Pueblo

Pueblo, name given by the Spanish to the sedentary Native Americans who lived in stone or adobe communal houses in what is now the South Western United States. The term pueblo is also used for the villages occupied by the Pueblo people. The prehistoric Ancestral Pueblo settlements, also known as the Anasazi and Mogollon cultures, extended southward from Southern Utah and Southern Colorado into Arizona, New Mexico, and adjacent territory in Mexico. The transition from Archaic hunters and gatherers to sedentary agricultural populations occurred around the 1st century A.D., when corn, squash, and beans were widely adopted; the trio of foods is still used by the Pueblo. Although agriculture provided the bulk of the diet for these early populations, hunting and gathering was an important source of additional foodstuffs. Pottery manufacture began about A.D. 400 and was used for cooking and water storage. Clothing was woven from cotton, grown in warmer areas, and yucca fiber. Early houses among the Ancestral Pueblo peoples were pit houses, which were replaced by adobe and stone surface dwellings throughout the region by the end of the first millennium A.D.