_by_ Robert H. Weber
The cultural heritage of New Mexico is a rich and colorful one, blending
as it does the three separate traditions of Indian, Spanish, and
Anglo-American. Of these, the lifeways of the Indian, ancient and
modern, are of particular interest to both the visitor and resident.
These were the first inhabitants of the New World, whose roots extend
back in time many thousands of years before the first European set foot
here. People who had adapted themselves to the varied and often harsh
environments of desert, plain, valley, canyon, and mountain; who
witnessed the disappearance of the large mammals of the Pleistocene Ice
Age and concomitant changes in climate and vegetation; the first
prospectors and miners seeking flint, obsidian, turquoise, clay, salt,
and mineral pigments; early traders exchanging valued minerals and
handicrafts for shells of the coastal regions; hunters and farmers,
architects and builders, civic and religious leaders, philosophers and
critics, skilled craftsmen and artists, explorers and soldiers—all
ancient counterparts of those who were to follow.
In 1540, when the train of soldiers in the company of Coronado’s Spanish
Expedition entered the unknown lands later called New Mexico, four
groups of native Americans were established residents in the area. Along
the arable valley of the Rio Grande and its tributaries, and in several
outlying areas were the adobe and stone apartment-house villages of the
Pueblo Indians, whose livelihood was based largely on agriculture. East
of the mountains were scattered bands of Plains Indians, Eastern
Apaches, who were nomadic hunters following the herds of buffalo that
ranged across the vast grasslands of the High Plains. Western Apaches
were dispersed in small bands of hunters and gatherers of wild foods
through the mountainous country to the west of the Rio Grande. A related
group, the Navajo, augmented the necessities of life gained by hunting
and gathering with subordinate agricultural crops in the Plateau region
to the northwest.
Early contacts of the _conquistadores_ were largely with the Pueblo
Indians, although they had limited knowledge of the Apaches and Navajos
in outlying districts. There was little to suggest to the Spanish
invaders, except for the ruins of long-abandoned Pueblo villages, that
the fragmentary record of thousands of years of human prehistory lay
scattered in the dust beneath their feet. Undoubtedly they would have
dismissed as utter nonsense any notion that men armed with stone-tipped
spears had here slain elephants in a marsh 12,000 years old that now lay
buried beneath shifting sands of a desert landscape. Indeed, it was not
until the last quarter of the 1800’s that serious attempts were made to
decipher the prehistoric traces of the Pueblo Indians, whereas concrete
evidence that man had hunted long-extinct Pleistocene big game in
America was not discovered until less than forty years ago.