Last updated: March 8, 2022
Place
Cavates at TA-18
LOS ALAMOS NATIONAL LABORATORY
Quick Facts
This site is on Los Alamos National Laboratory property. You can only access it through guided tours offered on specific dates. Find out more about tour reservations and schedules on the Bradbury Museum website.
Décor and art have helped makes houses “homes” for generations. At the cavates in this area, you can find evidence of how the Ancestral Pueblo people fixed up their homes.
Generations of Ancestral Pueblo people have called the Pajarito Plateau home. Today’s landscape contains abundant evidence of their lives here long before the site hosted the Los Alamos National Laboratory. At the cavates in TA-18, the rooms carved into tuff cliffs give us clues as to how the Ancestral Pueblo people lived.
In this region, a unique art form adorns some of the cavates. When the Ancestral Pueblo people carved out these shelters, they would often set bonfires in the caves to harden the wall, reduce dust, and create a blackened surface. This dark surface served as a canvas for petroglyphs carved into the walls.
Continue Your Journey
On the US Department of Energy tour to Technical Area 18, you go inside the Slotin Building, which bears the name of physicist Louis Slotin who was fatally exposed to radiation in that building. Additionally, you may peer into the Pond Cabin windows, where Emilio Segre conducted his plutonium research. You walk near Battleship Bunker - Creutz Test and Battleship Bunker - Magnetic Method sites where scientists conducted early implosion tests prior to the Trinity Test.
Can’t get on a Department of Energy tour? Learn more about the history of the Manhattan Project by visiting the Bradbury Science Museum! The museum’s interactive exhibits share stories from the project and provide a glimpse of other “behind the fence” historical sites.