Cannonball Pueblo

Cannonball Pueblo lies in the Montezuma County uplands near Cortez, in the dense concentration of Ancestral Puebloan ruins that surrounds Mesa Verde and the Hovenweep canyons. The site was recorded by the Historic American Buildings Survey under reference HABS CO-202, which produced a measured photographic record of its standing walls, masonry, and setting.

The ruin is a small ancestral village of the Pueblo III period, the cultural horizon that culminated in the great cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde and the canyon-rim towers of the Hovenweep group. Cannonball belongs to that wider Mesa Verde-region tradition of dryland farming communities that, by the late thirteenth century, had concentrated into defensively sited masonry villages clustered around springs and canyon heads. Walls were constructed of carefully shaped sandstone blocks set in earthen mortar, with mud-plastered interiors and timber roofs supported on pine and juniper vigas.

Although the term "adobe" is most often applied to the later Hispano building tradition, the earthen mortars, mud plasters, and clay floors used at Cannonball belong to the same ancestral lineage of earth-based construction that the Pueblo peoples carried forward into the historic era. The site's name comes from a distinctive boulder or rounded masonry feature observed at the ruin by early surveyors.

The pueblo was abandoned, like its neighbors, around the close of the thirteenth century during the regional depopulation of the northern San Juan. It survives today as a stabilized ruin, unoccupied and exposed to the high desert weather, with HABS documentation preserving a record of its appearance at the time of survey.

Within the regional adobe and earthen-construction tradition, Cannonball Pueblo represents the deep ancestral foundation on which the later Hispano and Anglo adobe building cultures of southwestern Colorado were eventually layered.