IV 
Tbe Pueblos of New Mexico 
THE Pueblo Indians of the Southwest are one of the most 
widely known primitive peoples in Western civilization. 
They live in the midst of America, within easy reach of 
any transcontinental traveller. And they are living after 
the old native fashion. Their culture has not disintegrated 
like that of all the Indian communities outside of Arizona 
, and New Mexico. Month by month and year by year, the 
old dances of the gods are danced in their stone villages, 
life follows essentially the old routines, and what they 
have taken from our civilization they have remodelled 
and subordinated to their own attitudes. 
They have a romantic history. All through that part of 
America which they still inhabit are found the homes of 
their cultural ancestors, the cliff-dwellings and great 
planned valley cities of the golden age of the Pueblos. 
Their unbelievably numerous cities were built in the 
twelfth and thirteenth centuries, but we can follow their 
history much further back to its simple beginnings in one- 
room stone houses to each of which an underground cere- 
monial chamber was attached. These early Pueblo people, 
howevet, were not the first who had taken this Southwest 
desert for their home. An earlier people, the Basket- 
makers, had lived there so long before that we cannot 
calculate the period of their occupancy, and they were 
supplanted, and perhaps largely exterminated, by the 
early Pueblo people. 
The Pueblo culture flourished greatly after it had settled 
upon its arid plateau. It had brought with it the bow and 
arrow, a knowledge of stone architecture, and a diversified 
agriculture. Why it chose for the site of its greatest de- 
velopment the inhospitable, almost waterless valley of the 
San Juan, which flows into the Colorado River from the