Quarai Ruins

 Today I continued east on hi way 60 to Fort Sumner NM. It is a rather bleak section of hi way 60, miles and miles of a brown grassy plain with a smattering of small green bushes

I did make a stop at the Quarai Ruins

The Quarai ruins are located in central New Mexico, in a rural desert. A natural spring attracted people to the area for centuries and attracted the ancestral Pueblo people to settle for longer periods of time and introduce agriculture to the area. The earliest masonry pueblos being built at Quarai around 1300s. The largest features of the ruins are the main pueblo and the walls of the mission church, which was probably one of the largest wall and beam structures in North America. The walls range in thickness from three to six feet, and probably reached a height of 40 feet.  By the early 17th century the large pueblo compound had been built. Spanish missionaries were received by the Quarai in 1626, and granted permission to build a mission.  Although the community did well, a severe drought afflicted the region beginning in the late 1660s, which combined with attacks from hostile Apaches to lead to its abandonment in 1675.

There is a small museum with some artifacts 

In the 1600s the Quarai were a manufacturing center for glazed red ware pottery

that was traded to the nearby Pueblos.

The spindle whorls, used to make cotton thread, were made from recycled

 or reworked pottery sherds.

One axe head and two arrowshaft straighteners

Distant quarries in Texas, Mexico and elsewhere yielded the flint, obsidian, jasper, 

chalcedony, chert and fibrolite used to make these tools. 

Model of what the site might have look like.

The long narrow sockets held the roof beams that spanned the church  

Free camping at lovely Bosque Redondo Park

Another interesting day on the road