, from about 300 to 1150, Ancestral Puebloan and Basketmaker people lived along the Muddy River in hundreds of pithouses, adobe villages, and rock shelters—the westernmost reach of the Puebloan world centered on the Four Corners. They farmed corn and squash, wove cotton cloth, fired painted pottery, and traded salt. Archaeologist Mark Harrington began excavating the site he called Pueblo Grande de Nevada in 1924; newspapers dubbed it the "Lost City." Lake Mead later flooded its heart, but the museum at Overton holds what was saved.

What the plaque says

Indians of a highly-developed civilization lived throughout Moapa valley from 300-1100 A.D. several hundred ancient pithouses, campsites, rockshelters, salt mines and caves of ancestral Puebloan people make up what is commonly known as “Lost City.” These people cultivated corn, beans, and squash in fields irrigated by river water. They also gathered wild seeds and fruits and hunted widely for deer, antelope, desert bighorn sheep, small mammals, and birds. They wove fine cotton cloth, fired beautifully painted and textured pottery, and mined and traded salt and turquoise to coastal tribes for seashells. Early dwellings were circular pithouses below ground. Later dwellings above ground were single storey adobes having up to 100 rooms. Lake Mead, created by Hoover Dam, flooded the most intensively developed portion of lost city.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Lost City Museum — 1.9 mi
  The Ancestral Puebloan metropolis Lake Mead drowned — and the museum that saved what it could
• Valley of Fire State Park — 6.3 mi
  Jurassic sand dunes turned to blazing red stone — Nevada's oldest and largest state park

More markers nearby

• Arrowhead Trail (1914- 1924) — 6.7 mi
• Nevada’s First State Park — 7.8 mi
• Moapa Valley — 8.8 mi
• Powell of the Colorado — 15 mi