Keres-Speaking Pueblos

The Keres language is an isolate language spoken only among the people of seven pueblos in New Mexico. The language is further divided into Eastern and Western subsets, each of which can be significantly different from the other. Each pueblo also has its own dialect of Keres but each dialect is mutually intelligible with its nearest neighbors.

Some sources say the people who eventually became the Keres evolved their proto culture across the desert, from around Winslow to the Rio Puerco of the East and from the northern San Juan region to the Rio Salado (in New Mexico). Before that, they were likely hunter-gatherers of the northern branch of the Cochise culture, the southern branch of which evolved into the Hohokam.

Some sources say the Keres really came into their own in the Mesa Verde, Aztec and Chaco Canyon areas. The Eastern and Western variants diverged around 1000 CE when the Western Keres-speaking people left the Mesa Verde area and migrated south. Those who went to Acoma passed around the west side of Mount Taylor and across the Rio San Jose. Then they came to a village in an excellent location on the top of a large white rock and they merged into the people there.

Those who went south from Mesa Verde and passed east of Mount Taylor came into the valley of the Rio San Jose and settled among the people already there. Within a hundred years, the budding settlements at Acoma and Laguna were on their own, with Chaco/Mesa Verde and Mogollon influences scattering to the winds.

The Acomas have been in essentially the same place for more than 1,000 years. Their water sources were very good, their defensive position was very good and, once they were built and decided to meet the neighbors, a couple major trade routes intersected there. There is some overlap in time between the founding of Acoma and the abandonment of the Mimbres Valley, indicating the possibility that some of the Mimbres people migrated to the Acoma area. The pot sherds left behind around Acoma say some of their designs did. There are similar potsherds found around Laguna and Isleta, too.

Some of the Western Keres people decided to build in the Laguna area, on the shores of a large lake. They went so far as to raise the level of the natural dam around the lake's outlet and raised the level of the lake. The farmland of both Acoma and Laguna stretched out through the drainage of the Rio San Jose but there seem to have never been any large communities built there. Over the years those small pueblos moved around but, for the most part, their landscape was unpopulated.

Today's Laguna Pueblo was partly settled by refugees leaving Acoma in the late-1690s to make peace with the Spanish when they returned to New Mexico after the 1680 revolt. They first built near the lake Laguna was named for, to the south and west of a couple older pueblos that were still inhabited (but there's precious little archaeology or history available about them).

The Eastern Keres-speaking pueblos were settled by migrants moving to the area from Mesa Verde, most likely in the later 1200s CE. The group that eventually settled San Felipe, Santo Domingo and Cochiti first stopped on the eastern slopes of the Jemez Mountains, on the Pajarito Plateau and in Frijoles Canyon for a couple hundred years (site of today's Bandelier National Monument). After being continually pushed further and further south by incoming Tewa people to the north, they migrated closer to the Rio Grande, traveling south from the mouth of Frijoles Canyon. The San Felipes went furthest south, building on the west bank of the Rio Grande first, then crossing the river to where there was more farmland and building a second pueblo. The Cochitis and Santo Domingos split at the river, with the Santo Domingos crossing to the eastern shore and the Cochitis not.

The Cerrillos Hills are in the Galisteo Creek drainage and that is where the lead/silver/copper/turquoise deposits that fueled the Santo Domingo and Southern and Middle Tewa economies are found. When the Spanish returned after the Pueblo Revolt, they seized all the lead sources they could find and denied the people access. Overnight, the glazeware pottery that had been produced throughout the area was finished. A hint of dryness in the air in the late 1690s and shortly, the Keres colonists had moved downstream to Santo Domingo while the Middle and Southern Tewas had moved north.

The Zias seem to have taken a different route, traveling south through the Jemez Mountains beyond the lands of the Towa-speaking Hamish (the Spanish couldn't pronounce the original name, they thought "Jemez" was close enough), and then downstream along the Jemez River toward the Rio Grande. The Zias settled in a place just upstream of that confluence that turned out to have much less usable farmland.

The Santa Anas may have come down out of the mountains first, crossing the Rio Grande and first traveling up into the Galisteo Basin. It wasn't long, though, and they were being pushed south by incoming Tewas and Tanoans. The structures at Paako, in the northeastern foothills of the Sandia Mountains, are tied to the people of Santa Ana, and perhaps the pueblo at Tijeras, on the south side of Sandia, is too. Eventually, they moved down out of the mountains and onto a large area of good farmland on the west side of the Rio Grande near the confluence with the Jemez River.

When Coronado arrived at the Rio Grande, he went to Kuaua first. At that time he found 12 or 13 "Tiquex"-speaking pueblos in the middle Rio Grande area. His demands of the people there led to the Tiguex War in which the Spaniards attacked virtually all of those pueblos and killed a few warriors, raped a few women and stole as much of the people's food stores as the soldiers could carry. The diseases they left behind did the rest of the job.

When the Spanish returned in force in 1598, the Tiguex area was partially occupied by migrants coming together at Santa Ana. Only the Isleta and Alameda pueblos remained of the Southern Tiwa.

The Franciscans named each pueblo after different Catholic saints and soon began their attempted destruction of native languages and religions. They also enslaved the people to build great mission structures and serve the priests so fully that the people couldn't even feed or clothe themselves properly. The first American Revolution (the 1680 Pueblo Revolt) was fought for freedom from that.

The Spanish did set up the All Pueblo Council in an effort to make it easier for them to control the people. The Council was the first democratically elected government in the New World, with representatives from all the pueblos in New Mexico. The Council meeting place was established at Santo Domingo in 1595 and it meets there still.