Zuni River valley and the surrounding Zuni Indians and their ancestors

[ERIC SHARP]

Zuni Prehistory

'Zuni' in Thayer's Marvels of the New West, p. 189. Image F595.T38 1891 courtesy of Cline Library Special Collections, Northern Arizona University.
The Zuni Indians and their ancestors have lived in the Zuni River valley and the surrounding region for more than 1,500 years [location map]. Contemporary Zuni Indians are the direct descendants of the prehistoric Pueblo people who settled the region sometime prior to A.D. 400. Mirroring the developments that took place throughout the region occupied by prehistoric Pueblo Peoples, the first settlements in the area were comprised of agriculturalists living in pithouses of various types. Later above-ground masonry structures (pueblos) were comprised of small, dispersed room blocks associated with subterranean pit structures or kivas. By A.D. 1000, the population in the Zuni area began to construct larger settlements oriented around Chacoan great houses with associated circular great kivas. Throughout this period, the occupation spans of most settlements were relatively brief, and many new villages were constructed over a wide area, perhaps in response to variability in climate and the gradually decreasing productivity of agricultural strategies.
As the prehistoric population of the Zuni region gradually increased in size through internal population growth and immigration, the mobility of communities became constrained. Each community required an agricultural area, presumably near its habitation, and an increasingly larger sustaining area for resource procurement. As the number of communities increased, the amount of available agricultural land decreased, and new settlements adversely impacted the ecology of the sustaining areas used by previously established communities. Regional packing of population into a finite area greatly diminished the ability to expand or maintain the settlement system, leading to a major change in the form and distribution of settlements.
In the mid-thirteenth century, a major shift occurred in the settlement patterns of the Zuni area. The occupation of virtually all small pueblos was relinquished and fewer, much larger, plaza-oriented settlements were founded in areas where more intensive agriculture was possible. In the drainage of the Zuni River alone, more than 37 of these large villages were occupied between A.D. 1250 and 1540, incorporating an estimated 10,000 rooms. Initially, many of the large pueblos in the Zuni area were only inhabited for relatively brief intervals, as short as 20 to 30 years. As the occupation of one pueblo was relinquished, another was founded somewhere else in the drainage of Zuni River. The settlement pattern in the late prehistoric era thus entailed the occupation of 8 to 12 large pueblo villages at any one time. Archaeologists have suggested various explanations for the relatively brief occupation spans of these large settlements, including the development of new forms of social organization needed to integrate large numbers of people living in dense settlements, climatic fluctuations that made the concentration of labor in larger villages advantageous with respect to more intensive agriculture, or an increase in the incidence of prehistoric warfare. Regardless of the precise set of causes, there was a trend through time toward the occupation of fewer, much larger villages located in the lower elevations of the Zuni River.

View of Ojo Caliente, one of the Zuni farming villages. Photo taken in 1979 by Barbara Mills.
By about A.D. 1450, a series of communities was established in the lower Zuni River valley that continued to be occupied into the historic period. These developments were accompanied by a relinquishment of habitation in other areas in the drainage of the Upper Little Colorado River. By the end of the prehistoric era, a Zuni settlement system had emerged that entailed the occupation of a few, very large villages in a core area of habitation that contained the best agricultural land in the region. This core area of settlement was surrounded by a much larger uninhabited region used for resource procurement. A similar development of settlement patterns occurred in the neighboring Acoma and Hopi areas, and by the onset of the historic period the only occupied villages in the Western Pueblo region were the Zuni, Acoma, and Hopi pueblos.
Spanish Contact

Zuni villages occupied in 1540
In A.D. 1540 the first Spanish Entrada in the Southwest encountered the Zuni Indians living in six or seven large pueblos along a 14-mile stretch of the Zuni River Valley. These villages were situated on elevated landforms above the floodplain, such as low hills, ridges, or mesa tops. They were also located on or adjacent to the more fertile agricultural soils in the Zuni area, in positions to take advantage of abundant water resources at springs or at confluences of major drainages. The documentary record suggests that the Zuni had a successful and well-established agricultural economy.
The arrival of the Spaniards initiated a long sequence of events that eventually disrupted the Zuni’s trading patterns, land use, and settlement system. The greatest initial impact was a dramatic decline in the Zuni population (see figure below). The Zuni had no immunity to the new diseases introduced by the Europeans, and the epidemics took a devastating toll. This population decline, along with other factors, required a reorganization of Zuni society and land use.

Zuni population from 1540 A.D. to 1988. Data from Hart (1991)
The Spaniards introduced new items of material culture to the Zuni, including important new cultigens like wheat and peaches and domesticated livestock, most notably sheep, horses, burros, and cattle. As a result, the Zuni were able to exploit the environment in new ways to adjust to the changing sociopolitical conditions of the Southwest. The grazing of sheep and cattle on distant ranges provided the Zuni with a new way to harvest the biomass of the sustaining area, converting grass into useful products (meat, wool, hides) that could be herded on the hoof back to the Zuni villages for use and consumption. Horses and burros increased mobility and made it easier to transport crops and other items. The incorporation of livestock into the Zuni economy made it feasible to undertake agriculture and other subsistence activities at a greater distance from residential settlements.
During the seventeenth century there was a decline in the number of occupied villages. The reduction of population, political pressure from the Spaniards, and raiding from the Navajo and Apache all contributed to attrition in the number of occupied settlements. Violence became a regular part of the social environment as the Zuni defended their land and resources from encroachment from other groups and resisted Spanish attempts to suppress their culture and religion. The Zunis joined with other Pueblos in August of 1680 in the historic Pueblo Revolt which succeeded in driving the Spaniards out of New Mexico. Documentary evidence indicates that the Zuni fled to the top of the Dowa Yalanne mesa and prepared for defense. Between 1680 and 1692 the Zuni built and maintained a large settlement that incorporated many pueblo room blocks on the mesa top, an area of less than 250 ha (617 acres). Since it did not contain enough land to support the entire Zuni population in 1680, there can be no doubt that the Zuni continued to farm and graze livestock in the valleys below throughout the period of the Pueblo revolt.
The village on Dowa Yalanne was pivotal in the development of historic settlement patterns. It is the first village in which the whole Zuni population gathered into a single settlement. Although it is unlikely that the contact period villages were totally abandoned, apparently every Zuni family maintained a residence on top of Dowa Yalanne that could be used for refuge when the Spaniards returned. The mesa top was also a position defensible against the hostile attacks of the Apaches.
In 1692, Diego de Varga, the Spanish general in charge of the "reconquest," entered the village peacefully, bestowed absolution, and convinced the Zuni to relinquish the occupation of Dowa Yalanne. Rather than reoccupy their multiple pueblos, the entire tribe coalesced settlement into a permanently occupied village at Halona:wa on the north bank of the Zuni River. Following this event, Halona:wa became known as the Zuni Pueblo.
In the eighteenth century, the Zuni developed a new land-use system that entailed the seasonal occupation of a variety of small settlements in satellite relationship to the single, permanently occupied village at Zuni Pueblo. These seasonally occupied settlements were used to support grazing and agricultural activities distributed throughout the area formerly occupied with full-time residential villages. By using seasonally occupied settlements the reduced Zuni population was able to maintain a large community with complex social organization at Zuni Pueblo and still benefit from the most fertile farmland and copious springs during the growing season. The settlement patterns of the eighteenth century were also influenced by Navajo and Apache raids. Zuni Pueblo was built into a multistoried fortress, and the outlying, seasonally occupied settlements were located on elevated landforms that could be more easily defended than villages on the valley bottom.
During the eighteenth century, the villages that had been abandoned as residential locations were reused as "sheep camps," facilities used by herders who camped on the range while they tended livestock. Sheep camps functioned in the livestock industry as basic support stations that supplied provisions to herders grazing livestock on grasslands far from Zuni Pueblo. The importance of livestock in the eighteenth-century Zuni economy is emphasized by the fact that, in 1779, the Zuni were grazing 15,736 sheep, a sizable livestock industry by New Mexico standards of that period.
Apache and Navajo raiding led to the establishment of sheep camps which were "refuge sites," safe areas with difficult access and associated with hidden corrals and small room blocks. These areas were situated along ridges and on the benches of canyons throughout the Zuni river valley and tributary drainages. Other refuge sites, sometimes referred to as "peach orchard villages," were established in part for peach orchard farming in areas of sandy soil that occurred at the bases and on the sides of mesas in the Zuni River valley. They represented the exploitation of a new topographic setting for agriculture in the Zuni area, one made possible by the assimilation of new cultigens in the subsistence system. The peach orchard villages were the largest of the seasonally occupied settlements in the eighteenth-century land–use system.
The Mexican and American Periods
The basic settlement pattern entailing occupation of a single permanent residential village at Zuni Pueblo with use of a number of seasonally occupied satellite settlements continued into the Mexican and American periods. Archaeological evidence in the form of tree-ring dates from the farming villages of Nutria and Ojo Caliente indicates that there was increased construction at these settlements during the Mexican period. At Ojo Caliente much of this construction occurred on the bench above the valley bottom in a location that was more defensible than subsequent construction at the settlement.
The American period began in 1848 with the ratification of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo when New Mexico became a territory of the United States. During the initial American exploration of the Southwest between 1846 and 1879, Zuni Pueblo became well known as an important provisioning station along the new trails and roads that were under development. Initial accounts describe the Zuni’s productive agriculture, including the peach orchards along the edges of the Zuni valley. They also describe the defensive Zuni watchtowers that were constructed in or near dispersed farm fields for use during Navajo raids. Numerous descriptions of the farming village of Pescado dating from the period between 1846 and 1879 describe a substantial "summer pueblo" surrounded by irrigated fields of wheat and corn.
From 1846 to 1881 the Zuni experienced an economic boom as they increased agricultural production to supply a new market for the corn and forage needed by the United States to support military installations at Fort Defiance and Fort Wingate. As a result, the use of farming villages located near farmlands that could be cultivated using ditch irrigation was intensified. The new source of income enabled the Zuni to purchase many new tools and construction materials, which they used to reconstruct Zuni settlements. The market for Zuni agricultural products dissipated with the construction of a railroad through Gallup, New Mexico in 1881, and the Army gained access to non-Indian suppliers.
The Zuni Indian Reservation was established by Executive Order in 1877. As the need for defensive strategies diminished, greater dispersion of buildings in the settlement plans of farming villages began to occur. The nineteenth-century settlement system solidified into the permanent occupation of Zuni Pueblo and the outlying farming villages. Surrounding each of these villages was a zone of intensively cultivated fields or gardens. On the banks of the river at Zuni Pueblo there were "waffle" gardens containing herbs and chiles grown in small earthen enclosures that could be watered by hand. At the farming villages there were fields irrigated by ditches from small reservoirs or springs. Surrounding these intensively cultivated plots was a much more extensive area of dispersed fields situated where surface runoff facilitated floodwater irrigation. Sheep and cattle grazed in a large open range surrounding the farming districts. After harvest in the fall, livestock were brought into the farming villages, where sheep herders could be more easily provisioned from Zuni Pueblo. The core area of settlement was surrounded by a much larger sustaining area suited for hunting animals and gathering plants and for the ritual visitation to shrines and religious localities scattered throughout the region occupied by the prehistoric ancestors of the Zuni. During the winter, the entire Zuni population resided at Zuni Pueblo, except for sheep herders and a few social outcasts who stayed at the farming villages.
Today the Zuni population has finally recovered from the decline that occurred during the Spanish period. Population estimates for Zuni in the nineteenth century vary between 1,294 and 2,000 people. After 1950, the Zuni population underwent remarkable expansion, increasing to 4,000 by 1960, 5,000 by 1971, and 8,929 by 1988. Even by 1915, there were sizable suburbs located to the north of Zuni Pueblo and on the south bank of the Zuni River. Eventually, the majority of the population began to live in the suburbs, and the pueblo core became known at Zuni as the "Old Pueblo" or "Middle Village."
In 1909, Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) policy led to the completion of a large dam and reservoir at Blackrock. This dam and reservoir were intended to provide irrigation water for a large agricultural development north of Zuni Pueblo. The general idea was to resettle farmers from the outlying farming villages onto individually owned farmsteads, following a model for non-Indian farmers in the larger American society. Part of Blackrock Dam’s long and tragic history is a series of failures, as well as the loss of 73 percent of its storage capacity within 20 years due to rapid siltation.
At the same time that the BIA was constructing large reservoirs and attempting to allot the Zuni Indian Reservation, the landscape was rapidly degrading from stream bed erosion. This erosion was caused by clear cutting of timber in the adjacent Zuni mountains and subsequent overgrazing. With the removal of the vegetative cover, the erosive force of runoff was significantly increased.
Overgrazing on the Zuni Indian Reservation exacerbated the problems with erosion. Between 1846 and 1912, the Zuni had lost 89 percent of their aboriginal land use area from land seizures by the United States. As a result, the Zuni were forced to restrict the geographic extent of the range where they grazed their livestock. They began to develop permanent ranch facilities to lay claim to range land and support their livestock industry. Even with a substantial voluntary reduction in the number of livestock in the first three decades of the twentieth century, the carrying capacity of the reservation range was greatly exceeded.
Stream beds were eroded into deeply incised arroyos during the early twentieth century, and traditional methods of floodwater farming became difficult or impossible. The soils that eroded from stream beds rapidly filled the reservoir at Blackrock, and the ditch-irrigated farming sponsored by the BIA lost its viability. New BIA grazing policies conflicted with the use of dispersed floodwater farm sites, and many of these farms were abandoned. The seasonal use of most of the peach orchard villages ceased about this time, a situation apparently related to these changes in land use.
The Contemporary Period
With the dramatic increase in population in the twentieth century, it is remarkable that today the Zuni remain in a single large town rather than reoccupy multiple villages. There is a slight but increasing trend for people to move to the farming village of Pescado, where electricity, running water, and paved roads provide the modern amenities desired by most Zuni. By and large, however, the occupation of the farming villages is now restricted to day-use, a pattern facilitated by the availability of pickup trucks and the improvement of the road network on the reservation. A few elderly people and sheepherders still reside at the farming villages on a seasonal basis, but virtually the entire tribe now resides in Zuni Pueblo and the adjacent settlement of Blackrock throughout the year.

Zuni Pueblo, N. Mex. Oct. 1931. Image NAU.PH.95.48.619 by Barbara or Edwin McKee courtesy of Cline Library Special Collections, Northern Arizona University.
Zuni Pueblo looks very different today than it did a century ago. In building new houses or rehabilitating old structures, the Zuni make use of modern construction materials and techniques to provide modern, weatherproof housing. In addition, since the 1960s, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has been replacing community architecture with commercial housing. HUD houses now constitute approximately 30 percent of the housing units of Zuni Pueblo, with much of it concentrated in subdivisions that are on the outskirts of Zuni Pueblo.
Today this housing is merging with recent HUD subdivisions located at Blackrock. The formerly separate settlements of Zuni Pueblo and Blackrock have coalesced into a single community with constant daily traffic between the two as people commute from home to work. With the construction of commercial buildings, jewelry stores, offices housing the tribal government, four schools, and other institutional buildings, Zuni Pueblo has grown into a large town encompassing an area of more than 260 ha (642 acres).