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