PUEBLO. The agricultural, town-dwelling Indians of the semi-desert south-western United States. They are of four dis tinct linguistic groups: (I) Shoshonean, comprising the seven Hopi (q.v.) villages in Arizona; (2) Zuni (q.v.), one town in western New Mexico; (3) Keres, comprising Acoma (q.v.), La guna, Sia, Cochiti, Santa Ana, Santo Domingo, San Felipe, all but the first two in the Rio Grande valley; (4) Tano, consisting of three divisions, all near the Rio Grande : (a) Tiwa, five towns, of which Taos is the most northerly and best known ; (b) Tewa, six pueblos (including Hano among the Hopi) ; (c) Jemez. The aggregate population is not far from i 0,000, stationary or slowly decreasing, and approximately equally divided between the four speech groups. At the discovery in 1540 the Hopi, Zufii and Keres may have been twice, the Tano three or four times, as numerous as to-day, the number of towns has also decreased, though some new ones have been founded. The Pueblos live on ancestral lands and cultivate these much as in the prehistoric period, though they have added wheat to maize and acquired some sheep, cattle, horses and asses; their houses, though larger, are of the old type; their religion has been successfully maintained by the Hopi and Zuni and partly preserved alongside Roman Catholicism by the Keres and Tano. They are peaceable, gentle, unenterprising, quietly industrious and conservative. Physically they are fairly uniform ; below average in stature, generally brachycephalic, with the skull somewhat flattened occipitally from the cradle-board.
Of all the tribes of the United States the Pueblos are most similar to the advanced native peoples of southern Mexico, and the bases of their culture—maize-beans-squash agriculture, cotton growing and weaving, turkey rearing, painted pottery, masonry architecture, ritualism—are no doubt derived from these Mexican civilizations. They lack, however, a number of accomplishments characteristic of the Aztec, Toltec and Maya, such as metallurgy, political organization, calendrical system, ideographic writing, temples and pyramidal substructures. Since some of these traits have an age of about 2,000 years, the main influences emanating from Mexico are likely to have reached the Pueblos perhaps as much as three millennia ago.
South-western archaeology reveals a development through sev eral stages : (I) Basket maker, possessing maize but apparently no other cultivated plants; no pottery or stone houses; spear thrower, but no bow; the physical type was long-headed. (2) Post-basket-maker, with crude pottery, slab-lined pit houses, the bow and arrow. (3) Proto-Pueblo, with the short-headed type which has persisted to the present ; masonry, painted and neck corrugated pottery, cotton, the turkey, the essentials of historic Pueblo culture, are already present. (4) Early Pueblo, in small
house clusters ; black-on-white and body-corrugated pottery ; this is the era of most of the cliff dwellings and of the greatest geo graphical extension of Pueblo culture, ruins in Nevada and well north in Utah belonging to this period. (5) Great Pueblo period, with large towns like Pueblo Bonito and Aztec, centring in the San Juan drainage ; the northernmost area had been given up, but the ruins in Chihuahua, like Casas Grandes, seem to be of this epoch. (6) Late Prehistoric Pueblo, with glaze-painted pottery; the San Juan area and Chihuahua extension had been given up, but there were still Pueblos on the middle Rio Grande near El Paso. The Spanish discovery of 154o falls in this period, which may be assumed to have continued until the influence of the missions became strong in the early 17th century, or until the general Pueblo rebellion of 1680. (7) Historic Pueblo, after the unsettlement caused by the rebellion ; pottery is again painted instead of glazed, but both black-on-white and corrugated ware are long since forgotten ; domesticated mammals have been in troduced and sheep's wool tends to take the place of cotton for clothing.
In general, the Pueblos did not irrigate, although they knew how to choose farmlands containing sub-soil water. They are matri lineal and matrilocal, women owning the houses ; but men order all public and religious matters. On the Rio Grande the clans weaken and moieties appear, until in the extreme northern towns clans are, to-day at least, lacking. The religious edifice is the kiva, Spanish estufa, a small semi-underground structure for the per formance of esoteric rites. Temporary altars are erected in these, often with ritualistic sand or meal paintings; feathers are "plant ed" as offerings at outdoor shrines ; and for all religious organiza tions, offices and clans there are fetish bundles. The mythology is characterized by tales of emergence from the lower world and long tribal wandering. Cults take three chief aspects: (I) Youths are initiated into a communal men's society performing masked dances representative of gods and ancestors—kachinas. (2) Men and women are initiated individually into "fraternal" societies whose main function is curing, although there are also war and hunt societies; masks are little used. (3) Hereditary priests fast, entreat and pray for rain for the crops and communal welfare, and ultimately direct not only all religious affairs but the civil officials. Ritual symbolism is rich, especially as regards the idea of fertilization and number-colour-direction symbol patterns.
P. E. Goddard, Indians of the South-west (1921) and A. V. Kidder, South-western Archaeology (1924), summarize the ethnology and archaeology and list the principal monographic works. (A. L. K.)