A really interesting tour of Acoma, the oldest continuously inhabited settlement in the USA, with its beautiful colonial era church, and a bloody history with the Spanish invaders.
Coronado - Pueblo Kuaua - has the most breathtaking murals rescued from a kiva, now in the museum on site, and replaced with replicas in the reconstructed kiva.
An hour's drive west of Albuquerque Acoma Pueblo stands high on a mesa above the mostly flat surrounding landscape - it is also known as "Sky City". We arrived for the first tour of the day at 9:30 which was led by the only permanent inhabitant of the pueblo "Gooby", who lives there with his young family.
Gooby, a lovely man, led us first past the beautiful school and into the enormous, cool mission church of San Esteban where he told us the history of his people and this village.
About 50 families have homes in Acoma and live here for at least part of the year. Many leave when elderly members of the family need extra care. There are still several thousand Acoma Puebloans nearby and scattered further afield.
The village has been here since the twelfth century. Spanish Conquistadors began to arrive in the early sixteenth century and at first were welcomed and provided with food.
At this time there were around 6,000 puebloans either in the Acoma Pueblo or surrounding villages.
Missionaries arrived in the 16th-17th centuries and, again, the puebloans were friendly, but persistent attempts by the missionaries to convert them led to clashes and many Spaniards were killed.
This led to a punitive Spanish expedition in 1599 which resulted in the massacre of hundreds of men, women and children. Those remaining spent twenty years in servitude, many of the men had a hand and/or foot amputated.
Juan Ramirez, a Franciscan Father, came to the pueblo in 1629 and he was probably instrumental in getting the church built. The puebloans had to carry all of the building materials up the mesa, including the 40 foot long Ponderosa pine vegas which support the roof. These were brought 25 miles from Mount Taylor and the men were severely punsihed if they allowed any of the poles to fall. Ramirez deliberately built the church over the largest kiva, one of the ceremonial gathering places of the puebloans.
In 1680 there was widespread rebellion by the puebloans when all of the missionary churches were destroyed except for the Acoma church. There seems to have been an uneasy co-existence thereafter.
Gooby played his flute in the church, beautiful music, haunting, and sounding like the wind in parts.
A legend grew up that Ramirez had caught a small girl who fell off the mesa during an aggressive demonstration by the puebloans against the missionaries coming to the village. This was though to be a miracle and the puebloans became friendlier, especially to Ramirez as they felt he was godlike. Ramirez only revealed years later that the child had, in fact, fallen onto a ledge and was briefly stunned - he simply picked her up.
Ramirez tried to suppress the puebloans' beliefs in every way, particularly in the use of kivas which he had destroyed. But the puebloans rebuilt them in a shape to mimic the homes and carried on with their beliefs.
The pueblo has feast days on Good Friday, September 2nd (the anniversary of the pueblo) and four days over Christmas. The public may watch the ceremonial dances and festivities but no photography is allowed in the church where the dances take place. Up to 10,000 visitors had come just two days ago on September 2nd. The puebloans feed the visitors, inviting them into their homes, but it must be a terrible crush.
Traditionally ancestral puebloan homes were of a single storey. Access was via ladders to reach a hole in the roof. Ladders could be pulled up and into the home for security. When homes became multi-storeyed, doors were added on the first floor, again accessed by a ladder.
The Spanish weren't keen on this arrangement as they couldn't easily inspect the homes for illicit activities, and so made the people build doors on the ground floor.
It was a fascinating tour. The pueblo is very traditional, and peaceful with so few people there and only half a dozen on our tour.
At the end Gooby gave us the option of riding back down or walking, we opted to walk. It was quite a tricky descent down narrow steps cut into the rock face through a slot canyon on the mesa - the traditional route in and out for the ancient puebloans.
Coronado was named after the Spaniard Francisco Vasquez de Coronado who camped here with his hundreds of soldiers and a thousand allies and slaves during his search for gold in 1540. It is actually the ancient pueblo of Kuaua (meaning "evergreen" in Tiwa). It was the excavation of the area in the 1930s to determine whether Coronado was ever actually here, that unearthed an extraordinary kiva and its murals.
Kuaua was one of twelve pueblos in the province of Tiguex.
When the Spanish first arrived the puebloans provided them with food and shelter, much as the people of Acoma had. And in much the same way, the demands of the Spanish became too great, including trying to convert the people to their own religious beliefs. The Tiguas rebelled in the winter of 1540-41 with disastrous results: two villages were destroyed and many of the people were killed.
Kuaua was inhabited from around 1300 to 1600. It was around 1300 that, probably due to drought conditions further north, a mass exodus of the Ancient Puebloans from places like Mesa Verde occurred. They settled in areas with a more congenial climate and reliable access to water. Kuaua is close to the Rio Grande, an excellent source of water for agriculture. The archaeological excavations in the 1930s revealed around 1200 rooms with more still remaining to be uncovered.
We arrived just in time for a tour, only six visitors. The guide sat us in the shade and proceeded to give a very good history of the pueblo and its interactions with the Spaniards. We then went into the museum where fourteen murals from the kiva are on display. No photography is allowed.
The kiva interior walls had 18 layers of whitewash covering the murals which were painstakingly peeled off to reveal the murals. These are fragmented but very lovely.
Some examples are a ceremonial figure of a deer walker - a man in deer skins bent over using two sticks to represent the front legs of the deer; birds, including an eagle, with a representation of rain coming from their beaks; a totally black figure with a round face, round eyes and a round mouth (we'd seen a petroglyph just like this at Rinconada Canyon at Petroglyph NM) surrounded by weather symbols such as lightning and rain - but no representation of sun.
The murals became much clearer when we went into the replica kiva of the pueblo. Kivas, and homes, were traditionally entered via a ladder through a hole in the roof, which is how we entered the replica kiva. Here the walls had been painted with the murals. They looked wonderful, quite primitive but so interesting. In one wall was a slot, low down, with the cloud symbol (this looks like a stepped pyramid) above and below. Offerings were found there, perhaps something to do with the puebloans believing that they originated from the earth. Or something to do with rain? Every mural had some representation of water and I thought they could represent the story of their life which relies heavily on the water supply, which they had already experienced could be fickle. Perhaps this was a kiva dedicated to a rain deity where ceremonies were performed to ensure plentiful water. Though a matriarchal society, women were not allowed in the kivas.
This was a wonderful experience, a real privilege to be allowed into even a replica kiva.
Leaving Coronado we had a long drive to Broomfield, broken by a late lunch at El Bruno's in Cuba. The region is famous for red and green chilies and produces a huge harvest every year. We had already been warned numerous times that these can be very hot and to ask which were milder wherever we had them, the red or the green, as it varies from place to place. Nevertheless, they put them in just about every savoury dish.
We were brought tortilla chips with red and green chili dip before the main dishes, the red was much spicier but not too bad. Andrew had a burger with the chili on the side, I had a Chimichanga Plate - flour tortilla filled with shredded chicken (looked like it had been deep-fried), beans, guacamole and sour cream with green chili on the side. The green chili was fine and the food was pretty good.