"The Buried City"
Perryton, Ochiltree County, Texas
Marker Inscription
In 1907, Dr. T. L. Eyerly, Floyd V. Studer and other archaeologists discovered here "The Buried City." These pueblo ruins were built by the Panhandle Pueblo Indians who were agriculturists, stone house builders, pottery and basket makers. Dr. Warren K. Moorehead partially excavated this ruin in 1919-1920. Some archaeologists and historians agree that the well-built stone houses were in ruins when Coronado explored this region in 1541. Erected by the State of Texas 1936
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
In 1907 Dr. T. L. Eyerly, Floyd V. Studer, and other investigators uncovered what they called "The Buried City" on the Texas Panhandle plains — the stone ruins of villages built by the Panhandle Pueblo people, who farmed, raised stone houses, and made pottery and baskets. Dr. Warren K. Moorehead led a partial excavation in 1919–1920. Some scholars believe these houses already stood in ruins when Coronado passed through the region in 1541, placing their builders deep before European contact.
Why it matters
The site is a rare Panhandle window onto a settled, agricultural Indigenous culture that flourished centuries before Europeans arrived, complicating the myth of the plains as empty land.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
Long before the Texas Panhandle was fenced into ranches and wheat fields, it was home to people who lived here for centuries — settled, rooted, and building for the long term. The high plains near the Canadian River drainage were not the empty, wind-scoured grassland later travelers imagined. They held villages of stone, worked fields, and a way of life adapted to a demanding country.
The people the marker calls the Panhandle Pueblo Indians farmed the river valleys, raised houses of stone rather than hide or brush, and made pottery and woven baskets. That combination — agriculture, permanent masonry architecture, and craft production — describes a durable community, not a passing camp. It is the signature of people who intended to stay.
By the time Europeans first pushed into this region, those villages were already old. The marker records the view of some scholars that the well-built stone houses stood in ruins when Coronado's expedition crossed the region in 1541. If that is right, the culture that raised them flourished and faded entirely within the deep pre-contact past, its story written in stone and soil rather than in any European record.
People & events
The rediscovery came in 1907, when Dr. T. L. Eyerly, Floyd V. Studer, and other investigators uncovered what they named "The Buried City" — a fitting name for stone ruins that had settled back into the plains until careful hands brought them to light again. Eyerly and Studer were among the early figures who took the Panhandle's antiquity seriously at a time when much of the region's Indigenous history was ignored or dismissed.
A dozen years later, in 1919 and 1920, Dr. Warren K. Moorehead led a partial excavation of the ruins. Moorehead was a prominent American archaeologist of his era, and his attention signaled that this was a site of real scientific weight, not a local curiosity. The word "partial" matters: these investigators opened a window, not the whole house, and much of the site's story remained — and remains — in the ground.
The figure who never dug here but hovers over the marker is Francisco Vázquez de Coronado, whose 1541 expedition is used as a kind of clock. If the stone houses were already ruins when he passed, then their builders belong to a chapter that closed before the Spanish arrived. Coronado is the latecomer in this story; the true protagonists are the anonymous farmers and masons who lived and worked here generations before any European set foot on the plains.
Its place in the American story
America's founding myth of the Great Plains often casts them as a blank, unpeopled expanse waiting to be crossed or claimed. The Buried City quietly refutes that. Here is hard evidence of a settled, agricultural society with permanent architecture — the kind of civilization that the myth insisted did not exist west of the woodland East.
Stone-house-building farmers on the Southern Plains connect this spot to a much larger continental story of Indigenous North America: people who cultivated crops, organized villages, traded, and built to last, from the Southwest's pueblos to the mound-building cultures of the river valleys. The Panhandle was not a margin between those worlds but a place with a rich life of its own.
The site also marks a turning point in how Americans came to understand their own land. Early-twentieth-century excavations like this one helped establish that the human history of the continent runs far deeper than the arrival of Europeans. Every documented pre-contact village pushed the national timeline backward and made the case, one stone wall at a time, that this ground had a long and dignified past long before it had a name on a settler's map.
If you visit
Come to this corner of Ochiltree County ready to use your imagination as much as your eyes. This is high, open Panhandle country — big sky, long horizons, and a wind that rarely rests. The drama here is not a soaring monument but the contrast between that vast emptiness and the knowledge that a settled community once farmed and built in stone right where you're standing.
Read the marker slowly and let the dates sink in: people were living here, raising houses and making pottery, in a past so deep that a famous sixteenth-century expedition may have found their homes already fallen. Look out at the land and picture fields, walls, and smoke instead of grass and distance. That mental shift is the whole point of the stop.
It fits naturally into a Panhandle road trip built around the region's layered history — a reminder to slot between the cattle-and-oil chapters that dominate the area's modern story. Treat it as a moment to slow down, respect that this is an archaeological place, and carry away a truer sense of just how long people have called these plains home.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · T. L. Eyerly
- · Floyd V. Studer
- · Warren K. Moorehead
- · Francisco Vázquez de Coronado
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Site of the Trading Post
Perryton, TX
C. E. Jones opened this trading post in 1874 along the Jones and Plummer Trail, the freight and cattle route running from Dodge City, Kansas, down to Mobeetie in the Texas Panhandle. At first it dealt food and cloth to Native peoples in exchange for hides; as ranching took hold, it became a supply stop for cattlemen hauling goods up from Dodge City. The State of Texas marked the site in 1936.
Route of Jones & Plummer Trail
Booker, TX
Opened around 1874, the Jones & Plummer Trail began as a freight route hauling buffalo hides north from the Texas Panhandle to the railhead at Dodge City, Kansas. In the same violent year it carried supplies to the U.S. Army campaign against the Southern Plains tribes and hauled materials to build Fort Elliott near Mobeetie. As the buffalo vanished and ranching took hold, the old hide road became a cattle trail before fading out around 1885.
Miami Mammoth Kill Site
Miami, TX
In 1933 a Panhandle farmer plowing wheat turned up chalky bones far too big for any cow or buffalo. Local investigators, and later University of Texas scientist Dr. E.H. Sellards with WPA funding, uncovered the remains of several mammoths lying beside Clovis fluted spear points — one resting just inches from a mammoth's vertebra. The find placed human hunters and mammoths together at an Ice Age watering hole roughly 12,000 years ago.
Battle of Adobe Walls
Stinnett, TX
On November 25, 1864, Colonel Christopher "Kit" Carson led a column of U.S. troops against a large force of Kiowa and Comanche near the ruins of an old trading post known as Adobe Walls. Sheltering behind the crumbling walls, Carson's men fought a hard engagement before withdrawing from the far more numerous warriors. It proved to be the famed frontiersman's last battle.