Pueblo peoples

The Pueblo peoples are Native American nations of the south-western United States, living mainly in New Mexico and Arizona, with one community in Texas. They share farming traditions centred on maize, a distinctive architecture of multi-storey villages, and related religious practices, yet speak languages from four unrelated families. Descendants of peoples who have lived in the region for millennia, they numbered nearly 79,000 in 2020, and Taos and Acoma Pueblos are among the oldest continuously inhabited places in the United States.

Pueblo societies draw on three major cultures of the ancient Southwest: the Ancestral Puebloans of the Four Corners region, including Chaco Canyon and Mesa Verde; the Mogollon culture of the Gila region; and the Hohokam of the southern Arizona deserts. Maize reached the Southwest from Mesoamerica, with the earliest evidence dating to about 2100 BCE. From about 700 to 900 CE people moved from pit houses into joined rectangular rooms, and by about 1050 they were building planned, terraced villages. The largest, Pueblo Bonito in Chaco Canyon, had around 700 rooms over five storeys. The name Anasazi, once common in archaeology, is a Navajo word usually understood as "enemy ancestors", and Pueblo people today reject it as offensive.

The Pueblo languages belong to four separate families: Keresan, spoken at Acoma, Laguna, Cochiti and other pueblos; Tanoan, which includes Tewa, Tiwa and Towa; Hopi, a Uto-Aztecan language; and Zuni, a language isolate. Anthropologists have contrasted the dry-farming western pueblos of the Hopi and Zuni with the irrigation farmers of the Rio Grande valley, and have noted differences in kinship: the Hopi, Zuni, Keres and Jemez trace descent through the mother, while most Tanoan-speaking pueblos follow the father's line.

The Spanish name pueblo, meaning "village", was given by explorers in the sixteenth century. Tiwa communities fought Coronado's expedition in 1540–41, and in 1598 colonists under Juan de Oñate settled in the region, which became part of New Spain. Spanish efforts to suppress Pueblo religion grew harsher over the following decades. In 1675 the governor had forty-seven Pueblo religious leaders arrested for sorcery; three were hanged. One of those released, the Ohkay Owingeh man Popé, then spent five years organising resistance. In August 1680 the Pueblo Revolt drove the Spanish out of New Mexico and kept them out for twelve years, a rare case of a Native people forcing colonists from a region of North America for so long. Diego de Vargas returned in 1692 and had regained the Rio Grande pueblos by 1696. As the anthropologist Alfonso Ortiz observed, the Spanish were afterwards more cautious in their demands, while the Pueblos kept their ceremonial life out of Spanish view.

Pueblo religion centres on the cycle of the seasons and the bringing of rain. Katsinas, spirit beings representing the ancestors, are believed to bring rain and to live part of each year among the people. Sacred ceremonies take place in kivas and are closed to outsiders, while public dances in the village plazas, regarded as a form of prayer, may be attended by visitors who follow strict rules of conduct. Each pueblo also keeps a Catholic feast day, timed to coincide with an existing ceremony.

Early Spanish writers' figures have been used to suggest a population before contact of up to about 313,000 people in over 110 pueblos, though such estimates are uncertain. By 1907 the ethnologist James Mooney counted just over 11,300. Numbers have since recovered, to 78,884 in 2020. In 1970 Taos Pueblo won back its sacred Blue Lake and surrounding mountain land, an early success of the era of Native self-determination. In 2018 Deb Haaland was elected to the House of Representatives, the first Pueblo woman to win a seat there, and she later served as Secretary of the Interior.

Our 1492 map labels the Pueblos in the upper Rio Grande and neighbouring country, a broad and approximate outline of their lands; the label does not mark when Pueblo history began or ended. On the 1500 map much of the region is drawn as the land of the Navajo.