CHAPTER ONE Ancient Santa Fesarweb.org/media/files/sar_press_santa_fe_history_of_an...At Pecos, Cieneguilla, and San Cristóbal pueblos, all within twenty-five miles of Santa Fe, they

In the summer of 2006, my researchteam from the Museum of New Mex-ico’s Office of Archaeological Studiesuncovered five highly unusual storagepits with fire-reddened interior wallsonly a few blocks from Santa Fe’s cen-tral plaza. They lay within El Pueblo deSanta Fe, a centuries-old settlementunderlying part of downtown. After col-lecting and processing archaeomagneticsamples, our laboratory directorinformed me that five of the pits datedfrom 400 to 600 CE. In amazement, Irealized they were six hundred yearsolder than anything else found at this siteand could place farmers in the Santa Fearea four hundred years earlier than pre-viously known. More than a centurybefore, Adolph Bandelier had describedthis same site, which lies right under ournoses, but, with the passage of time andgrowth of the city, we were no longercertain of its exact location. Now, afteranalyzing the unique storage pits, werealized we were looking at evidence ofthe emergence of the Ancestral Puebloan

way of life. Farming and living in vil-lages, attributes of both Pueblo Indiansand Spanish colonists, formed the foun-dation that defines Santa Fe and its people today. This was but one part of a rich story that reaches back ten thou-sand years.

Early Santa Fe ArchaeologyFor more than a century, Santa Fe’s rich and diverse multicultural past hasfascinated archaeologists. While earlyarchaeologists focused on large puebloruins and cliff dwellings, researcherstoday are more likely to study thesmaller and less prominent sites left byearly hunter-gatherers, Ancestral Pueblofarmers, and historic Spanish and Anglo-American settlers. Each of these culturalgroups lived, or still lives, in the SantaFe area with its high desert landscapebackdropped by the Sangre de Cristo Mountains.

In the late nineteenth and early twen-tieth centuries, antiquities collectors and

www.sarweb.sarpress.org Copyrighted material from Santa Fe: History of an Ancient City ❈ 1

C H A P T E R O N E

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Ancient Santa FeTEN THOUSAND YEARS OF HIGH DESERT LIVING

Stephen S. Post

Adolph F. Bandelier at an archaeological ruin.

2 ❈ Copyrighted material from Santa Fe: History of an Ancient City www.sarweb.sarpress.org

archaeologists sought out ancient cliffdwellings and ruins in search of fineartifacts to send back to museums orsell to collectors in the East. Scholarslike Adolph Bandelier, Edgar Hewett,and Alfred V. Kidder tried to define ahistorical link between the then dwin-dling population of Pueblo Indians ofthe Rio Grande and the AncestralPuebloan sites in the Four Cornersregion. At Pecos, Cieneguilla, and SanCristóbal pueblos, all within twenty-five miles of Santa Fe, they employednew methods to an emerging field ofarchaeology.

Santa Fe, a far inland outpost of theSpanish Empire, was contemporarywith St. Augustine, Florida; Jamestown,Virginia; and Quebec City in Canada.In the 1950s and 1960s, in order tolearn more about the early colony, his-torical archaeologists Bruce Ellis of thePalace of the Governors and StanleyStubbs of the Laboratory of Anthropol-ogy excavated several seventeenth-century sites in Santa Fe, including LaParroquia (the predecessor of today’s St.Francis Cathedral), San Miguel Chapel,and parts of the Palace of the Gover-nors. Their interest in Spanish institu-tions also led them to excavate theeighteenth-century sites of La Castrense,

which was a military chapel on thesouth side of Santa Fe’s plaza, and LaGarita, a torreon (tower) and guardhouse on the slopes of Fort Marcy Hill.

In the late 1980s, both the city andthe county of Santa Fe enacted ordi-nances requiring that archaeologicaland historical study precede commercialand residential developments. Sincethen, archaeologists have had opportu-nities to study many small sites indiverse environments on private land.As a result, we have been able to look beyond the melted walls of pueblos andthe city and report on such topics asseven-thousand-year-old hunter-gatherercamps, population increases in the firstcenturies of the Common Era, pottery-firing kilns left by Pueblo Indian ances-tors, metalworking of Spanish settlers,and the vast Spanish acequia systemsthat predated Santa Fe’s earliest munici-pal water systems.

A Good Place to LiveSanta Fe’s natural beauty captivates allwho live there. Meandering river val-leys, grasslands, wooded hills, and highmountains combine with a temperateclimate to make it a desirable place tolive. Even with its diverse plant and

animal life, however, its inhabitantssometimes found it to be a challengingenvironment.

Around Santa Fe, most precipitationfalls as winter snow in the high moun-tains and intense summer thunder-storms in the valley and piedmont hills.The growing season averages 170 days,with the last frost in May and the firstkilling frost in October. Annual vari-ability in the length of the growing sea-son and the timing and amount ofprecipitation affects both wild anddomesticated plant productivity. Duringhistoric times, unpredictable precipita-tion made irrigation farming risky, withthe result that downstream farmersoften struggled to water their crops.Periodic droughts or temperatureextremes adversely affected everyoneregardless of culture or technology.

Reaching nearly 13,000 feet in eleva-tion, the Sangre de Cristo Mountainsand foothills are covered by denseforests watered by narrow, fast-runningstreams that feed into the Santa Fe andTesuque rivers below. In the past, bothIndian and Spanish people hunted elk,bighorn sheep, and mountain goats inthe high-elevation stands of fir, spruce,and aspen. They transported game andplant foods long distances over difficultterrain to valley settlements and camps.On lower slopes, pinon-juniper andponderosa pine forests supplied woodfor fuel and building. Rocky outcropsof sandstone and limestone containedabundant deposits of fine-grained, multicolored chert used by NativeAmericans and Europeans to maketools for hunting, plant processing, andstarting fires, as well as for gunflints forflintlock rifles and pistols. Men hunteddeer and small game near the quarries,while women and children foraged foryucca, cactus, pinon nuts, and otherseeds, nuts, and berries in season. La Garita ruins, ca. 1910.


The Santa Fe River flows out of thefoothills into a valley cut through atwenty-million-year-old hilly piedmontbordering a grassy plain. Springs,arroyos, streams, and the Santa FeRiver contributed to a high water tablethat formed a swamp north and east oftoday’s downtown plaza. Over the cen-turies, this swamp and the surroundingbraided floodplain with its deep soilsand surface water first attracted hunter-gatherers and, later, Ancestral Puebloansand Hispanic settlers. Farmers culti-vated the floodplain downstream all theway to Caja del Río canyon ten mileswest of Santa Fe. In the foothills, peoplegathered wood to use for building mate-rials and fuel. They also collectedplants, such as yucca, to make fiber forclothing and hunted animals for meat.Chert, washed down from the moun-tains, supplied Ancestral Puebloanswith a valuable resource for fashioningsharp-edged tools such as knives, scrap-ers, and projectile points. South of thefoothills, juniper-covered grasslands

offered grazing for antelope and, later,cattle and sheep. In ancient times, justas today, Santa Fe’s environmentstrongly influenced where and how people lived.

Ancient PeoplesBy studying the implements, stone tools,broken pottery vessels, and architecturethat people left behind over ten thou-sand years, archaeologists can assemblea rich story about Santa Fe’s culturalhistory. This long span of time isdivided into four eras peopled by Paleoindian big game hunters, desert-adapted Archaic hunter-gatherers,Ancestral Pueblo farmer-foragers, andEuropean-descended colonists fromSpain, Mexico, and the United States.

Paleoindian Hunters

At the end of the Pleistocene era (around9500 BCE), bands of hunters roamed thevast open grasslands as they followedherds of large mammals across the

North American continent. Archaeolo-gists find evidence of these Paleoindianhunters throughout the New World.However, despite an abundance of localresources, we know of only one Pale-oindian site in the Santa Fe area.Located on an isolated butte west oftown, these early nomadic NativeAmericans left many spear points datingfrom the Clovis, Folsom, Midland,Cody, and Plainview periods (9500 to6000 BCE). From this elevated setting,these nomadic people could monitornearby watercourses for game animalssuch as bison, elk, and deer. In additionto meat, their diet consisted of fruits,nuts, seeds, and the roots of edibleplants. All such food resources could begathered from the surrounding rollingpiedmont hills and the distant alpinemeadows. This diverse landscape sup-plied everything they needed for food,shelter, clothing, and toolmaking.

Why have archaeologists found onlyone Paleoindian site in this resource-rich area? One reason may lie in the

The Santa Fe River, spring 2007. A characteristic piedmont landscape west of Santa Fe.


fact that nomadic people lived in theircamps for short periods of time and hadfew possessions, most of which wereperishable and did not preserve in opensettings. Another factor is erosion,which either erases or buries sites ofgreat age, rendering them invisible toarchaeologists. Due mostly to late Pleis-tocene climate changes, large gamemammals migrated to the Great Plains.By 6000 BCE, Paleoindian culturearound Santa Fe and throughout theSouthwest had disappeared. At aboutthis time, it was replaced by the Archaicculture (5500 BCE to 600 CE), of whicharchaeologists find abundant evidence.

Archaic Hunter-Gatherers

We describe the Archaic people of theSouthwest as hunter-gatherers becausethey lived in many environments andrelied on a full spectrum of edible andutilitarian plants and game animals forfood and clothing. As the seasonschanged, they traveled across the landin search of places with plentiful foodresources. In a single year, a band of upto twenty members might move aroundwithin a territory of thousands ofsquare miles—in a lifetime, hundreds ofthousands of square miles. They werebound by kinship and marriage and

selected their leaders according to age,skill, and knowledge. While living mostlyin isolation, they occasionally met withother bands to exchange food and infor-mation, conduct rituals, and meet poten-tial marriage partners.

Early Archaic times (approximately5500 to 3300 BCE) were dry in NewMexico with expansive grasslandsbarely able to support a hunter-gathererlifestyle. A few sites around Santa Fegive us fleeting glimpses of earlyArchaic life. I excavated one site wherea small family from this period camped,located on a wind-sheltered and warmsoutheast-facing hill slope overlookingthe middle and upper reaches of theSanta Fe River. From the camp, thefamily enjoyed easy access to plants andanimals of the piedmont hills. They leftobsidian and chert flakes and bonesplinters in a ring around a collapsedcobble-lined fire pit, evidence of having

made tools and consumed rabbit anddeer. An atlatl dart point, made frombasalt acquired while hunting and gath-ering along the Rio Grande, lay nearby,along with a hand stone (or mano) usedto process fruits and seeds. These rarelyfound small camps were the mainstay ofEarly Archaic settlement. Their scarcityis attributable to low population,patchy distribution of food resources,and the destructive effects of naturalprocesses on site preservation.

By 3000 BCE, a cooler climate and an increase in annual rain and snowspurred greater plant productivity,resulting in more abundant gamethroughout much of the Southwest,including Santa Fe. Although thesefavorable conditions did not last, theyled to increased population. From thistime forward, archaeologists find thatArchaic people often returned to thesame well-maintained camps year after

Paleoindian spear points. Left to right: Clovis,Folsom, and Plainview.

Artist’s reconstruction of an Archaic camp.


year and built substantial dwellings anddug pits for parching and roasting food.

To obtain food and critical resources,Archaic bands moved their base campsfrom one resource-gathering area toanother through the seasons. They oftensituated these camps on gentle slopesabove major arroyos affording access towater and to fuel wood from snags andfallen dead trees. Set back from river valleys, these camps provided a certainamount of seclusion from prospectivegame animals and other nearby bandsof people. Some base camps I have exca-vated took advantage of low sandstoneoutcrops for protection from the wind.

At its base camp, a family typicallylived in a small hut made from juniper and piñon boughs, brush, and mud.These easily built dwellings were dugpartly into the ground and, with aninterior diameter rarely more than 7feet across, could sleep only three orfour tightly packed family members.Most had a small interior hearth forheat and one or two small subfloor pitsfor secure storage of food or valuablegoods.

When excavating Archaic camps, wefind many clues to the life these peoplelived. Some camps, which were usedrepeatedly season after season, covermore than 5,000 square feet and con-

tain two or three bases of huts. Duringclement weather, former inhabitantscarried on many of their activities—making tools, parching grass seeds,roasting nuts, treating hides, cookingmeals, conducting ceremonies—out ofdoors. We usually recover the debrisfrom making stone tools, as well astools used to grind or pound seeds,nuts, and fruit and to scrape and shredplant fibers. We also find dense concen-trations of obsidian chips (as many astwelve thousand) from manufacturingthree or four dart points dumpedaround campsite perimeters.

The occupants of a camp dug a vari-ety of pits in the ground outside theirhouses in which to prepare food on adaily basis. During a typical season,these might number eight to ten. Someare shallow, contain fire-cracked cobbles,and are heavily burned from repeateduse. (The edges of the camps often con-tain piles of these discarded burnedrocks.) People used these pits to parchsuch foods as rice grass seeds and goose-foot (a leafy plant sometimes called“wild spinach”) or roast piñon nuts andyucca roots. Sometimes they abuttedunburned, or slightly burned, pits used

Archaeological remains of an Archaic hut base.

Remains of three types of roasting pits after excavation.


to warm already cooked foods. In other,larger pits, located farther away from thecamps, they roasted meat, such as veni-son. Camps that were repeatedly occupiedmay contain up to forty roasting pits.

We assume that women and childrenforaged daily for edible plants up to adistance of three to five miles fromhome. Such foraging activities left littlein the way of tools or other detectibleevidence on the surrounding landscape.Men and some women staged multidaytrips in the mountains to hunt game,such as elk and bighorn sheep. At theirhunting camps, they butchered thegame and dried the meat for easiertransport back to their homes. We rec-ognize their hunting camps by the accu-mulations of tools and waste chips ofobsidian, chert, or quartzite found inthem, along with one or two hearths.

In the Santa Fe area, the Archaic wayof life continued with some variationuntil 800 or 900 CE. We now recognizethat this robust, resilient, and successfulway of life, which lasted for six thou-sand years, forms an important part ofSanta Fe history.

Ancestral Pueblo Farmer-Foragers

First Farmers in the Santa Fe Region. Insouthern Arizona, corn cultivation wasunder way by 2500 BCE, and on theColorado Plateau it started between1600 and 1200 BCE. Hunter-gatherers inthe northern Rio Grande region, on theother hand, did not adopt farming to asignificant degree until after 500 CE

(with a few exceptions, such as in theAlbuquerque area and around JemezCave). Archaeologists attribute this lateoccurrence to a number of factors,including unsuitable temperature andrainfall patterns and an abundant anddiverse ecology that forestalled hunter-gatherer’s reliance on domesticated

plants. In addition, the low regionalpopulation allowed people to movefreely to food sources as seasons and climate changed.

Until recently, archaeologistsbelieved that farmers moved into theSanta Fe area from elsewhere after 850CE. Excavations I directed at the SantaFe Civic Center in 2006 may changethat view. At this well-watered settingwith deep soil, we uncovered large, deepbell-shaped storage pits with burnedinteriors. The pits, which dated tobetween 400 and 600 CE, contained theremains of charred corn and squash andcorn pollen, irrefutable evidence ofSanta Fe’s earliest farmer-foragers.

The closest early farming communityto Santa Fe that we know of is in thePeña Blanca area at the confluence ofthe Santa Fe River and the Rio Grande.In 1998, I was part of a team from theUniversity of New Mexico and Museumof New Mexico whose excavations illu-minated the lives of these first farmers.We learned that around 750 CE, Pueblopeople established a farming commu-nity in this location consisting of a clus-

ter of six residences spread across a mileof low river terraces. Each extendedfamily had access to prime farmland.

The inhabitants of this small settle-ment lived in subterranean pithouses(about 14 by 22 feet in diameter),which had upright posts that supporteddomed roofs made from cottonwoodlimbs and branches, reed mats, andmud. People entered them by way of aladder reaching down an open hatch inthe roof. The floors of the houses hadcentral fire pits to provide warmth,smaller cobble-lined hearths for lightcooking, and small floor pits and wallniches to store daily food, personalitems, and tools. The air intake for eachhouse consisted of a floor-level, hori-zontal tunnel 3 or 4 feet long that wentthrough the south or east wall to a ver-tical airshaft. The air outlet was thehatched roof entry. Floor space was suf-ficient to accommodate four to eightpeople comfortably; however, mostdaily activities occurred outdoors.

Following a harvest, families storedcorn kernels and cobs in large, deep,bell-shaped pits placed near their home.One or two storage pits, which weresometimes burned on their interior toharden the walls, held enough corn tofeed a family for a year. Similar toArchaic people, household membersexcavated a wide range of earthen androck-lined pits to process, prepare, andcook foodstuffs. Using local clay, theyfashioned rough-surfaced jars for tem-porary storage and cooking and madebowls in which to prepare, serve, andeat their meals. Cooking corn inceramic pots enhanced its nutritionalvalue by making starch more digestible.Domesticated beans and squash wereimportant to the diet as well. To obtainmeat protein, they hunted rabbits,squirrels, prairie dogs, gophers, and theoccasional deer around their gardens.

Excavated bell-shaped storage pit dating from400–600 CE at the Civic Center site in down-town Santa Fe.


We think the residents stayed in theirvillage during most of the year; how-ever, they also traveled to huntinggrounds for game animals that did notventure into their fields. Most ritualactivities, we believe, were carried outby members of a given household. Able-bodied individuals made periodic tripsto communities south along the RioGrande Valley and up the Jemez Riverto trade, exchange news (information),find marriage partners, and participatein communal rituals of renewal andblessing. The Peña Blanca communitythrived until 900 CE, when the farmersleft and did not return.

They Came to Stay. Ancestral farmersestablished permanent communities inthe Tesuque and Santa Fe river valleysbetween 850 and 1000 CE. In Santa Fe,they settled on Fort Marcy Hill and itslower terraces. Living in pithouses, theydepended mostly on agricultural har-vests for food; however, they also wentup into the mountains to quarry stoneand hunt large game. In addition, theyforaged widely in the foothills to obtainpiñon nuts and seeds. Potters now mademore elaborately decorated black-on-white bowls, water jars, and canteens.Archaeologists have named these pot-tery types Red Mesa and Kwahe’e

Black-on-white. The unpainted cookingand storage jars exhibit banded, finger-tip-indented, and tooled exterior pat-terns on the neck and shoulder. Later,this decoration covered the whole ves-sel. Because villagers expected to stayfor years, rather than seasons, theyinvested more energy and creativity inpersonal and household items. Thismore settled life allowed them todomesticate turkeys for food and feath-ers and keep surprisingly large numbersof dogs as work animals and pets. Dailyactivities and rituals revolved aroundhouseholds. Later on, after 1100 CE,these Puebloans built communal reli-gious structures, such as kivas.

The First Pueblos. By the early 1100s,Santa Fe’s farmers moved to the pied-mont hills north of the Santa Fe River,where they built homes with puddled-adobe walls. The Arroyo Negro site,located three miles west of the plaza, isa good example. Over the course offifty years, its inhabitants erected sevenbuildings in this community, each ofwhich had between two and twenty-fiverectangular rooms averaging 10 feetlong by 7 feet wide and about 7 feethigh. Like the Peña Blanca dwellings,people entered a main room from theroof. They accessed other interiorrooms through doors. Rooms used forliving and cooking had hearths and afew subfloor storage pits. In otherrooms they stored harvest surpluses;raw materials, such as yucca fibers; personal adornments fashioned of shell,bone, and stone; clothing and featherblankets; and other personal posses-sions used in rituals and ceremonies.Small houses of two to four roomsaccommodated single families of threeto eight individuals. One building had a twenty-five-room linear arrangement,two or three rooms wide—it could have

Plan view of one site in the farming community in Peña Blanca, s outhwest of Santa Fe, with pit-house-drawing insert.


housed thirty to fifty people related bymarriage and kinship. Arroyo NegroPueblo had several kivas that werearchitecturally similar to pithouses ofan earlier period: central hearths, venti-lation systems, and roof entries. Theirfew floor pits, apparently, had a moresymbolic than utilitarian function. Inkivas, residents participated in rituals orceremonies that renewed and reinforcedtheir place in the social, natural, andsacred worlds. This roomblock/kiva layout became the design model for thelarge villages built after 1300 CE.

As population in the region grew,residents of Arroyo Negro and its con-temporary villages chose to live closertogether. Strength in numbers increasedthe ability of each community to controlits prime farmland. Inhabitants of eachvillage participated in local and long-distance trade, some communal rituals,marriage, and shared hunting and gath-ering territories with other local com-munities, including people living in theTesuque Valley. The inhabitants of vil-lages in the greater Santa Fe area tradedwith one another and sustained rela-tionships with people as far away as the Socorro and Chupadero areas to the south and the Chaco, Chuska, andMesa Verde regions of the ColoradoPlateau. Their access to mines in theCerrillos hills and to the plains providedthem, respectively, with turquoise and

buffalo meat (and maybe buffalo robes)to barter for shells, exotic bird feathers,and lapidary materials (such as jet) withdistant tribes. These long-distance rela-tionships proved critical to people livingin the San Juan Basin as deterioratingenvironmental and social conditionsforced them to migrate to Santa Fe andsurrounding areas after 1150 CE.

Big and Bigger Villages. In the early tomid-1200s, families began leaving theirsettlements, which had been founded acentury before, and moving to newlocations on the floodplains of theSanta Fe River and its southern tribu-taries. There they built new villages,some of which grew into rectangular or C-shaped blocks of multistoried,puddled-adobe buildings that encircledplazas with kivas. From tree-ring dat-ing, we know that this amazing popula-tion growth and change in villagelayout occurred in stages as settlementsgrew from within, as well as throughthe influx of uprooted households from the Colorado Plateau and its margins.These large villages with their long his-tories have been of great interest toarchaeologists because they are criticalto understanding the origin and devel-opment of modern Pueblo Indian villages. Since 1932, archaeologistsexcavated portions of three ruins: Pindi Pueblo, Arroyo Hondo Pueblo,

and El Pueblo de Santa Fe.Today, all that remains of Pindi

Pueblo is a cluster of low mounds cutby residential roads. The site is locatedon the north side of the Santa Fe Riverin the village of Agua Fria about sixmiles downstream from the Santa FePlaza. Agua Fria is named for the coldsprings that attracted Pueblo and Span-ish settlers alike. Excavated betweenDecember 1932 and June 1933 by Lab-oratory of Anthropology archaeologistsStanley Stubbs and W. S. Stallings Jr.,the project was a cooperative effortwith the Civil Works Administrationrelief program during the Depression.The archaeologists and their hardy crew excavated more than one hundredrooms, recovered tens of thousands ofartifacts, and collected tree-ring samplesthat documented the pueblo’s 150-yearoccupation history and served to firmlydate decorated pottery types namedSanta Fe Black-on-white and GalisteoBlack-on-white. Archaeologists still relyon this ceramic chronology.

Pindi was first settled in the early1200s by one or two families who livedin pithouses. Between 1250 and 1310,the settlement grew into a village oftwenty to thirty puddled-adobe roomsoccupied by three or four related fami-lies. The inhabitants built this smallhamlet in a style and form similar to thatof Arroyo Negro Pueblo, with a linear

Santa Fe Black-on-white bowls.


arrangement of two rows of one- andtwo-story rooms. The east-facing room-block faced three circular kivas, wherethe families conducted seasonal rituals.Between 1320 to 1350, the village grewto two hundred rooms arranged in rowsof one to four rooms that were one tothree stories high. Housing more thanone hundred people, these roomblockswere built in a rectangular layout form-ing interior plazas that held D-shapedsurface kivas and circular subterraneankivas. The new and old kiva formsaccommodated founding and immigrantfamily ritual needs. The villagers heldtheir seasonal community functions inthe open, but secluded, outdoor plazas.

Daily life at Pindi probably differedlittle from that of Arroyo Negro Puebloexcept that the need and competition forfarmland, water, and other importantresources may have increased villagetensions. People farmed the floodplainsand fields, covering more area than everbefore. As soils became depleted, fieldsproduced less, and villagers had to culti-vate increasingly more distant fields,possibly encroaching on another com-munity’s lands or competing with new-comers. Now, domesticated animalsbegan to play a more important part insubsistence. Inhabitants raised turkeysin well-made wattle-and-daub pens intheir village plazas. They prized turkey

feathers, which they wove into warmblankets and also used as ritual adorn-ment and to trade for scarce commodi-ties. Archaeologists find open-air siteswith hearths and fire pits three to fivemiles from these villages. We think vil-lagers were foraging for edible plants,fruits, nuts, and seeds in these areas andhunting game. Near these huntingcamps, we also found the remains ofkilns and fired but shattered Santa FeBlack-on-white bowls and a dipper.This surprised me as I had expected thatpeople fired most of their pottery nearerto their village. The kilns consisted ofoval-shaped, shallow pits lined withcobbles on which the pots rested. Dur-ing firings, the potters covered these pitkilns with a dome of juniper and pinonboughs. Temperatures could haveexceeded 800 degrees centigrade. Whilenot unheard of, kilns so far from thevillage suggest that some villagers vol-untarily or forcibly acted outside of nor-mally expected ways.

Dendrochronological studies indicatethat Pindi’s residents left around 1360CE; we are unsure where they went.Archaeologists speculate that they leftbecause of unsafe buildings, poor sani-tation, or disputes among residents thatwere resolved by moving away.

Pindi Pueblo had two neighbors:Arroyo Hondo Pueblo, ten miles to thesoutheast, and El Pueblo de Santa Fe. In addition to being contemporaneous,these three pueblos shared many simi-larities, including building constructionstyles, the presence of circular subter-ranean and surface D-shaped kivas,Santa Fe and Wiyo Black-on-white pot-tery, and a heavy reliance on farmingsupplemented by foraging and hunting.

Arroyo Hondo was partly excavatedby Nels Nelson in 1915 and by theSchool of American Research from1970 to 1974. As at Pindi, Arroyo

Drawing of Arroyo Negro site plan.


Hondo started small, but between 1310and 1330 it grew to around one thou-sand rooms. These were contained intwenty-four one- and two-story room-blocks enclosing ten plazas in whichwere four kivas 12 to 24 feet in diame-ter. A fifth kiva (33 feet in diameter),not enclosed within a roomblock, mayhave served greater community ceremo-nial needs. At its zenith, Arroyo HondoPueblo was the largest pueblo in theSanta Fe area, attaining a population ofabout eight hundred residents, a num-ber four to five times greater than PindiPueblo.

One theory holds that ArroyoHondo Pueblo housed groups of peoplefrom diverse geographical areas andcultural traditions. By building exten-sive roomblocks around plazas, eachgroup had privacy and also was able tomonitor who came and went and tomaintain its own public space in whichto hold ritual and community events.Ultimately, Arroyo Hondo residents mayhave suffered negative consequences

from such rapid growth; analysis ofskeletal remains have shown that manyhad poor health. The catastrophic deathof eight villagers combined with thesudden closing of one kiva suggests thatArroyo Hondo experienced more severeinternal conflict than its neighbors. Asat Pindi, Arroyo Hondo villagers movedaway by 1360 when decreased rainfallreduced food availability and exacer-bated social stress. Where they went isunclear. However, the Arroyo Hon-doans had long maintained relationswith villages in the Galisteo Basin; per-haps they took refuge there. The villagereformed between 1370 and 1420,when some villagers or their descen-dants returned to build two hundredrooms in ten roomblocks on top of theearlier buildings. At a time when mostvillagers in the northern Rio Grandeused glaze-decorated or biscuit wareblack-white pottery, Arroyo Hondo res-idents continued to use mostly Santa FeBlack-on-white pottery, suggesting thatthey were a socially distinct group.

El Pueblo de Santa Fe is less well-known than Arroyo Hondo or Pindipueblos. Described by Adolph Bandelier

in the 1880s, Alfred E. Kidder in the1910s, and Harry P. Mera in the 1920s,its low mounds remained visible untilthe building of Santa Fe High School inthe same location in 1934. The village,and especially its aboveground struc-tures, sustained considerable damage asa result of urban development in down-town Santa Fe up until 2005. Recentexcavations by the Office of Archaeo-logical Studies revealed occupationfrom 1250 to 1425, six hundred yearsafter the early farmers. As at PindiPueblo, its first residents lived in pit-houses but soon built and moved intopuddled-adobe houses. Four survivingcircular kivas resemble those of ArroyoHondo and Pindi in their size, orienta-tion, floor and wall pits, and niches.Archaeologists collected archaeomag-netic samples that show a sequence ofoccupations through the late 1200s,middle 1300s, and early 1400s.Although we do not know the fullextent of El Pueblo de Santa Fe, we sur-mise from the large number of outdoorstorage and food-processing pits that itwas equal or larger in size than PindiPueblo. Whereas Arroyo Hondo Puebloresidents showed signs of nutritionalstress, most of El Pueblo de Santa Fe’spopulation appears to have beenhealthy. When a twelve-year droughtending in 1425 forced El Pueblo deSanta Fe and Arroyo Hondo villagers to leave, their strong ties to villages inthe Galisteo and Tewa basins offerednew opportunities to carry on.

After 1425, indigenous travelerspassed through Santa Fe for 185 yearsbut maintained no permanent settle-ments. As villages grew in the Tewa andGalisteo basins, Santa Fe’s villagesmelted back into the earth. When donPedro de Peralta arrived in 1610 andlaid out the Villa de Santa Fe, he foundonly mounds.

Archaeological excavations at Pindi Puebloshowing outlines of turkey pens under the plaza.

An excavated pottery kiln west of Santa Fe. Notedipper on right edge.


Historic-Period Colonists from Spain,Mexico, and the United States

A Villa on the Edge of Empire. In 1599,under the leadership of Juan de Oñate,Spanish colonists arrived at OhkayOwingeh at the confluence of the RioGrande and Chama rivers. Eleven yearslater, Governor Pedro de Peralta led thefailed settlement to a low rise betweenthe Santa Fe River and Arroyo Mascarasfloodplains adjacent to a swamp. Thiswas the site of the future city of SantaFe. Peralta laid out a quadrangle-shapedplaza to be surrounded by governmentbuildings and a parroquia. The casasreales (later known as the Palace of theGovernors) had generously sized roomswith ornate adobe-brick floors thatreflected the governor’s high status inthe colony. As for the town’s early pri-vate residences, they were modestdwellings with cobble foundations,adobe walls, small gardens, and outdoorkitchens. Their occupants furnishedthem with rugs, tapestries, and furnitureof wood and leather. Most clusteredaround the plaza for safety, but small

ranches, granted to citizens in exchangefor military service, extended down theSanta Fe River. The colonists built irri-gation or acequia systems on both sidesof the river to distribute water to house-holds and farms. The remnants of theseearly ditches, which archaeologists havefound in the plaza and Palace of theGovernors and on Santa Fe’s east side,attest to the complex irrigation networknecessary for raising Old World nativeplants, including wheat, barley, lentils,grapes, and fruits, as well as corn,beans, and squash. The early colonistsalso kept small herds of sheep, goats,cows, pigs, and chickens.

Archaeologists rarely find physicalevidence of early colonial residences;instead, working in such sites as thePalace of the Governors, Cathedral Park,Sena Plaza, and San Miguel Chapel, wehave unearthed pits filled with butcheredanimal bone, charred seeds, grains, andfruit pits. We also have unearthed frag-ments of serving bowls (hemisphericalplain and decorated), cooking jars ofindigenous forms, European-style soupbowls, plates, platters, cups, candlestick

holders, and condiment containers, allmade by Pueblo potters living in theGalisteo and Tewa basins. Intermingledwith these artifacts have been a fewsherds of Mexican majolica and Chineseporcelain, which were brought to SantaFe on triannual caravans from the southfollowing the Camino Real. These fewimported items were often inherited or recycled when broken before beingdiscarded.

The Pueblo Rebellion of 1680 and theResettlement of Santa Fe after 1692.Joseph P. Sánchez relates in chapter 3that longstanding grievances overoppressive Spanish rule led to a success-ful rebellion by the Pueblo Indians andtheir allies in August of 1680. With theSpaniards in exile in El Paso del Norte,the victorious Indians destroyed most of Santa Fe and its surrounding settle-ments and built their own village withinthe downtown quadrangle. Historicalaccounts from Diego de Vargas, whoreconquered the villa in 1693, describeit as four stories high with two plazasand kivas and housing one thousandpeople. Below the Palace of the Gover-nors, archaeologist Cordelia Snowuncovered the foundations of smallrooms, human burials, fire pits, andstorage pits left by the Pueblo residentsof 1680–1693. The Spaniards demol-ished this pueblo in 1699; except forSnow’s work, conclusive evidence of a Revolt-period pueblo has eludedarchaeologists working in downtownSanta Fe.

Returning Spanish citizens reclaimedtheir properties, and an influx of newfamilies revitalized the villa. Throughoutthe eighteenth century, neighborhoodsgrew up around newly built and resur-rected churches, including La Castrense,Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe, and SanMiguel Chapel. Tree-ring dating of roof

View of a portion of Arroyo Hondo Pueblo during excavations in 1971.


beams shows that some eighteenth-century houses still survive in the Barriode Analco and along Canyon Road.

The Palace of the Governors and thePresidio (a military complex) dominatedthe north side of the plaza. My 2002–2007 excavations behind the Palaceexposed buried cobble foundationsfrom adobe-walled barracks and store-rooms used by soldiers stationed inSanta Fe. We also uncovered three rowsof adobe buildings divided into 25-footby 20-foot rooms with corner fireplacesand compacted dirt floors. The poorsoldiers living in these spartan accom-modations had few imported table-wares or luxury goods and relied onPueblo-made tableware and utilitarianpottery. Behind the barracks, we found a large volume of sheep, goat, and cattlebone and a circular butcher shop thatserved the many people who lived andtook their meals in the Palace in the1700s.

Santa Fe had many prosperous fami-lies. At the Civic Center site, archaeol-ogist Stephen Lentz excavated theremains of a large residence, which isshown on the 1766–1768 map of SantaFe created by José de Urrutia (see p. 49).Only a small portion of its cobble foun-dation remained, the rest having beendemolished in 1789 to build a new pre-sidio. However, its affluent residents left pits filled with burned animal bonesand pottery made by Pueblo Indians, aswell as assorted Mexican, European,and Oriental dishes. Lentz also foundthe remains of a well, corrals, and evenmetal-working facilities. The family’sprosperity rivaled that of the governor;undoubtedly, they were regular guests at his table in the nearby Palace.

Southwest of the plaza, residencesand subsistence farms lined the CaminoReal (today’s Agua Fria Street) after themiddle 1700s. As Santa Fe grew, the

Spanish expanded the city’s acequiasystem to distribute water to theimmediate area and miles downriveras well. Artifacts recovered from anewly discovered residential site inthis rural area should provide newinsights into Santa Fe society andoffer interesting comparisons withthose excavated at the Palace of theGovernors and the Civic Centerhacienda.

The Santa Fe Trail and a Territory inthe United States. Dramatic social andeconomic changes followed the open-ing of the Santa Fe Trail. Merchantsbecame successful as they gainedaccess to US manufactured goods and took advantage of a new marketfor New Mexico’s products. Initially,much of the new wealth passed throughSanta Fe; consequently, archaeologistsfind little evidence of widespread pros-perity. Many Santa Fe Trail ruts stillexist from this time period, meander-ing across the southeast neighborhoodclose to major modern roads.

General Stephen Kearny and the USArmy of the West occupied the Palaceand presidio barracks and corrals in1846 (see chapter 7). For the firsttwenty years, the military used the old presidio buildings, adding glass win-dows, new fireplaces, and cobble floorsin some. By 1868, they had rebuilt orrenovated all buildings in what becamethe Fort Marcy military reservation.The territorial governors lived in thePalace, which was surrounded by themilitary installation. North of thePalace, the recent excavations at theCivic Center site uncovered the lime-stone foundations of officers andenlisted men’s quarters, as well as thepost hospital, the hospital steward’squarters, and rock-lined privies andwells. We also found hundreds of other

US artifacts, such as bottles, shoes,boots, dishes, dolls, some medical appa-ratus, and a variety of other personalitems. They all reflect the burgeoningconsumerism that accompanied militarylife and the completion of the railroadin 1879.

The Railroad and New Mexico Statehood.Leading up to statehood, major changestook place in Santa Fe. Many old adobebuildings were torn down and replaced

Tewa red soup plate.

Historic-period refuse pit excavated behind thePalace of the Governors.


by brick and frame Victorian-style resi-dences. In 1884, Bishop Lamy com-pleted construction of St. FrancisCathedral, using sandstone quarried inLamy, New Mexico, and transported toSanta Fe by the rail line that was com-pleted in 1880. Speculators subdividedland at the railhead and sold lots to theAtchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railwayfor its station, water tank, enginehouses, and turnstile. When workers

were constructing the Community Bankon Guadalupe Street in 1990, they weresurprised to uncover the long-buriedmasonry roundhouse, which now isincorporated into the building. Excava-tions at the Santa Fe Railyard alsouncovered the massive sandstone foun-dation for a water storage tank andpumphouse, the engine house founda-tions, impressions of track beds, hugequantities of cinders, and other build-

ings associated with railroad activities.With the railroad came huge quantitiesof manufactured goods that are found atterritorial period sites large and small.When New Mexico achieved statehoodin 1912, Santa Fe once again became thedistant political and economic center fora country and people defined by theirdeep-rooted traditions of independenceand self-reliance.

As archaeological investigations inSanta Fe continue, I expect new findingsto reinforce some old knowledge andchallenge other long-held concepts. Bystriving to better understand Santa Fe’spast, we honor the people whose ten-thousand-year-old story we tell. At thesame time, we must guard against thetemptation to build monuments totruths that may be only a shovel’s depthaway from change.

Acknowledgments

The author acknowledges all the arch-aeologists who have contributed to agreater and richer understanding ofSanta Fe’s past. More specifically, Iwould like to thank Stewart Peckham,David Snow, Cordelia Snow, CherieScheick, Janet McVickar, Jason Shapiro,James Snead, my Office of Archaeologi-cal Studies colleagues, and, of course,Frances Levine, who authored the SantaFe archaeology essay in the 1989 vol-ume, blazing the trail that I followed.

The foundations of a water storage tank west of Guadalupe Street.

Documents

CHAPTER ONE Ancient Santa Fesarweb.org/media/files/sar_press_santa_fe_history_of_an...At Pecos, Cieneguilla, and San Cristóbal pueblos, all within twenty-five miles of Santa Fe, they