MODULE 2
THE PUEBLOS
Key Concepts:
Pueblo
pueblo
Western Pueblos
Eastern Tanoan Pueblos
Keresan Bridge Pueblos
sodality
moiety
cacique
kiva
clan
lineage
matrilineal
patrilineal
bilateral
compartmentalization
Reading Assignment, Text: Chapter 2, "The Pueblos," pp. 34-69
When most people think of the Southwest, they envision cliff dwellings tucked into canyon ledges and multistoried pueblos on sandstone mesas. These dramatic prehistoric ruins were left behind by the Ancestral Pueblos (Anasazi), Mogollon, and Hisatsinom, the ancestors of today's Puebloan peoples, who now live in villages along the Rio Grande and its tributaries in northern New Mexico, villages that are spread out westward toward Arizona, and in the villages on top of and near the three Hopi mesas in northeastern Arizona.
When the Spaniards arrived in 1540, they found over 40,000 Pueblo people living in roughly 90 villages on the Colorado Plateau. Impressed by their settled village lifestyle made possible by agriculture, they named the people, "Pueblo" or "town-dwellers." Today, Pueblo refers to Puebloan peoples collectively and individually, the people of a given village, and the village itself. Thus, we say, "the Pueblos live in the Southwest," "He is Pueblo," "She is San Ildefonso Pueblo," and "San Ildefonso Pueblo is holding a dance."
Pueblo homes tend to have contiguous alignment of rooms and, in some cases, multistoried terraced rooms that rise to four and five stories. Along the Rio Grande, these houses tend to be made of adobe, while away from the river, they are made of sandstone slabs or pumice blocks. While adobe brick was known among prehistoric Puebloan peoples, before Spanish contact, they generally used coursed adobe construction. Since the arrival of the Spaniards, adobe brick house construction has replaced coursed adobe.
Another common trait shared by Puebloans is their reliance on agriculture. All Puebloans live in the high arid plateau country of northern Arizona and northwestern and central New Mexico. Before contact, their important crops included maize, beans, gourds (squash), cotton, and tobacco. The Spaniards brought fruit trees such as apple, cherry, plum, and peach, along with wheat, alfalfa, and chili.
Puebloan peoples never constituted a single tribe, for each Pueblo village acts as an autonomous political entity and has its own distinct culture; while the people of some Pueblo villages spoke the same or similar languages, others spoke entirely unrelated languages. Despite this autonomy, Puebloans constantly traded, visited, and intermarried.
Pueblo Languages:
A. Uto-Aztecan spoken by the Hopi
B. Zuni spoken by the Zuni
C. Keresan spoken by the people of Acoma, Laguna, Cochiti, Santo Domingo,
San Felipe, Santa Ana, and Zia
D. Tanoan includes the subgroups of Tiwa, Tewa, and Towa:
Although each pueblo has its own distinct cultural identity, anthropologists group them into three regional divisions. Environmental differences, especially the relative availability of water, varied greatly from west to east. While the Hopi have no permanently flowing streams, a small stream serves the pueblo of Zuni, so that the people who live there must rely primarily on rainfall and runoff to bring a successful harvest to fruition. The Eastern Tanoan Pueblos, in contrast, who live along the Rio Grande and its tributaries, have constructed irrigation canals to divert the water to their planted fields.
Furthermore, farming based on flooding and rainfall does not require a large labor force, so, in the west, small families and clan groups easily provided the needed manpower. However, in the east, the complex tasks of clearing, terracing, damming, and ditching, as well as fields sometimes located at a considerable distance from permanently flowing waters, required greater communal effort. The use of more complex technology in the east often involve the whole adult population. Thus, the first apparent difference between western and eastern pueblos is the composition of the groups that performed tasks associated with farming. The Western Pueblos-Hopi, Hano, Zuni, Acoma, and Laguna-carried on a subsistence economy based on flood and dry farming techniques with lineages and clans. The Eastern Tanoan pueblos-that are located along the Rio Grande-used nonkinship units called sodalities and associations to mobilize the large numbers of people needed to conduct irrigation-based farming. In between these two extremes was the third group, known as the Keresan Bridge because they were intermediate in their organization. While the Keresan Bridge Pueblos (those not included in the Western Pueblos and who are located along the Rio Grande) had lineages and clans, they used nonkinship units (again, sodalities and associations) to fill governmental duties. (A lineage is a family line, while a clan includes several related lineages that reach further back in time to a previous ancestor who may be a mythic being. While lineages can be traced, clans include such time depth that relationships cannot be traced through specific linkages.) The Keresans who practiced irrigation appear to have been shifting from clan involvement in government to nonkinship control vested in their powerful medicine associations.
Each group-the Western Pueblos, the Keresan Bridge Pueblos, and the Eastern Tanoan Pueblos-shares a constellation of characteristics that includes similarities in political, social, and ceremonial organization as well as farming techniques. Pueblo society revolves around five basic concerns: 1) weather, 2) illness, 3) warfare, 4) control of flora and fauna, and 5) village harmony. The emphasis on these concerns varied among the three groups as well as how they dealt with them. The Western Pueblos coped through magical and religious practices, while the Eastern Tanoan Pueblos used more practical means, although their cultures were no less religious.
The Western Pueblos-Hopi, Hano, Laguna, Acoma, and Zuni-practice matrilineal kinship, and everyone belongs to their mothers' clans. When a couple marries, they go to live with the wife's parents (matrilocal residence). Women own the houses and garden plots.
The Katsina cult is extremely important; Katsinam are ancestral beings who have the power to bring rain and well-being. These pueblos are theocracies, and clans dominate government, religious, subsistence, and community affairs. Although Zuni, discussed in Module 4, has more centralized political authority, in general, political power is most dispersed among the Western Pueblos (in comparison to the other two regional groups). In an environment where the success or failure of crops is never certain from year to year, ceremonies emphasize on weather control and rainmaking. A bountiful harvest is believed to be the result of the successful observance of religious retreats and rituals.
The Eastern Tanoan Pueblos-Tesuque, Nambe, Pojoaque, San Ildefonso, Santa Clara, San Juan, Taos, Picuris, Sandia, Isleta, and Jemez-practice a dual chieftainship based the division of the village into two groups, each of whom governs for half of the year. Each group is called a moiety and the individual usually joins the moiety of his or her father, but this affiliation may be changed later for various reasons. Children may be assigned alternately to one moiety and then to the other if the parents belong to different moieties. The important unit of social, ceremonial, and governmental organization is the moiety. Each moiety is headed by a cacique (village chief) with his own staff, headed by a war captain who carries out the decisions of the cacique.
These pueblos are bilateral which means that both the father's and the mother's lines are important, with land use rights being passed on to both daughters and sons. Except for Jemez, none of these pueblos have matrilineal clans.
The Katsina cult is weak, if it is present, and has none of the power that it does in the Western Pueblos. The ceremonial focus is warfare and hunting. Sodalities (nonkinship associations) are social and ceremonial associations that have special functions, such as hunting, warfare, clowning (associated with the Katsina cult), and, in some cases, medicine. A major role that sodalities play is uniting the pueblo because each sodality has members from both moieties. Thus, factionalism is minimized because sodality members share a common focus.
It was the Eastern Tanoan Pueblos that experienced the greatest pressure from representatives of all three Spanish groups-the Catholic church, the civil government, and the military. Religious oppression-not only were Puebloans forbidden from practicing their native practices but some of their medicine men were also executed-led the Pueblos to compartmentalize the two religions. Thus, they outwardly practiced the Catholicism that was forced upon them, while they secretly continued their traditional beliefs and practices, keeping the two separate and distinct.
The Keresan Bridge Pueblos-Zia, Santa Ana, San Felipe, Santo Domingo, and Cochiti-had the most centralized political authority of all three groups because of the power vested in the medicine societies who coordinated communal tasks instead of simply fulfilling less specific functions as they did at other pueblos. In addition to their usual duties related to curing of disease and rites of exorcism, medicine societies in Keresan Bridge Pueblos played a much greater role than elsewhere by exerting a powerful influence in preserving traditional ways. The medicine societies have also assumed governmental and ceremonial functions. Through their status as medicine men they exerted a great deal of influence over other people, to the point of being called an embyonic ruling class. The village chief (cacique) and his assistants in Keresan pueblos are medicine men. The governmental and religious duties that clans have as part of their dominant role in the Western Pueblos, are the responsibility of medicine societies in Keresan pueblos, thus consolidating authority in a small, powerful group of officers. The focus of Keresan ceremonies tends to be on curing and warfare.
The Keresan Bridge Pueblos have weak matrilineal clans which are primarily concerned in marriage control through clan exogamy. This means that a person cannot marry someone who belongs to the same clan or a related clan. In some of these pueblos, such as Zia, the cacique must come from a specific clan. It is believed that Keresan clans were once stronger and had more functions, but over time, the medicine societies took over many of their functions.
As matrilineal clans decreased in importance in religion and government, patrilineal aspects became emphasized, so that the direction is in the direction of bilaterality. The nuclear family is replacing matrilocality and the extended matrilineal household as the important social unit. Patrilineal moieties (Children belong to the moiety of their fathers.) have also led to the importance of the nuclear family.
Why have such regional differences developed?
Although it is tempting to say that the differences among these three regional
groups can be traced to environmental differences that determine the degree
of certainty regarding the success of the basic means of livelihood, this
would be to overlook other key influences. Yes, the use of intensive irrigation
did play a role in the development of a more complex political system in the
Eastern Tanoan Pueblos and among the Keresan Bridge Pueblos. There we find
strong political control invested in the cacique and his council, including
the powerful war captain who could revoke permission to live in the pueblo
if a person refused to join communal work on the irrigation system. Such strict
means of social control contrasted with gossip and avoidance practiced in
the Western Pueblos, where smaller work groups based on clans and lineages
provided enough manpower to practice dry and flood farming.
Despite the appeal of the irrigation hypothesis, other factors have clearly been operating. Ethnic and linguistic differences existed among the Western Pueblos, the Keresans, and the Eastern Tanoans long before the arrival of the Spaniards. The Zuni, who speak a language unrelated to any other known language in the world, are probably a mixture of Ancestral Pueblo (Anasazi) and Mogollon. Their language alone indicates considerable time depth as a separate people. The Uto-Aztecan proto-Hopi may have arrived in the Four Corners area early enough to participate in the Basketmaker-Anasazi transformation of the Desert Culture. The Keresan-speakers and the Tanoan-speakers also descended from the Ancestral Pueblo (Anasazi). Why did the Ancestral Pueblo peoples leave the Four Corners area to settle elsewhere? Archaeologists identify five stress factors, including raiding by more nomadic groups, inter-pueblo warfare and aggression, disease, the major drought that occurred on the Colorado Plateau between A.D. 1276 and 1299, and erosion of their farmland related to the lowering of the water table through drought. The harsh environment of the Southwest, an area that is marginal for agricultural, forced people to move constantly in search of better conditions. When they migrated, groups of different ethnic backgrounds-the Ancestral Puebloans were not a unified, single entity-and different beliefs and practices.
Warfare provides a third factor in the development of regional differences. Much more important among the Eastern Tanoans, raiding by nomadic Indians, including Apaches, Comanches, and Navajos, led to a greater emphasis on warfare. The Eastern Tanoans had war captains and Warriors' Associations, and the Pueblos were such superb warriors that the Spaniards, to combat nomadic tribes after the reconquest, even enlisted them to serve but allowed them to remain directly under their own captains of war.
There was also influence from other Indians, especially those of the southern Plains, on the people of the northern Tanoan pueblos through trade and other forms of peaceful exchange. As material items were exchanged, beliefs and practices were also borrowed.
Finally, the degree of Spanish influence must be considered. The Eastern Tanoans had far greater contact with the Spaniards whose influence was slowly transforming Puebloan governmental and social systems toward a more European model. Relations with Spanish settlers, missionaries, and military and civil officials were far more intense in the east. All of these influences must have contributed to the great differences among the three regional groups.
Regional Differences Among the Pueblos
The following chart identifies the pueblos included in each group and summarizes
the characteristics shared by pueblos in that regional grouping, based on
political organization, social organization, ceremonial organization, religion,
and world view:
Western Pueblos
Hopi, Hano, Laguna, Acoma, Zuni
strong matrilineal clans,
matrilocal residence
female ownership of house and garden plots
strong Katsina Cult
dispersed political authority
ceremonial focus: weather control, rainmaking
Eastern Tanoan Pueblos
Tesuque, Nambe, Pojoaque, San Ildefonso, Santa Clara, San Juan
Taos, Picuris, Sandia, Isleta, Jemez
dual chieftainship based on their moiety division
sodalities crosscut moiety division to unite each pueblo
bilateral extended family structure
men own houses and land
no matrilineal clans among most (Jemez is an exception)
if present, Katsina Cult is weak
ceremonial focus: warfare and hunting
Keresan Bridge Pueblos
Zia, Santa Ana, San Felipe, Santo Domingo, Cochiti
most centralized political authority because of power vested in medicine societies
weak matrilineal clans
matrilocal residence
moieties with patrilineal membership
ceremonial focus: curing and warfare