50 Fun Facts About Pueblo Peoples

The red sun symbol on New Mexico's state flag was borrowed from a pot made at which Pueblo?

Zia Pueblo's sacred sun went on the flag in 1925 without the tribe being asked, and in 2012 the state formally acknowledged taking it without permission.

Which objects did runners carry to every Pueblo in 1680 as a countdown to the day of the uprising?

Knotted cords worked as a shared calendar: each morning the leaders untied one knot, and when the last was gone every Pueblo was to rise against the Spanish at once.

Acoma Pueblo, perched 365 feet above the New Mexico desert on a flat-topped rock, is known by which nickname?

Sky City is one of the oldest continuously inhabited places in the United States, and the Acoma say it was established in the 11th century.

Which bird did Ancestral Puebloans domesticate, later weaving its feathers into blankets?

Turkey became so important that by the 13th century it had overtaken deer as the main meat eaten at many sites.

Traditional Pueblo houses were built without doors or windows at ground level, so people got inside using what?

Ladders linked every level and doubled as a defence, because the traditional design left attackers no door or window to break through.

Which New Mexico Pueblo regained its sacred Blue Lake in 1970 when President Nixon signed back 48,000 acres?

Taos Pueblo lost the lake to a national forest under Theodore Roosevelt, and its return is counted as the first success of the modern Land Back movement.

Traces of which Mesoamerican ingredient, carried at least 1,200 miles north, turned up in pottery at Pueblo Bonito?

Cacao, the bean behind chocolate, was detected in 2009 on sherds from the great house, proof of how far its builders' trade reached.

Which Colorado national park protects Cliff Palace, one of the largest cliff dwellings in North America?

Mesa Verde, Spanish for green table, became in 1906 the first national park created to protect a place of cultural significance.

Deb Haaland of Laguna Pueblo became the first Native American Cabinet secretary in 2021, leading which department?

Interior made her only the second Native American in any Cabinet, after Charles Curtis, a Kaw Nation citizen who served as vice president.

Spanish explorers gave the Pueblo peoples their name, taking it from a Spanish word with which meaning?

Village is the meaning of pueblo, which can also mean people; the Spanish used it for the multistorey communities they met in the 1500s.

Before the Spanish taught brick-making, Pueblo builders raised walls by the handful or basketful from which material?

Adobe takes its name from an ancient Egyptian word for mud brick, which passed through Arabic and Old Spanish before it reached the Southwest.

Which name is given to the round, usually underground rooms where Pueblo peoples hold ceremonies and councils?

Kiva rooms were so central to community life that Cliff Palace alone holds 23 of them, and the Hopi and other Pueblos still use theirs for worship.

Which Tewa religious leader from Ohkay Owingeh organised the 1680 revolt that drove the Spanish out of New Mexico?

Popé was among 47 Pueblo religious leaders arrested for witchcraft in 1675, and his statue now represents New Mexico in the National Statuary Hall.

The 1680 Pueblo Revolt forced Spanish colonists to abandon which capital, which they did not retake for twelve years?

Santa Fe was besieged for days before the governor broke out of his palace and led the survivors south, leaving New Mexico in Pueblo hands.

Pueblo farmers relied on corn, beans and which third crop, a trio known as the Three Sisters?

Squash earns its place with wide leaves that shade the ground, keeping the soil moist and the weeds down while the beans climb the corn stalks.

Which Spanish conquistador stormed the Zuni pueblo of Hawikuh in 1540 while hunting for seven cities of gold?

Coronado met a crushing disappointment: the fabled golden city was nothing like the reports, and his men reached it almost starving.

Which legendary name did 16th-century Spaniards give the seven golden cities they believed lay among the Zuni pueblos?

Cíbola was what the friar Marcos de Niza called Zuni in 1539, though he never claimed to have entered it, only to have seen a wealthy city on a hill.

Which name for the Ancestral Puebloans, taken from the Navajo language, do many modern Pueblo people reject?

Anasazi, in one account, traces back to a word meaning ancient enemy, which is why Pueblo people object to it and archaeologists now say Ancestral Puebloans.

Which New Mexico canyon holds Pueblo Bonito and more than a dozen other great houses of the Ancestral Puebloans?

Chaco Canyon's great houses, raised from quarried sandstone and timber hauled from far away, stayed the largest buildings in North America until the 19th century.

Which humpbacked flute player is among the most easily recognised figures in ancient Pueblo rock art of the Southwest?

Kokopelli is a fertility deity and a trickster, and his flute-playing is said to chase away the winter and bring on the spring.

Ysleta del Sur Pueblo, founded by Tiwa people displaced during the 1680 revolt, lies in which US state?

Texas is home to the Tigua, as the community is also known, whose Pueblo sits inside the city of El Paso, far south of their old homeland.

After leaving the Four Corners, many Pueblo peoples resettled along which river?

Rio Grande pueblos formed the heart of the 1680 revolt, though it also drew in the Zuni and the Hopi, 120 and 200 miles away to the west.

Which recurring disaster of the late 1200s helped drive Ancestral Puebloans out of their Four Corners cliff dwellings?

Droughts, severe and prolonged, brought years of instability, and by 1285 the cliff dwellers had migrated south into Arizona and New Mexico.

Settlers wrongly credited which Mexican civilization with a Pueblo ruin in New Mexico, an error its name preserves?

Aztecs never came near it: Ancestral Puebloans built the complex, but the 19th-century settlers' guess stuck, and the site is still a national monument under that name.

Hopi runner Louis Tewanima, a 1912 Olympic silver medallist, was the Carlisle school teammate of which famous athlete?

Jim Thorpe's teammate took silver in the 10,000 metres, the best American result in that race until another Native runner, Billy Mills, won gold in 1964.

Which blue-green stone, mined near Cerrillos in New Mexico, did Ancestral Puebloans craft and trade to great profit?

Turquoise remains sacred to the Zuni and other Pueblo peoples, and the old Cerrillos workings are thought to be the country's oldest mines of the stone.

Which US president gave each of New Mexico's 19 Pueblos a silver-tipped cane in recognition of their sovereignty?

Abraham Lincoln recognised Pueblo self-rule with the canes in the middle of the Civil War, just as the Southern states were fighting to break away.

Which tropical birds, brought north from Mesoamerica, left 30 skeletons in the rooms of Pueblo Bonito?

Scarlet macaws dated as early as the late 800s show the great house was dealing with Mesoamerica over a century sooner than archaeologists had thought.

Hopi carvers traditionally shape their kachina dolls from the root of which tree?

Cottonwood root gave the body of each figure in a single piece, and the dolls were given to young girls to teach them about the spirit beings.

Among the Hopi, a newborn child is named by one side of the family but belongs to the clan of which relative?

Mother, because Hopi clans are matrilineal; the naming falls to the women of the father's clan, who gather when the baby is 20 days old.

Which Hopi settlement in Arizona, founded around 1100, ranks among America's oldest continuously inhabited places?

Oraibi split in 1906, when a bloodless contest between rival factions ended with the traditionalists walking out to found a new home at Hotevilla.

Maria Martinez of San Ildefonso Pueblo became world famous for pottery in which striking style?

Black-on-black ware got its colour when the firing was smothered with powdered dung, so that trapped smoke turned the red clay a deep glossy black.

Helen Cordero of Cochiti Pueblo invented which clay figure in 1964, modelled on her grandfather surrounded by children?

Storyteller reworked an older Cochiti figure of a singing woman holding a child into a man with children climbing all over him to listen.

Astronomer A. E. Douglass worked out when Pueblo Bonito was built by reading which natural record?

Tree rings in ancient timbers let him piece together a continuous record reaching back to the year 700, founding the science of dendrochronology.

Which beehive-shaped outdoor structure, brought by the Spanish, do Pueblo cooks still fire with wood to bake bread?

Horno ovens reached Spain with the Moors; the baker burns a fire inside, rakes out the embers and ashes, and only then slides the bread in.

Which paper-thin Hopi bread is made by smearing blue corn batter by hand across a hot stone?

Piki bakes almost instantly into sheets so thin they are translucent, and a Hopi couple eats it on the morning of their wedding.

Zuni farmers grow crops in grids of small sunken squares walled with clay, a method named after which food?

Waffles lend their name because each cell sits an inch or two below ground inside thick clay walls, which hold moisture and keep plants cool in the heat.

Which conquistador founded Spain's colony of New Mexico in 1598 and ordered brutal reprisals against Acoma Pueblo?

Juan de Oñate remains so divisive that in 1998 protesters cut the right foot off his statue, echoing the punishment he had ordered for Acoma men.

Rancher Richard Wetherill came upon Cliff Palace in December 1888 while out searching for what?

Stray cattle led him and his brother-in-law Charlie Mason to the ruin, where they found a stone axe with its handle still attached.

Until Miguel Trujillo of Isleta Pueblo won a 1948 court case, New Mexico denied Native Americans which right?

Voting was barred to 'Indians not taxed', a rule he challenged after coming home from wartime service in the Marines to find he could not cast a ballot.

Which Hopi word names the small floor hole symbolising the portal where Pueblo ancestors emerged into this world?

Sipapu openings recall a story in which the first peoples changed from lizard-like beings into humans as they stepped out, at a spot said to lie in the Grand Canyon.

Which Moroccan-born explorer, enslaved by a Spanish nobleman, was killed on reaching the Zuni pueblos in 1539?

Estevanico was one of only four survivors of the Narváez expedition, a group that trekked nearly 2,000 miles across the continent.

Which name is given to the peeled log roof beams whose ends jut through the walls of traditional Pueblo buildings?

Vigas carry the weight of the roof in old buildings, but since the Pueblo Revival style took off in the 1920s most new ones are purely ornamental.

Which writer of Laguna Pueblo descent published the acclaimed 1977 novel Ceremony and won a MacArthur grant in 1981?

Silko grew up at the edge of the Laguna reservation and is counted among the key figures of the Native American Renaissance.

On Fajada Butte, three leaning stone slabs send a dagger of light through a large spiral carving on which day?

Summer solstice is when the blade crosses the bigger spiral, though the site is now off limits: one slab shifted in 1989 under the wear of visitors' feet.

Which New Mexico monument near Los Alamos preserves homes that Ancestral Puebloans carved into soft volcanic rock?

Bandelier's cliffs are ash from an eruption 1.14 million years ago; builders broke the firmer layers into bricks and hollowed rooms out of the softer ones.

Before they built pueblos, Ancestral Puebloans of the Basketmaker periods lived in which kind of home?

Pithouses, dug into the ground and roofed over, were the first Ancestral Puebloan homes, and versions of them have sheltered people worldwide for 12,000 years.

Which New Mexico city is home to the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center, owned and run by the state's 19 Pueblos?

Albuquerque has hosted the centre since August 1976, and its campus holds a museum, galleries, a library and a restaurant called the Indian Pueblo Kitchen.

Zuni carvers are renowned for small stone animal figures, each tied to a compass direction, known by which name?

Fetishes guard six directions in Zuni thought, counting above and below, and each has its own animal, such as the yellow mountain lion of the north.

Pueblo potters traditionally shape their vessels without a wheel or mould, using which hand-building technique?

Coiling builds each pot up by hand from locally dug clay, and the finished vessel is traditionally fired in an earthen pit.