Acoma Pueblo Cibola New Mexico United States

Pueblo people are believed to have descended from the Anasazi, Mogollon, and other ancient peoples.

These influences are seen in the architecture, farming style, and artistry of the Acoma.

The Anasazi abandon their canyon homelands in the early thirteenth century due to climate change and social upheaval.

For upwards of two centuries, migrations have occurred in the area, and Acoma Pueblos emerges by the thirteenth century.

This early founding date makes Acoma Pueblo one of the earliest continuously inhabited communities in the United States.

A Western Keres-speaking community develops a pueblo settlement, from about 1200, at Acoma, located eighty-four miles (one hundred and thirty-five kilometers) west of present Albuquerque.

The pueblo settlement itself is perched atop a sandstone mesa that rises three hundred and fifty-seven feet (one hundred and nine meters) above the valley floor; the community’s irrigated fields of maize, beans, and squash are located below the mesa approximately twelve miles (nineteen kilometer) away at Acomita.

...the languages of the Zuni and of the Keresan-speaking Pueblos of New Mexico, from Acoma eastward to the Rio Grande, have not been clearly related to any existing linguistic family. (U.S. linguist Joseph Greenberg, however, grouped the Keres group with the Siouan family to form a postulated Keresiouan macro-group).

The Pueblo people of 1540 inhabit perhaps ninety independent villages along the Rio Grande in the region of present northern New Mexico and northeast Arizona.

Village-dwelling cultivators, they construct multistory apartment houses focused around subterranean religious rooms (kivas).

Political power is vested in religious organizations, and each member of Pueblo society participates in the intense ceremonial cycle that fills each year.

Warrior societies exist in each village, but they are primarily oriented toward defensive actions.