In 1680 Pueblo peoples drove Spanish colonists out of New Mexico
The Pueblo Revolt of 1680 was the first time a Native American group expelled European colonists from North America for years at a stretch. It came from communities that had built five-storey apartment blocks centuries earlier, and whose neighbouring villages still speak languages from four unrelated families, so different that English now bridges them.
Pueblo is simply the Spanish word for village, the label conquistadors gave to the multistorey adobe and stone towns they found in the 16th century. Today some 75,000 Pueblo people live mainly in New Mexico and Arizona, in communities such as Taos, Acoma, Zuni and Hopi, all farming varieties of maize. Many reject the old archaeological term Anasazi: it comes from a Navajo word meaning roughly 'enemy ancestors', although the archaeologist Alfred Kidder, who popularised it, believed it meant 'old people'.
Their roots run through three earlier cultures. Hohokam farmers dug irrigation canals from at least the 9th century CE and became the Southwest's largest population by 1300; their forebears in the Tucson Basin may go back to 2000 BCE. The Mogollon moved from pithouse hamlets to stone-walled villages and cliff dwellings. Ancestral Puebloans raised the famous cliffside towns of Mesa Verde and Chaco Canyon, some reachable only by rope or climbing. By 1050 they were building planned, terraced villages, and Pueblo Bonito in Chaco Canyon held about 700 rooms over five storeys, housing perhaps 1,000 people.
Beneath shared farming and ritual lie deep differences. Anthropologist Paul Kirchhoff noted in 1954 that the Hopi, Zuni, Keres and Jemez trace descent through the mother, marry outside the clan and tell of humans emerging from underground, while most Tanoan-speaking pueblos trace descent through the father, marry within the clan and describe people rising from under water, with ritual numbers based on threes.
Spanish settlement began in earnest with Juan de Oñate at the end of the 16th century, and efforts to replace Pueblo religion with Catholicism grew steadily harsher. The Tiwa had already halted Coronado's advance in the Tiguex War of 1540 to 1541. In the 1670s drought brought famine and more Apache raids, and the discontent broke into organised revolt. Pueblo communities nonetheless preserved much of their religion, including a syncretic Pueblo Christianity.
Source: Pueblo peoples
