Crown Family Playlab

Pueblo

Playing house in the pueblo includes harvesting and grinding corn, and cooking over a fire.

See what it was like to live in a pueblo hundreds of years ago in the Southwestern United States. This life-sized recreation of a pueblo—complete with a plaza, nearby corn field and an original mural of the mountains—encourages children to try out the lifestyle of a different place and time. Nearby you’ll find dollhouses where children can “experience” daily life in two other cultures.

Explore what the cultural environments in the Crown Family PlayLab share in common, as well as how they are different.

What can you do?
	Harvest corn from a field and store it inside the pueblo.
	Use a mano and metate to grind cornmeal.
	Cook over a fire pit and lay down on a sleeping mat.
	Play with dollhouses from two more different cultures—a Pawnee Earth Lodge from the Great Plains and a Tuareg Tent from Africa.

What can you discover?
	In the Southwest, there were not many trees around for building houses, making fires, or for shade. The pueblo and its surroundings illustrate how this home relates to its environment.
	Real artifacts and touchable replicas show how pueblo potters rolled clay into long strips that were wound around to build a pot. They smoothed the clay and baked it in a hot fire to make it waterproof for cooking.
	If you lived in this pueblo, your most important food would be corn. Find out how corn was harvested, dried in the sun, stored and ground into corn meal to make bread or porridge.

Want to see more at The Field Museum?
Stop by The Ancient Americas exhibition on the main floor to see another pueblo. Also on the main floor, cook over a fire pit or lay down on a buffalo-skin bed in the full-scale reconstruction of a Pawnee Earth Lodge. Look for a full-sized diorama of a Tuareg Tent in our Africa exhibition.

Have more fun at home.
Think about the environment and culture where you live. Is it in the city, the suburbs, or a rural community? What was used to build your house? What kinds of things are inside of your house? Do you grow your own food in a garden or do you go to the grocery store to buy it?

How is your daily life similar to the cultures you’ve explored in the Crown Family PlayLab? How is it different?

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