Between the Painted Desert and the ponderosa highlands of northern Arizona lies Wupatki National Monument, a landscape of rare desert grasslands, mesas, and volcanic hills. Nestled within it are villages built by Native peoples centuries ago. Despite years of change, they still stand on land that the ancestors of the Hopi, Zuni, Navajo, Yavapai, Havasupai, Hualapai, and several bands of Apache and Paiute, have called home for millenia. Yet today, climate change threatens this ancient and extraordinary place.
In 2021, the Center for Architectural Conservation (CAC) at the Stewart Weitzman School of Design received a $1.3 million grant from the Getty Foundation to respond to new risks facing Wupatki Pueblo, the Monument’s largest architectural structure, which dates back to the 11th century. Frank Matero, founder and director of CAC and Gonick Family Professor and chair of historic preservation, led the project alongside partners from Ancestral Lands Conservancy Corps, the National Parks Service (NPS), and the University of Minho, Portugal. In consultation with the Indigenous communities who have protected and valued the site for centuries, they developed a preservation plan set for publication in December 2024, which coincides with the Monument’s 100th anniversary. The plan supports longstanding efforts to preserve this historic location for current and future generations and for the past generations recognized by the affiliated Tribal groups as still inhabiting it today.
“Traditionally, we do a lot of our preservation work in the summer, but now that it's getting so much hotter, we need to rethink when we do our work and also how we do it so that we're doing work that is going to hold up in the changing climate,” says NPS’s Amy Horn, cultural resources program manager for Flagstaff Area National Monuments.
As new and unpredictable environmental stressors emerge, the CAC focuses on anticipating preservation needs rather than reacting. The Getty grant enabled Matero to apply and develop that model of climate risk assessment.
“We saw it as an opportunity to keep working on the idea of what vulnerability looks like. I can’t think of a more vulnerable site as site types go. Vulnerability assessment means shifting the focus from what is needed now to the future and what can be done in the short and the long term to reduce the loss, to move to a more sustainable management model,” says Matero.
This story is by A. Paul Rose and Bea Huff Hunter. Read more at Weitzman News.
