Pueblo Peoples
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50 free Pueblo Peoples trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
The Pueblo peoples have lived in the American Southwest for well over a thousand years, and their history is full of surprises: apartment-style towns raised long before Europeans arrived, a colonial power thrown out for more than a decade, and trade routes that reached deep into Mexico. This quiz collects fun facts about the Pueblo tribes past and present. It covers the Ancestral Puebloans and their cliff dwellings and great houses, the arrival of the Spanish and the revolt of 1680, and the farming, food, pottery, languages and ceremonies of the Hopi, Zuni, Acoma and their neighbours, along with notable Pueblo people of modern times. It suits students studying Native American history, travellers planning a trip to New Mexico or Arizona, and anyone who likes a good story behind a place. Every answer comes with a short explanation.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The red sun symbol on New Mexico's state flag was borrowed from a pot made at which Pueblo?
Zia
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.
Q 02Which objects did runners carry to every Pueblo in 1680 as a countdown to the day of the uprising?
Knotted cords
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.
Q 03Acoma Pueblo, perched 365 feet above the New Mexico desert on a flat-topped rock, is known by which nickname?
Sky City
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.
Q 04Which bird did Ancestral Puebloans domesticate, later weaving its feathers into blankets?
Turkey
Turkey became so important that by the 13th century it had overtaken deer as the main meat eaten at many sites.
Q 05Traditional Pueblo houses were built without doors or windows at ground level, so people got inside using what?
Ladders
Ladders linked every level and doubled as a defence, because the traditional design left attackers no door or window to break through.
Q 06Which New Mexico Pueblo regained its sacred Blue Lake in 1970 when President Nixon signed back 48,000 acres?
Taos
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.
Q 07Traces of which Mesoamerican ingredient, carried at least 1,200 miles north, turned up in pottery at Pueblo Bonito?
Cacao
Cacao, the bean behind chocolate, was detected in 2009 on sherds from the great house, proof of how far its builders' trade reached.
Q 08Which Colorado national park protects Cliff Palace, one of the largest cliff dwellings in North America?
Mesa Verde
Mesa Verde, Spanish for green table, became in 1906 the first national park created to protect a place of cultural significance.
Q 09Deb Haaland of Laguna Pueblo became the first Native American Cabinet secretary in 2021, leading which department?
Interior
Interior made her only the second Native American in any Cabinet, after Charles Curtis, a Kaw Nation citizen who served as vice president.
Q 10Spanish explorers gave the Pueblo peoples their name, taking it from a Spanish word with which meaning?
Village
Village is the meaning of pueblo, which can also mean people; the Spanish used it for the multistorey communities they met in the 1500s.
Q 11Before the Spanish taught brick-making, Pueblo builders raised walls by the handful or basketful from which material?
Adobe
Adobe takes its name from an ancient Egyptian word for mud brick, which passed through Arabic and Old Spanish before it reached the Southwest.
Q 12Which name is given to the round, usually underground rooms where Pueblo peoples hold ceremonies and councils?
Kiva
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.
Q 13Which Tewa religious leader from Ohkay Owingeh organised the 1680 revolt that drove the Spanish out of New Mexico?
Popé
Popé was among 47 Pueblo religious leaders arrested for witchcraft in 1675, and his statue now represents New Mexico in the National Statuary Hall.
Q 21Ysleta del Sur Pueblo, founded by Tiwa people displaced during the 1680 revolt, lies in which US state?
Texas
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.
Q 22After leaving the Four Corners, many Pueblo peoples resettled along which river?
Rio Grande
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.
Q 23Which recurring disaster of the late 1200s helped drive Ancestral Puebloans out of their Four Corners cliff dwellings?
Droughts
Droughts, severe and prolonged, brought years of instability, and by 1285 the cliff dwellers had migrated south into Arizona and New Mexico.
Q 14The 1680 Pueblo Revolt forced Spanish colonists to abandon which capital, which they did not retake for twelve years?
Santa Fe
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.
Q 15Pueblo farmers relied on corn, beans and which third crop, a trio known as the Three Sisters?
Squash
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.
Q 16Which Spanish conquistador stormed the Zuni pueblo of Hawikuh in 1540 while hunting for seven cities of gold?
Coronado
Coronado met a crushing disappointment: the fabled golden city was nothing like the reports, and his men reached it almost starving.
Q 17Which legendary name did 16th-century Spaniards give the seven golden cities they believed lay among the Zuni pueblos?
Cíbola
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.
Q 18Which name for the Ancestral Puebloans, taken from the Navajo language, do many modern Pueblo people reject?
Anasazi
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.
Q 19Which New Mexico canyon holds Pueblo Bonito and more than a dozen other great houses of the Ancestral Puebloans?
Chaco
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.
Q 20Which humpbacked flute player is among the most easily recognised figures in ancient Pueblo rock art of the Southwest?
Kokopelli
Kokopelli is a fertility deity and a trickster, and his flute-playing is said to chase away the winter and bring on the spring.
Q 24Settlers wrongly credited which Mexican civilization with a Pueblo ruin in New Mexico, an error its name preserves?
Aztecs
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.
Q 25Hopi runner Louis Tewanima, a 1912 Olympic silver medallist, was the Carlisle school teammate of which famous athlete?
Jim Thorpe
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.
Q 26Which blue-green stone, mined near Cerrillos in New Mexico, did Ancestral Puebloans craft and trade to great profit?
Turquoise
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.
Q 27Which US president gave each of New Mexico's 19 Pueblos a silver-tipped cane in recognition of their sovereignty?
Abraham Lincoln
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.
Q 28Which tropical birds, brought north from Mesoamerica, left 30 skeletons in the rooms of Pueblo Bonito?
Scarlet macaws
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.
Q 29Hopi carvers traditionally shape their kachina dolls from the root of which tree?
Cottonwood
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.
Q 30Among the Hopi, a newborn child is named by one side of the family but belongs to the clan of which relative?
Mother
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.