Citadel Pueblo Wupatki
— the village the high ground kept.
Not only on a wall.
Citadel Pueblo Wupatki, 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.
“Citadel Pueblo sits on a small limestone hill in Wupatki, about forty miles north of Flagstaff. Ancestral Puebloans built it around 1100, ringing the summit with masonry rooms above a natural sinkhole. The view from the top runs to the San Francisco Peaks one way and the Painted Desert the other. The walls have stood for roughly eight hundred years. from the studio
The place, in three passes.
Wupatki National Monument covers 35,422 acres in Coconino County, Arizona, about forty miles north of Flagstaff. President Calvin Coolidge designated it in 1924 to protect a cluster of ancestral Puebloan masonry villages built after the nearby Sunset Crater eruption around 1085. Citadel Pueblo sits along the loop road that joins Wupatki with Sunset Crater Volcano National Monument, on a low limestone knoll overlooking a natural sinkhole. The monument is co-stewarded with the Hopi, Zuni, and other descendant communities.
The pueblo holds roughly fifty rooms of coursed Moenkopi sandstone and Kaibab limestone, built directly on the knoll's bedrock cap so the masonry rises out of the stone it stands on. The siting is defensive and signalled: from the rooftops, line of sight reaches Lomaki Pueblo, Box Canyon, and the larger Wupatki Pueblo on the plain below. Tree-ring dates and ceramic styles place primary occupation between roughly 1100 and 1250, after which the residents moved on to the Hopi Mesas and the Little Colorado.
Citadel Pueblo is reached on the thirty-five-mile loop that connects US-89 with Wupatki and Sunset Crater Volcano. A short paved trail from the parking pull-off climbs to a viewpoint near the base of the knoll; the pueblo itself is not entered, in keeping with the descendant communities' guidance. Entrance is $25 per vehicle, valid seven days for both monuments. The visitor centre near Wupatki Pueblo has water and restrooms; nothing else is sold along the loop.
