Pueblo

1 a member of any of about two dozen Native American peoples called pueblos by the Spanish because they live in villages built of adobe and rock

2 a city in Colorado south of Colorado Springs

3 a communal village built by Indians in the southwestern United States

English

Noun

pueblo

1. A communal building erected by certain Indian tribes of Arizona and New Mexico. It is often of large size and is usually built either of stone or adobe.

Spanish

Etymology

populus

Noun

1. town, village
2. the common people, the working classes
3. population, people, nation

See also

• aldea
• ciudad
• nación
• población

Verb form

pueblo

1. I populate, I settle, I colonize (1st-person singular indicative of poblar)

Pueblos are traditional communities of Native Americans in the southwestern United States of America. The communities are recognized worldwide for adobe buildings, which are sometimes called "pueblos," although some pueblos only have a few of these buildings still standing.

Etymology and usage

The Castilian word pueblo, evolved from the Latin word populus ("people"), means "village". On the central Spanish meseta the unit of settlement was and is the pueblo; that is to say, the large nucleated village surrounded by its own fields, with no outlying farms, separated from its neighbours by some considerable distance, sometimes as much as ten miles or so. The demands of agrarian routine and the need for defense, the simple desire for human society in the vast solitude of the plains,dictated that it should be so. Nowadays the pueblo might have a population running into thousands. Doubtless they were smaller in the early middle ages, but we should probably not be far wrong if we think of them as having had populations of some hundreds.

Of the federally recognized Native American communities in the Southwest, those designated by the King of Spain as Pueblos at the time treaties ceded Spanish territory to the United States are now legally recognized by the Bureau of Indian Affairs as Pueblos. Some of the Pueblos also came into the United States by treaty with Mexico, which briefly gained jurisdiction over territory in the Southwest ceded by Spain. There are 21 federally recognized Pueblos that are home to Pueblo people. As listed by their official federal names:

Historic places

Pre-Columbian towns and villages, which of course were not yet called pueblos, were located in defensive positions, for example, on high steep mesas such as Acoma. Anthropologists and official documents often refer to earlier residents of the area as pueblo cultures. For example, the National Park Service states, "The Late Puebloan cultures built the large, integrated villages found by the Spaniards when they began to move into the area." The people of some pueblos, such as Taos Pueblo, still inhabit centuries old adobe pueblo buildings. Residents often maintain other homes outside the historic pueblos.

In addition to the contemporary pueblos there are numerous ruins of archeological interest throughout the Southwest, some of relatively recent origin, others of prehistoric origin such as the cliff dwellings and other habitations of the Ancient Pueblo Peoples or Anasazi.

Notes