The mission churches of Salinas Pueblo Missions National Monument, in central New Mexico, are built from the ground they stand on. Their red walls are Permian sandstone and their grey courses Permian limestone, the same rock the pueblo villages beside them were built from.
| Where | about 50 miles (80 km) southeast of Albuquerque, in Socorro and Torrance Counties |
| Units | three separate sites — Abó, Gran Quivira and Quarai |
| Size | about 1,071 acres (433 hectares) |
| Protects | three Pueblo villages, four of the best-preserved 17th-century Spanish mission churches in the United States, and 19th- and 20th-century ranches |
| History | Gran Quivira National Monument, 1909; enlarged and renamed Salinas National Monument, 1980; its present name since October 28, 1988 |
Most of the three sites have never been excavated. They belong to a much wider web of places — Archaic camps, early and late pueblos, old trade routes — in a region that has long been home to many cultures at once.
The ground beneath
The monument sits where several big landscapes meet: the Rio Grande Rift, the Manzano Mountains, the Estancia Basin and Chupadera Mesa. It lies within the Basin and Range, the province of long mountain ranges and wide flat basins that stretches across much of the American West.
| Age | Rocks | Where you see them |
|---|---|---|
| Permian | Abo, Arroyo de Alamillo and San Andres formations: red, orange, yellow and pinkish-white sandstone and mudstone, with grey limestone, sandstone and gypsum | the "red beds" of the landscape — and the walls of the pueblos and churches |
| Tertiary | dark igneous dikes — sheets of once-molten rock forced up through cracks | at Gran Quivira |
| Quaternary | stream deposits and windblown sand | valley floors |
At Gran Quivira the dikes did more than cut through the Permian layers of Chupadera Mesa: they pushed the rock above them up into a cluster of small arches, or anticlines. The pueblo and its mission were built on top of those bumps.
Maps and reports
The Park Service's Geologic Resources Inventory, which maps and describes the geology of more than 270 parks, has done Salinas Pueblo Missions: a scoping summary of what the mapping should cover, a digital geologic map for GIS software, a report on the park's geology and its management, and a poster of the map. A soil survey of the monument has been completed too. All are free on the NPS DataStore.
Sources
Written from "NPS Geodiversity Atlas — Salinas Pueblo Missions National Monument, New Mexico", National Park Service Geologic Resources Division, a work of the United States government in the public domain, which cites KellerLynn (2018). The New Mexico Bureau of Geology and Mineral Resources has more on the state's geology.
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