INVESTIGATING THE PUEBLO REVOLT

In 17th-century New Mexico the Native Americans launched a successful revolt against the Spanish. Archaeologists are unearthing the details of this unusual event and its consequences.

By Julian Smith

This illustration showing Native Americans hanging a Spanish priest is based on a painting by Hopi artist Fred Kabotie that appeared on the cover of the book WhatCausedthePuebloRevoltof1680.

In the late-summer heat of August 1680, the Pueblo Indians on the northern edge of Spain’s New World empire banded together and drove the Spanish colonists out of the province of New Mexico. As monsoon thunderheads gathered over the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, Pueblo warriors killed roughly 400 colonists, burned churches and homesteads, and laid siege to the Spanish capital of Santa Fe. After nine days, Governor Antonio de Otermín led the survivors to El Paso del Norte (now Ciudad Juárez, Mexico).

The Pueblo Revolt lasted for 12 years, making it one of the most successful uprisings in the history of the Americas. Its repercussions are still felt today among the inhabitants of the Southwest. Recent investigations into the archaeology of this turbulent period are revealing how it changed the lives of those who lived through it and those who came after.

“From 1680 to 1692, archaeology and Pueblo oral history are our only sources of information,” says Robert Preucel of the University of Pennsylvania, editor of Archaeologies of the Pueblo Revolt. Spanish written records are mostly limited to the periods before and after the uprising, and they didn’t record the day-to-day lives of Indians, much less many of the abuses they endured under both the Spanish crown and the Catholic Church. Pueblo oral histories have often been ignored. Preucel’s research has involved combining archaeology and oral history in collaboration with Cochiti Pueblo.

“Archaeology can tell us what daily life was like for the Pueblo people and the struggles they faced,” says Preucel. “Did they give up Spanish foods or herding Spanish livestock? How did they build the new villages they took refuge in after the rebellion? How did they restructure their lives?”

The causes of the revolt included decades of economic

The Nuestra Senora de Guadalupe de Zuni was burned and destroyed during the Pueblo Revolt.The church was reconstructed after 1700 and used until 1821,at which time the mission was withdrawn and the building fell into ruin.The mission was restored in the 1960s in a cooperative project between the Pueblo of Zuni,the Catholic Church,and the National Park Service.

exploitation, religious repression, and social oppression. Spanish settlers demanded tribute and labors from Puebloans, many of whom lived a marginal existence. Native religions were banned, and nomadic Apaches and Navajos continually raided settlements for slaves. A number of scattered rebellions throughout the 17th century were put down by the Spanish, so when a charismatic leader named Popé emerged to lead them in the 1670s, the Indians were primed to rise up en masse.

But the Pueblo Revolt “is more nuanced than just Spanish versus Indians,” says Preucel. “The Spanish were a huge part of Pueblo life—there were strong connections not easily broken.” While their leaders encouraged the Indians to reject everything Spanish and return to their traditions, in 82 years of contact many had intermarried with Europeans and converted to Christianity. Almost all the Puebloans had learned to enjoy the new foods, animals, and products the settlers had brought. Families were torn apart in the struggle. And “the revolt wasn’t just a successful military campaign,” adds Preucel. “It was a broad-based cultural revitalization movement.”

Mixing On The Mesas

The architecture of many Pueblo Revolt sites reflects significant changes that occurred when many groups resettled in more defensive locations due to fear of a Spanish reprisal. Archaeologist T.J. Ferguson, an adjunct professor at the University of Arizona, investigated the settlement of Dowa Yalanne near Zuni Pueblo in western New Mexico from 1987 to 1991. Dowa Yalanne (“Corn Mountain”) sits on top of a sheer-walled mesa southwest of the modern pueblo. During the uprising it may have housed as many as 2,500 people, who occupied at least 559 rooms.

Ferguson concluded that the Pueblo Revolt brought about a “fundamental reorganization of Zuni society.” He analyzed aerial photographs of the settlement and he also made numerous trips to the top of the 1,000-foot-high mesa in order to map it. He mapped lines of sight, passageways between rooms and buildings, and other quantifiable spatial properties, and then analyzed the results.

“If you can see people, there’s a higher chance you’ll interact with them. Seeing is a form of interaction,” Ferguson explains. A site with a high “integration” value, according to Ferguson, has open architecture that results in easy movement; a low integration value indicates constricted movement and, often, a defensive layout. “This approach lets you see whether it’s relatively easy or hard to get around from the perspective of someone coming in from the outside,” says Ferguson. “It tells you how the architecture structures social interactions.”

Ferguson found Dowa Yalanne to have a much more open layout than earlier plaza-oriented settlements such as Hawikuh, the first Zuni community encountered by the Spanish in 1549. This makes sense, given that six distinct

Zuni villages, plus small groups of refugees from other pueblos, were thrust together on top of the mesa during the revolt. An open layout may have helped these disparate groups get to known each other.

“The real defensive character of Dowa Yalanne comes from its location, not the construction of the village itself,” says Ferguson. “Once you were inside, there was a lot of space for people to interact. There was a considerable amount of social experimentation going on here.”

All told, Ferguson looked at 14 sites near Zuni. He found that, in general, villages built earlier in the Pueblo Revolt era displayed pattersns oriented around plazas, with low integration values. Sites constructed toward the end of the period, when many people were moving between pueblos to fight or find refuge, show more dispersed plans with high integration values. Most Pueblo villages that exist today fall in the latter category.

In 1995, Preucel began investigating Hanat Kotyiti, an ancestral community near Cochiti Pueblo between Albuquerque and Santa Fe. Set on Potrero Viejo mesa high above the Rio Grande, Kotyiti was the site of one of the final battles of the Spanish reconquest in 1694. In collaboration with the pueblo of Cochiti, Preucel collected and analyzed surface ceramics from Kotyiti’s two distinct settlements. He also analyzed ceramic samples collected in 1912 by archaeologist Nels Nelson of the American Museum of Natural History. The majority of the ceramics were Kotyiti glazeware and Tewa matte paint polychromes, styles contemporaneous with the Pueblo Revolt, indicating that both settlements were occupied during that period.

Bones from cows, sheep, and goats showed that the Puebloans kept using these animals after the uprising, despite Popé’s exhortations to reject everything connected with the colonizers. On the other hand, specially prepared stones for making piki (wafer) bread were found in over 30 rooms, suggesting that traditional foods made a comeback after the Spanish were expelled. Similarly, ceremonial ceramics, including miniature pottery vessels associated with rain-making rituals, implied that traditional religious practices were reinstituted, “or at least practiced more openly,” during the rebellion, says Preucel. The very layout of one of the two settlements at Kotyiti may have symbolized the Puebloans’ rejection of things Spanish and the revival of the old ways. “The plaza Pueblo in particular appears to have been built to assert certain elements of the Keresan cosmology,” writes Preucel in Expedition magazine. (Keresan is a language spoken at a number of the pueblos.) Open gateways led in the directions An excavator works at Pueblo San Marcos,which is preserved by The Archaeological Conservancy.The pueblo’s Fray Manuel Tinoco was one of 21 priests who died in the revolt in August,1680. Excavations at San Marcos in 1999 and 2000 by the American Museum of Natural History revealed that San Marcos’s church was neither burned nor torn down,but the church’s bell was smashed to pieces.

This Hawikuh glaze ware bowl was typical of the types of ceramics used in the Zuni area prior to the revolt.

in which supernatural beings were believed to reside, as well as to the north, where the Puebloans held that their ancestors had first emerged from the underworld.

Shards Of History

Barbara Mills, an archaeologist at the University of Arizona, found more information in the pottery of Zuni area. She examined pottery from before and after the rebellion, including 1,151 whole vessels recovered from Hawikuh and other sites in the early 1900s that are in the collections of the National Museum of the American Indian.

“Ceramics are some of best-preserved objects in the archaeological record,” says Mills. “Pottery is used every day, and it changes with different foods and uses. It’s a record of their daily life.” And since Puebloans still make pottery today, she adds, it provides continuity. “You can work back and forth between past and present to understand the role of ceramics in Pueblo life.”

Mills found “drastic changes” in ceramics at Zuni before and after the Pueblo Revolt, and interprets this as a subtle form of resistance by those who most likely made the ceramics: the Zuni women. “We know that women were making pots 200 years later, so we inferred women were making them back then,” she explains.

In particular, Mills noticed that Zuni potters stopped making certain pre-Revolt styles of ceramic serving bowls. Styles such as Hawikuh glaze ware and Matsaki buff ware, common before the uprising, were completely replaced by matte-paint polychrome. This radical change occurred at every pueblo where glaze paints were used before the revolt. Mills calls it “one of the enigmas of historic Pueblo ceramics.”

The designs painted on the bowls also changed. Religious pre-Revolt motifs such as Roman crosses and katsinas (stylized representations of spiritual beings) were out. Instead, stylized feathers were repeated on nearly every vessel, both inside and out. Mills calls these changes an intentional break with the past—both a rejection of Spanish styles during the rebellion and a means of avoiding further religious repression afterward. Stylized feathers may have seemed innocent to missionaries and Spanish soldiers, but they actually had a significant spiritual association with native prayer sticks, altar decorations, ritual costumes, and even shields. Designs on the outside of vessels would have been easily visible at public feasts and other ceremonies, and would have served to unite the groups that found themselves mixed together during and after the revolt.

“This was one way women participated in the resistance process,” says Mills. “They weren’t actually fighting, [so] they expressed it in a different way. It’s very clever to do it in the design and materials, things others might think of as just pretty designs. It’s a way of resisting without having too much fear of any kind of Spanish repercussion.”

Yet Zuni potters didn’t reject everything Spanish. After the introduction of new domestic animals and foods, Pueblo artisans had adapted “a more open-cauldron, stewpot style,” says Mills, “as opposed to the closed-neck pots you see at Zuni for most of prehistory.” This didn’t change after the revolt, illustrating a selective mix of rejection and preservation of Spanish influences.

After the revolt,Zuni potters changed the style of their ceramics,the images painted on them,and the type of paint,switching from glaze to matte.This Ashiwi polychrome is representative of post-revolt pottery.

Floating Like Butterflies

The twin threads of ceramics and architecture come together in the work of Matt Liebmann, a Ph.D. candidate in anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. Liebmann, a student of Preucel’s, has worked with Jemez Pueblo, in the pine-clad mountains northwest of Albuquerque, since 2000.

With the help of students from the pueblo and Philips Andover Academy in Massachusetts, Liebmann collected ceramics from historic pueblos near Jemez named Cerro Colorado, Patokwa, and Astialakwa. “There was a battle with the Spanish at Astialakwa in 1694 during the reconquest,” he says, “so there was broken pottery everywhere.”

In addition to noting the style of each piece, Liebmann analyzed its temper—materials mixed into the clay to keep it from cracking during firing—by filing an edge and looking at it under a microscope. The results surprised him. “Jemez sites are known for a style called Jemez Black-On-White,” he explains, “which typically makes up a third to one-half of all the pottery. We expected to find a lot of this, especially because the Puebloans were supposed to be going back to older design styles during the revolt.” Instead, it appears that Jemez potters stopped making this style almost completely. “As soon as they moved up to Patokwa and Astialakwa,” he says, “Jemez Black-On-White drops to about five percent of the total.”

In the minds of the Indians, the style may have been tainted. “We know that before the revolt, the missionaries were forcing the women to make lots of things in the Black-On-White style, especially religious items like candlesticks, chalices, and crucifixes,” he says. “This type of pottery might have been associated with the Spanish and the labor they demanded of the Puebloans, so they stopped making it as soon as they could.”

Liebmann mapped the three sites and another located nearby called Boletsakwa. Using digital photography and total stations, he was able to create topographic maps and 3D computerized reconstructions of each settlement. With over 200 rooms, Astialakwa alone took him six months of work. In an upcoming paper written with Ferguson and Preucel, Liebmann describes findings that mirror Ferguson’s at Zuni. Both along the Rio Grande and out at Zuni, villages built early in the Pueblo Revolt period show “planned communal construction and evidence of strong centralized leadership that resulted in highly structured social interaction.” Later villages exhibit dispersed layouts that made it easier for communities in turmoil to mix informally. The effects linger in the social alliances and layouts of modern Pueblo villages. In his chapter in Archaeologies of the Pueblo Revolt, Liebmann also investigates the persistence of Christian iconography among the Puebloans during the uprising. His conclusions illustrate how complex Pueblo opinions were toward the religion the Spanish had thrust upon them less than a century before. Instead of rejecting the trappings of Catholicism wholesale, the Indians put them to their own uses. According to historic documents, during their reconquest of the pueblos after 1692, the Spanish found not only the more utilitarian elements of European culture still in use—such as herds of sheep, cattle, and horses—but also crosses, altars, chalices, and lamps. They were used in very different ways than what the friars had taught them, however. Pueblo warriors dressed in Catholic vestments to celebrate their victory. Churches and convents that had escaped destruction were used for Archaeologists have documented changes in settlement during the pre-revolt (pre-1680) to post-revolt (1680-1694) periods.Pueblo people vacated their pre-revolt mission village homes and established new villages high on mesas for defensive purposes. Acoma was the one pueblo that was occupied during both periods.In 1694,and then again in 1696,Diego De Vargas organized military campaigns against the pueblos and resettled most of them at their original mission villages.

Jemez Pueblo sculptor Cliff Fragua created this statue of Popé,who led the Pueblo people against the Spanish.The statue will be on display in the National Statuary Hall in the U.S.Capitol.

native ceremonies. A petroglyph in Frijoles Canyon near Los Alamos, New Mexico (now part of Bandelier National Monument), exhibits a traditional rectangular mouth but also European-style facial features and a spiked crown or halo similar to images of the Virgin Mary.

“It was curious to me that you were getting this persistence of imagery, when at the time documentary evidence would suggest they were getting rid of it,” says Liebmann. “But just because you find Christian imagery doesn’t mean these people were still practicing Catholics,” he emphasizes. “They were reinterpreting Catholic images to use their power against the Spaniards. It was part of the resistance.” The Indians, it seems, were acknowledging the power of Christianity and its icons while refuting its practitioners.

Pueblo oral tradition reflects this appropriation. During the battle with Spanish forces at Astialakwa in 1694, seven defeated Pueblo warriors threw themselves off the edge of a cliff to escape capture. According to Jemez history, an image of San Diego appeared on the cliff side and the men floated safely to the ground “like butterflies.” (The image is still visible today and venerated as a shrine.)

Echoes Of The Past

In 1692, the new governor of New Mexico, Diego de Vargas, rode north from presentday Mexico on a mission of reconquest. In the past 12 years, fragile alliances among the Pueblo groups had collapsed. Years of fighting followed Vargas’s hasty declaration of victory, but the Pueblo Revolt was over.

Its repercussions, however, would resonate for centuries. The Spanish never treated the Puebloans the same again, says Preucel, and they became more accepting of native religious practices. Consolidation, fighting, and resettlement left far fewer pueblos after the revolt. The area became part of the U.S. in 1848 at the end of the MexicanAmerican War.

Over 300 years later, the Pueblo Revolt is still a sensitive subject among Hispanics and Puebloans. When a bronze statue of Don Juan de Oñate was erected near Española in 1998, an unknown protestor sawed off its right foot in memory of the conquistador’s decision to punish an uprising at Acoma Pueblo in 1599 by cutting one foot off of every surviving male over the age of 25—a vivid example of the harsh treatment that eventually led to the revolt.

“A lot of what we know today is speculation on the part of historians, especially when there’s no real record of what happened,” says Herman Agoyo, former governor of San Juan Pueblo. “There’s an almost total lack of information, even within the pueblos. It was such a terrible thing, they didn’t like to talk about it, like soldiers returning from World War II.”

Liebmann draws another parallel. “The Pueblo Revolt was an act of independence, not simply resistance,” he writes. “It was a declaration of liberty and sovereignty, just as Americans view the Revolutionary War.”

There are signs that people are coming to terms to the events of the distant past. When each state was allowed to memorialize two famous residents in the National Statuary Hall in the Capitol in Washington, D.C., one of New Mexico’s choices was a seven-foot statue of Popé by Cliff Fragua, a sculptor from Jemez Pueblo. Agoyo, who has been instrumental in the process, says the statue will be installed in September.

JULIAN SMITH is a travel and science writer living in Santa Fe,New Mexico.