Gila Pueblo

Gila Pueblo stands on a low rise on the south edge of Globe, in Gila County, central Arizona, on the road toward the historic mining district of Miami. The property takes its name from the prehistoric Salado-period ruin on which it is built and from the archaeological foundation that occupied it from 1928 onward. The complex was developed by archaeologists Harold S. Gladwin and Winifred Gladwin as the headquarters of the Gila Pueblo Archaeological Foundation, an influential private research institution that operated from the site through the early 1950s and produced much of the foundational survey work on Hohokam and Salado cultures in the lower Southwest.

Construction is vernacular adobe: thick sun-dried earthen-block walls over stone footings, with flat or low-sloped roofs supported on heavy timber vigas, projecting wooden canales, and small punched windows in deep reveals. The Gladwins explicitly designed their compound to evoke and respect the prehistoric Salado pueblo footprint on which it sits, so the new buildings echo the multi-room, rectilinear, courtyard-organized plan of the underlying ancestral architecture. Surface finishes are mud plaster renewed by hand, with painted wood trim at the openings and exposed timbers at the eaves.

The foundation conducted regional archaeological survey, excavation, and publication from Gila Pueblo for roughly a quarter century and donated its collections to the Arizona State Museum in 1950. The property was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1977 under reference number 77000235 in recognition of both the prehistoric ruin and the twentieth-century research compound.

The site is presently held in private and institutional ownership and is not regularly open to the public. Within Arizona's adobe tradition Gila Pueblo is distinctive as a research compound deliberately built in the vernacular adobe manner to sit on the ancestral pueblo footprint it studied.