To The Pueblos
On this day, we went to visit the Pueblo Ruins at the Salinas Pueblo Missions National Monument. Wow, so many monuments. I also managed to slam my toe in a car door when we were leaving, so that was a nice start to my day. Most of the ruins that you can actually see in the area are of Missions built by Spanish Conquistadors, but there are some remnants of the Pueblo’s living quarters, some that were constructed as early as the 1300’s. The different ruin sites are all along the Abo Pass Trail, a road that was originally a Native trade route. We first stopped at the visitor’s centre in Mountainair to look at some maps and to watch a video on the history of
the ruins. Apparently there have been natives living in the area for 20 000 years and the Pueblo people first arrived around 7000 years ago. The adobe homes that the Pueblos were known for we being built as early as the 1100’s. They were all doing fine and dandy and then came along the Spanish Conquistadors, killing off the natives with their diseases and harsh behaviour, forcing the Pueblos to work for them and driving them to starvation. Within one hundred years of the Spanish Invasion, the Pueblos had been driven
clean out of the area after being punished for their culture for one hundred years. Really nice of the Spaniards, isn’t it. After we watched the video, we hopped back in the truck to begin our journey, beginning with Abó, which was very windy. It have been a rather large community that had been thriving until the Franciscans arrived in 1622 and started trying to convert every living person within arm’s reach to Christianity. Scarcely fifty years later, the Abó people up and left, leaving us with a crumbling mission and piles of dirt where the adobes used to stand. There were lots of signs telling the history of the area, about how the natives were used to build the buildings and other
such trivia. We also learned about Kiva’s, underground rooms where the Pueblos would hold religious rituals. After the invasion of the conquistadors, the natives were forbidden from practicing their religion, as it was deemed demonic, so they hid Kiva’s inside the missions themselves. Rebellion. The second ruin was Gran Quivira, or Las Humanas, the largest pueblo of the three along Abo
Pass. There was a half-mile long hike that looped around and came up to the ruins, and I assume it allowed you to see more things, but my smushed toe was hurting quite a lot by this point so I opted just to take the shortcut straight to the ruins. There were a lot more buildings here. I went in the mission first while the other three were on their hike. It was pretty big and a maze of complicated rooms, but I managed to get myself in and out without getting lost and without stumbling into any snake holes, so we’re all good here. By the time I walked a little farther up the hill to get to the adobe ruin, which had hardly any wall remaining, the family had made their
way up the hill. There were lots of small hidden Kiva’s within the adobe and an even larger one outside the house that belonged to the friar. The larger one was not hidden, which leads archeologists to wonder about the relationship between Christianity and the religion of the native’s because there are a couple Kiva’s that seemed to have been used by the Christians as well as the Pueblos. At the time the pueblo was populated, the friar’s house was used as a church, as the mission I walked through at the beginning was never fully completed. The pueblo was abandoned before it could be finished. After we stopped at the Gran Quivira visitor’s centre to get Isaac his Junior Ranger stuff and to look at the small museum of artifacts they had, we only had about half and hour until the park closed and one more pueblo to see. We rushed over there and took a quick look around the Quarai mission, which was the most massive of the three and entirely built by women. Nice. We then took the scenic route back to the campground, through the mountain pass, although a bit slow. Worth it, all the same. Peace out m8s.
