PUEBLO INDIANS (Spanish, "town," "village"; hence Pueblos, °villagers"), a group of sedentary agricultural tribes comprising the Tanoan, Keresan or Queres, and Zuffian lin guistic stocks in New Mexico, and the Hopi or Moqui of the Shoshonean stock in northeastern Arizona. There are also some Mexicanized remnants of the Tanoan stock on the Rio Grande below El Paso, in Texas, and Chi huahua. For details see under the above stock names.
Physical Disregarding those who have been more or less affected by Spanish contact, the Pueblo Indians are generally small in stature, particularly the women, some of whom are quite diminutive. After marriage the latter frequently become stout, but obesity is rare. The men are a rich brown in color, not so dark nor so reddish as their Navaho neighbors. The women are lighter, many of them being of a fine olive tint, which, with regular features and often with eyes almost oriental in type, make them decidedly comely. Albinism is common among the Hopi and Zufii, those of the latter tribe averaging one in 200. The hair is thick, black and glossy. That of the men is cut 'terrace fashion,' that is, banged across the forehead, cut horizontally at the sides on a line with the chin, and allowed to grow to full length behind, but knotted and tied into a short queue. This is probably the more primitive style of hair-dressing, but it now varies more or less with the tribe. The front hair of the women is cut level with the chin, parted lat erally, and allowed to fall over the face, neces sitating continual brushing aside with the hand to permit them to see. The unmarried Hopi girls retain the primitive method of wearing the hair in large whorls over the ears.
The costume of the men, now largely superseded by the clothing of civilization, consisted of a shirt, a poncho-like coat formed of a squarish piece with a hole in the middle for the head, and sewed down the sides, with partly open sleeves; a pair of loose trousers reaching below the knees, open half-way up the outer sides and fastened with a belt; footless stock ings, leggings, garters, moccasins or sandals, breechcloth, headband, hairband, and blanket. Dressed skin or native cotton formed the chief materials from which their costumes were made, but these gave place largely to woolen articles after the introduction of sheep by the Spaniards. The woolen blanket of later times was prob ably preceded by a robe made of strips of rabbit or wildcat skin coarsely woven or plaited to gether. Yucca strips, feathers, and even human hair also formed raw materials for clothing. The typical dress of the women consisted of a skirt of skin or cotton (now of wool) reaching from the neck to below the knees, and girded with a belt, the right arm and shoulder being bare; a manta hanging loosely from the neck and down behind or thrown over the head; stockings, deerskin leggings, consisting usually of an entire skin wrapped many times around the calf, and sandals or moccasins, to which latter the leggings were attached. Among some of the Rio Grande Pueblos the women wear soft deerskin boots instead of the cumbersome leg wrappings. Necklaces of seashell and tur quoise beads, and pendants, ear-tablets, brace lets, and other ornaments were worn by both men and women, but the shell necklaces of the latter have been superseded by those of silver. Leather belts strung with large silver discs and silver-mounted wnstguards are worn by the men who can afford them. Excepting the moc
casins and leggings, skin has largely gassed out of use for clothing, cheap cotton prints and a woolen blanket being almost exclusively em ployed by the men.
Houses.— The typical pueblo is a many celled, communal, defensive structure of several stories, opening on one or more courts or plazas in which dances and other ceremonies are per formed. When the pueblo enclosed a single court, the outer wall was usually the highest, and was pierced with only small openings, or port-holes, to afford a view of the surrounding country. A slight elevation was usually pre ferred, but there are many instances in which the site is a lofty mesa or a level plain, while other dwellings were built in natural recesses in the rocky walls of canons or cliffs, hence their popular designation, cliff-dwellings. The site depended on accessibility to water, to cultivable fields, or to the necessity for de fense against enemies. Both rounded or polygonal structures were common, while some pueblos were semicircular in ground-plan, with a high rear wall and with the houses arranged in terraces, the tiers of dwellings successively retreating so that the roof of the lower formed the means of access as well as the "front yard" of the tier next above, and so on to the sixth or seventh story. The ground tier usually con tained only small wall openings, access being gained by means of a movable ladder to the roof, which was provided with a hatchway. Most of the pueblos still follow this ancient form, but there are now but few whose ground floor houses are not provided with doors and windows. Sometimes forming a part of and sometimes detached from the main house cluster, are chambers, wholly or partly under ground and usually circular, used in early times as gathering places and sleeping apartments by the men, and still employed for cere monies and tribal councils. The fireplace was in the centre, the smoke escaping through the hatchway; so hot did these kivas become that the Spaniards likened them to stoves, hence their still popular name, •estufas." The structural materials depended largely on the immediate supply. Slabs of sandstone, being abundant, were commonly used; they were sometimes neatly pecked and laid in adobe mortar or chinked with spalls, and al though joints in the masonry were not the result was frequently a marvel ously straight and strong wall that has stood the ravages of centuries. Pise construction was also employed in massive buildings, such as Casa Grande in southern Arizona. Molded adobe bricks, now so commonly used, were not made in pre-Spanish times, but balls of mud mixed with ashes and sage, and dried, were in vogue as a building material in pre-historic times. The roofs of the houses consist usually of pine or cottonwood beams, with light poles laid transversely, which in turn are covered with brush-grass, and adobe mud, well tamped. The introduction of the horse, which permitted the transportation of heavy roof beams, seems to have had a decided influence in increasing the size of the rooms, the compartments of the ancient structures being usually mere cells. Flakes of selenite were pieced together for window panes, hut these have given way to stock frames purchased from the white traders, while the corner fireplace and chimney have been substituted for the central fire-pit, except in the kivas.