Pueblos ('towns', 'villages', so called on account of file peculiar style of
compact permanent settlements of these people, as distinguished from temporary
camps or scattered rancherias of less substantial houses). A term applied by the
Spaniards and adopted by English-speaking people to designate all the Indians
who lived or are living in permanent stone or adobe houses built into compact
villages in south Colorado and central Utah, and in New Mexico, Arizona, and the
adjacent Mexican territory, and extended sometimes to include the settlements of
such tribes as the Pima and the
Papago, who led an agricultural life. The Pueblo
people of history comprise the Tanoan,
Keresan (Queres), and
Zuņian linguistic
families of New Mexico, and the Hopi, of
Shoshonean affinity, in north east
Arizona. These are distributed as follows, the tribes or villages noted being
only those now existent or that recently have become extinct:
Habitat.-The Pueblo tribes of the historical period have been confined
to the area extending from north east Arizona to the Rio Pecos in New Mexico
(and, intrusively, into west Kansas), and from Taos on the Rio Grande, New
Mexico, in the north, to a few miles below El Paso, Texas, in the south. The
ancient domain of Pueblo peoples, however, covered a much greater territory,
extending approximately from west Arizona to the Pecos and into the Texas
panhandle, and from central Utah and south Colorado indefinitely southward into
Mexico, where the remains of their habitations have not yet been clearly
distinguished from those of the northern Aztec.
