Salmon Ruins great house
— a Chacoan great house the river kept watch over.
Not only on a wall.
Salmon Ruins great house, 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.
“A Chacoan great house on a terrace above the San Juan River in northwestern New Mexico. Built in the late 1080s as a northern outlier of the Chaco system, reoccupied a century later by Mesa Verdean people, empty by the 1280s. The Salmon family kept squatters and pothunters off the ruin through the homestead years. Their lamplight is the reason there is anything left to see.
The place, in three passes.
Salmon Ruins sits on a terrace above the San Juan River just east of Bloomfield in San Juan County, northwestern New Mexico, at roughly 5,300 feet elevation. The site is a Chacoan great house, one of the largest outliers of the Chaco regional system, built between 1088 and 1094 by builders sent north from Chaco Canyon. The site is administered by the San Juan County Museum Association rather than the National Park Service, with a small museum, heritage park, and Salmon homestead exhibit on the grounds.
The great house held roughly 150 ground-floor rooms across three stories, arranged in a C-shape opening south toward the river. Masonry follows the Chaco core-and-veneer style — flat sandstone slabs laid in courses with a rubble core, finished with shaped facing stones. A Great Kiva sits in the plaza below. The roof beams were felled in the Chuska Mountains, dressed, and carried more than fifty miles to the site. Several original viga ends are still visible in the surviving second-story walls.
Construction began about 1088 and finished within a generation. The Chacoans left around 1130 as the regional system collapsed. Mesa Verdeans from the north reoccupied the great house around 1180, subdividing the large Chacoan rooms into smaller domestic spaces and adding kivas. They abandoned the site around 1280 as part of the broader ancestral Puebloan migration south. George Salmon homesteaded the river bench in the 1870s, and his family guarded the ruin against looting until 1969, when the land passed to public stewardship.
