Zuni Trivia
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47 free Zuni trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
40 free Zuni trivia questions with answers. Zuni trivia for students, travellers along New Mexico's Trails of the Ancients and anyone curious about the A:shiwi, the people of the Middle Place. The quiz covers the pueblo's deep history - farming the Zuni River valley for thousands of years, the six villages including Hawikuh that the Spanish mistook for the Seven Cities of Cibola, Estevanico's death in 1539, Coronado's attack in 1540, the refuge on Dowa Yalanne after the Pueblo Revolt, and the reservation created in 1877. It also looks at Zuni life and art: the language isolate that no linguist can relate to any other, matrilineal households, pottery fired with dung, needlepoint and petit-point turquoise, the carved stone fetishes and their six directions, Zuni Salt Lake and the coal mine that was stopped in 2003, the ethnologists Frank Hamilton Cushing and Matilda Coxe Stevenson, the weaver We'wha who met President Cleveland, and Zuni's cameo in Brave New World. Sacred ceremony is treated with respect and only through what the Pueblo itself makes public. Every answer has been checked against a reference page and each question shows its source once you have answered.
30 of 47 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What do the Zuni call themselves in their own language?
A:shiwi
A:shiwi is the people's own name; 'Zuni' is an outsiders' word that reached English through Spanish, which is thought to have borrowed it from the language of a neighbouring pueblo.
Q 02The Zuni call their homeland Halona Idiwan'a, which translates as what?
Middle Place
Middle Place marks the end of a journey: in Zuni origin stories the people wandered for years in search of the centre of the world, and built their home where they found it.
Q 03Zuni Pueblo lies in western New Mexico, south of which nearby city?
Gallup
Gallup was already a trading town for the Zuni when, in 1922, its businessmen launched the Inter-Tribal Indian Ceremonial to show off Native dances and crafts, a summer fair where Zuni jewellers and dancers have long taken part.
Q 04How do most linguists classify the Zuni language?
An isolate
An isolate has no known relatives: Zuni shares a few religious loanwords with its Pueblo neighbours, yet no attempt to tie it to another language family has won general acceptance.
Q 05Zuni religion centres on masked spirit beings, also honoured by the Hopi, known by which name?
Kachinas
Kachinas are spirits rather than costumes: when a dancer puts on the mask, the being it shows is thought to be present within him, temporarily transforming him.
Q 06Zuni ancestors built the pueblo of Atsinna atop which New Mexico landmark, later covered in travellers' carved signatures?
El Morro
El Morro's rooftop pueblo housed some 500 to 600 people around 1300; long after they left, the pool at the foot of the cliff drew passing Spanish and American travellers, who carved their names in the rock.
Q 07Besides singular and plural, Zuni pronouns have which third grammatical number?
Dual
Dual forms single out exactly two people; several unrelated neighbouring languages mark the same thing, a likeness linguists put down to centuries of contact between the Pueblo peoples rather than to common descent.
Q 08Which crop were early farmers along the Zuni River already watering from canals some 3,000 years ago?
Maize
Maize grew in canal-fed plots small enough for a single household to dig and tend; only much later did Zuni farmers spread out across the land with drought-hardy varieties that could live on summer rain.
Q 09An ancestral settlement on the Zuni reservation, excavated in 1930, is known as the Village of the Great what?
Kivas
Kivas of the usual size served one group within a village, but a 'great' kiva was built far larger so that a whole community could gather in it for shared ceremonies.
Q 10The name 'Zuni' is thought to come, through Spanish, from the language of which mesa-top 'Sky City' pueblo?
Acoma
Acoma and Zuni have been tied together for a thousand years by a footpath between the two pueblos, and hikers can still follow a stretch of it across the lava flows of El Malpais.
Q 11Which Moroccan-born scout for Fray Marcos de Niza's 1539 expedition was killed by the Zuni at Hawikuh?
Estevanico
Estevanico had already survived a wrecked Florida expedition and an eight-year trek across the continent, which is why the friar sent him on ahead; the Zuni reportedly killed him as a spy.
Q 12Fray Marcos de Niza claimed Hawikuh was one of which legendary seven cities?
Cíbola
Cíbola turned out to be a mirage: by his own account the friar had only glimpsed Hawikuh from a distance, and the soldiers who marched north on his word found plain adobe villages with no gold at all.
Q 13Which conquistador stormed the Zuni town of Hawikuh in July 1540 in his search for cities of gold?
Coronado
Q 21Where did a Zuni hunter carry the stone fetish of his guardian animal?
Over his heart
Over his heart, in a small buckskin bag hung from a thong; after a kill the hunter dipped the stone animal in the blood of his prey so that it, too, could drink.
Q 22In Zuni fetish tradition, which animal is master of the prey gods and guardian of the north?
The mountain lion
The mountain lion was given the north, in the story, for being 'strong of will', and its yellow coat matches the colour of that direction; each of the other guardians is counted as a younger brother.
Q 23Which two stone-setting techniques using many tiny stones are Zuni specialties?
Needlepoint and petit point
Coronado arrived with his men close to starving; when the townspeople refused to let them in he attacked, took Hawikuh and its food stores, and found none of the treasure he had marched north for.
Q 14What does 'Dowa Yalanne', the sacred mesa southeast of the pueblo, mean?
Corn Mountain
Corn Mountain was the Zuni's fortress: families fled to its flat top when Spanish soldiers first attacked in 1540, and went back up whenever danger threatened over the next century and a half.
Q 15Since 1978 the Zuni have won back dozens of carved wooden figures of which sacred beings from museums and collectors?
The War Gods
The War Gods are meant to stand at open-air shrines until they weather away, so to the Zuni any figure in a museum case had been stolen; the first came home from a New York auction house in 1978.
Q 16Which Smithsonian anthropologist lived with the Zuni from 1879 to 1884 as a pioneering 'participant observer'?
Frank Cushing
Frank Cushing was 22 when, the story goes, he simply spread his bedroll in a tribal leader's house; he stayed four and a half years, and some Zuni still fault him for publishing their sacred knowledge.
Q 17Zuni women traditionally grew chilies, onions and herbs in small clay-walled plots known as what kind of gardens?
Waffle gardens
Waffle gardens take their name from the grid of low earth ridges around each sunken square, built to hold precious water close to the plants' roots in a land of little rain.
Q 18Which stone, prized across the Southwest, do Zuni jewellers most often set in silver?
Turquoise
Turquoise was Zuni wealth long before silver: the people cut and traded it for centuries, and only in the 1890s did a Zuni smith first set the stone in the metal they had recently learned to work.
Q 19We'wha, the celebrated Zuni weaver and potter, met which US president on a visit to Washington in 1886?
Grover Cleveland
Grover Cleveland received We'wha at the White House near the end of a six-month stay in Washington, where society took the visitor for a Zuni princess and photographers pictured We'wha weaving at a loom.
Q 20Matilda Coxe Stevenson, who wrote extensively on the Zuni, holds what distinction in US science?
First woman employed as an anthropologist in the US
She was also the first woman hired by the Bureau of American Ethnology and helped found the Women's Anthropological Society.
Zuni are also known for mosaic and channel inlay work, mostly in turquoise, sometimes coral.
Q 24By the 1880s, what was the usual fuel Zuni potters used to fire their pots?
Animal dung
Animal dung, in practice dried sheep manure, was by then almost the only fuel; while a pot was being finished nobody sang or whistled nearby, for fear the being thought to live in the clay would copy the sound and break the vessel.
Q 25Which motifs are among the most common on traditional Zuni painted pottery?
Frogs, dragonflies and deer
Frogs, dragonflies and deer: the first two are rain symbols, tadpoles, dragonflies and frogs standing for early, middle and late summer, while the deer is drawn with a line from mouth to chest that stands for its breath.
Q 26Who traditionally heads a Zuni household?
The eldest woman of a lineage
The eldest woman of a lineage heads the home because house and fields pass from mother to daughter; a husband moves in with his wife's family rather than the other way round.
Q 27Zuni Salt Lake, sacred as the home of the Salt Mother, fills what kind of geological feature?
A volcanic maar
A volcanic maar is a crater blasted out when rising magma meets groundwater; the shallow lake that fills this one has no outlet, so the salt carried in by springs stays behind as the water evaporates.
Q 28What did a utility drop plans to open near Zuni Salt Lake in 2003?
A coal mine
A coal mine would have pumped groundwater that the Zuni feared fed the lake, the home of their Salt Mother; after years of lawsuits and protest the utility gave up the plan.
Q 29The Zuni River runs west off the Continental Divide to join which larger river?
The Little Colorado
The Little Colorado meets the Zuni River at Kołuwala:wa, or Zuni Heaven, where in Zuni belief the spirits of the dead go to live; in 1984 Congress set the land around it aside for the tribe.
Q 30About how often do Zuni pilgrims travel the 'Barefoot Trail' to Kołuwala:wa, or 'Zuni Heaven'?
Every four years
Every four years the pilgrims follow the trail across land that is no longer theirs; when a rancher moved to bar them in 1985, the case went to a federal court, which in 1990 granted them a right of way across his land.