Origins Pueblo societies contain elements of three major cultures that dominated the Southwest United States region before European contact: the
Mogollon culture, whose adherents occupied an area near
Gila Wilderness; the
Hohokam culture; and the
Ancestral Puebloan culture who occupied the
Chaco Canyon and
Mesa Verde regions of the
Four Corners area. Archeological evidence suggests that people partaking in the Mogollon culture were initially
foragers who augmented their subsistence through the development of farming. Around the first millennium CE farming became the main means to obtain food.
Water control features are common among Mimbres branch sites which date from the 10th through 12th centuries CE. The nature and density of Mogollon residential villages changed through time; the earliest Mogollon villages were small
hamlets composed of several
pithouses, houses excavated into the ground surface with a stick and thatch roofs supported by a network of posts and beams, and faced on the exterior with earth. Village sizes increased over time so that by the 11th century CE villages composed of ground level dwellings of rock and earth walls and wooden beam-supported roofs were the norm.
Cliff-dwellings became common during the 13th and 14th centuries.
Hohokam is a term borrowed from the
O'odham language, used to define an archaeological culture that relied on irrigation canals to water their crops since as early as the 9th century CE. Their irrigation system techniques allowed for its adherents to expand into the largest population in the Southwest by 1300. Archaeologists working at a major archaeological dig in the 1990s in the
Tucson Basin, along the
Santa Cruz River, identified a culture and people that were ancestors of the Hohokam who might have occupied southern Arizona as early as 2000 BCE. This prehistoric group from the Early Agricultural Period grew corn, lived year-round in sedentary villages, and developed sophisticated irrigation canals from the beginning of the common era to about the middle of the 15th century. Within a larger context, the Hohokam culture area inhabited a central trade position between the
Patayan situated along with the Lower
Colorado River and in southern California; the
Trincheras of
Sonora, Mexico; the
Mogollon culture in eastern Arizona, southwest New Mexico, and northwest
Chihuahua, Mexico; and the
Ancestral Puebloans in northern Arizona, northern New Mexico, southwest Colorado, and southern
Utah. The Ancestral Puebloan culture is known for the stone and earth dwellings its people built along cliff walls, particularly during the
Pueblo II and
Pueblo III eras, from about 900 to 1350 CE in total. The best-preserved examples of the stone dwellings are now protected within United States'
national parks, such as
Navajo National Monument,
Chaco Culture National Historical Park,
Mesa Verde National Park,
Canyons of the Ancients National Monument,
Aztec Ruins National Monument,
Bandelier National Monument,
Hovenweep National Monument, and
Canyon de Chelly National Monument. These villages were accessible only by rope or through rock climbing. However, the first Ancestral Puebloan homes and villages were based on the pit-house, a common feature in the
Basketmaker periods. Villages consisted of apartment-like complexes and structures made from stone, adobe mud, and other local materials, or were carved into the sides of
canyon walls. Design details from Ancestral Puebloan villages contain elements from cultures as far away as present-day Mexico. In their day, these ancient towns and cities were usually multistoried and multi-purposed buildings surrounding open
plazas and
viewsheds. They were occupied by hundreds to thousands of Ancestral Pueblo peoples. These population complexes hosted cultural and civic events and infrastructure that supported a vast outlying region hundreds of miles away linked by transportation roadways.
Development of architecture and city-states By about 700 to 900 CE, Pueblo people began to move away from ancient pit houses dug in cliffs and to construct connected rectangular rooms arranged in apartment-like structures made of adobe and adapted to sites. By 1050, they had developed planned villages composed of large terraced buildings, each with many rooms. These apartment-house villages were often constructed on defensive sites: on ledges of massive rock, on flat summits, or on steep-sided mesas, locations that would afford Pueblo people protection from raiding parties originating from the north, such as the
Comanche and
Navajo. The largest of these villages,
Pueblo Bonito in
Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, contained around 700 rooms in five stories; it may have housed as many as 1000 persons.
Spanish contact and colonization Before 1598, Spanish exploration of the present-day Pueblo areas was limited to several transitory groups. A group of colonizers led by
Juan de Oñate arrived at the end of the 16th century as part of an apostolic mission to convert the Natives. Despite initial peaceful contact, Spain's attempts to dispose of the Pueblo religion and replace it with Catholicism became increasingly more aggressive, and were met with great resistance by Pueblo peoples, whose governmental structure was based around the figure of the
cacique, a
theocratic leader for both material and spiritual matters.
Return of the Spanish Comancheria Mexican period and Rio Arriba Rebellion The rebellion took place in 1837, when New Mexico was part of the frontier of the
Republic of Mexico which was located to the south, along with the Mescalero and Gila
Apaches; to the west were the
Navajo lands, and to the east was the
Republic of Texas. The
Department of New Mexico (a department of the U.S. Army) was surrounded by those they considered to be enemies.
Mexican–American War and Taos Revolt Debate over legal status as Indians Pueblo Lands Act and Pueblo Lands Board Self-determination era 21st century , one of the first
Native American women elected to the
House of Representatives and the first Native American Secretary of the Interior, is a citizen of
Laguna Pueblo. On 22 September 2005, the statue of
Po'pay, leader of the Pueblo Revolt, was unveiled in the Capitol Rotunda in Washington, D.C. The statue was the second commissioned by the state of New Mexico for the
National Statuary Hall Collection; it was the 100th and last to be added to the collection. It was created by
Cliff Fragua,
Jemez Pueblo sculptor. It is the only statue in the collection to be created by a Native American. In 2018,
Deb Haaland became the first Pueblo woman elected to the
United States House of Representatives, and later became the first Native American
Secretary of the Interior from 2021-2025. == Culture ==