[Illustration: The kiva and the mission church frame the two worlds
of the Pecos Indians. During the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, Pecos
Indians destroyed the first mission and built this kiva (now
restored) within the mission’s convento. For a few years they
followed their religion undisturbed.]
The ruins of Pecos Pueblo and Spanish missions of the 17th- and
18th-centuries crown a small ridge overlooking the Pecos Valley in upper
New Mexico. At the time of the Coronado _entrada_, the pueblo was a
giant apartment house, several stories high, with a central plaza, 600
rooms, and many kivas—home to 2,000 souls. The village prospered because
it commanded the trade path between Pueblo farmers of the Rio Grande and
buffalo hunters of the Plains. Pecos was a crossroads of commerce and
culture, and its people grew adept at trade and war. The arrival of
Franciscan priests in the 1600s with Spanish custom, religion, law
inexorably altered Pueblo life. The Spaniards built a spacious mission
church on the south end of the ridge, and a second but smaller one when
the first church was destroyed in the Pueblo revolt of 1680. Pecos
continued as a mission for more than a century. Disease and Comanche
raids spelt decline in the late 18th century. The last inhabitants—fewer
than 20—drifted away in 1838.
The park is 25 miles southeast of Santa Fe. Among its features are the
ruins of the ancient pueblo, two restored kivas, and adobe mission
walls. For information on the park and its programs, write:
Superintendent
Pecos National Historical
Park
P.O. Drawer 418
Pecos NM 87552-0418
[Illustration: Map]
[Illustration: Extensive pinyon-juniper forests once surrounded
Pecos Pueblo.]
[Illustration: The vessel is a 16th-century olla. The Spanish spur
dates from the 17th century.]