Pecos National Historical Park - just between Las Vegas and Santa Fe

If you travel across New Mexico along Highway 25, you can make a right turn somewhere between Las Vegas and Santa Fe. If you do it, soon you find yourself in the Pecos National Historical Park exploring the ruins of ancient Pueblo.

 

This is a Pecos Pueblo, also known historically as Cicique, a Native American community abandoned in historic times.

The first Pecos pueblo was one of two dozen rock-and-mud villages built in the valley around AD 1100 in the prehistoric Pueblo II Era. Within 350 years the Pueblo IV Era Pecos village had grown to house more than 2,000 people in its five-storied complex.

This place has a perfect location in the reach of many other tribes and people - agricultural Pueblo communities of the northern Rio Grande from the west, and the nomadic hunting tribes of the plains. The tribes gathered together and exchanged the goods, now we would call it the marketplace.

The first pueblo people grew corn, pumpkins and beans here. Sometimes they hunt some prey (deer and bison) and were peaceful folks.

Pecos was visited by expeditionaries with Francisco Vásquez de Coronado in 1540. The Spaniards didn't attempt to vanquish the Indians but left some of the guards behind. But everything had changed in 1590 - Castano de Sosa and big group of soldiers stormed and conquered the village. Later the priest came and they enforced the pueblo people to Christianity. 

The Spanish mission church was built in 1619. A traditional kiva was built in front of the church during the Pueblo Revolt in 1680 as a rejection of the Christian religion brought by Spanish colonists. They also broke down the church and now only the foundation reminds us about this first building.

 

However, when the Spaniards returned in 1692, the Pecos community stayed on friendly terms with them. The church was restored back. The site was abandoned in 1838, after the Pecos population suffered from marauding Comanches. Only 180 people lived here in 1788. The surviving remnant of the Pecos population (all 17 of them) moved to the Jemez Pueblo in 1838.

Now this is a site where we can look back to the past and learn something about people who survived here for centuries even when circumstances did not always play in their favor.

Pictures were taken on October 21, 2017.