Clothing and Textiles

Perishable materials rarely survive as well as pottery or stone.

That makes clothing more difficult for archaeologists to reconstruct.

Nevertheless, Pueblo peoples of the broader Southwest were accomplished textile makers.

Cotton textiles were produced in Pueblo communities, while yucca fiber, animal hides and feathers also provided usable materials.

Spinning and weaving required extensive labor.

Fibers had to be processed before thread could be created.

Thread then became cloth.

Clothing consequently represented considerable stored labor.

Textile production was another part of household life that has left fewer archaeological traces than the adobe walls and pottery scattered across ancestral sites.

Children in the Pueblo

Archaeology too often makes ancient communities seem populated entirely by adults.

Sapawe was full of children.

At a peak population of perhaps several thousand people, hundreds would have been young.

Children learned by watching and participating.

A young child might accompany relatives to fields.

Older children could help gather fuel, tend crops, carry materials or watch younger siblings.

They learned language through everyday conversation.

They learned stories by hearing them repeatedly.

They learned where water could be found, what plants were useful and how family relationships connected them to other people.

Skills were not confined to formal instruction.

Life itself was education.

That process continues to be central to modern Pueblo cultural preservation. Pueblo communities today emphasize language, traditional skills, stories and participation as ways children maintain connections with their ancestors.

Language: Tewa Country

Language is one of the strongest links between this ancestral landscape and the present.

Tewa continues to be spoken in northern New Mexico.

The six Tewa-speaking pueblos are generally identified today as:

Ohkay Owingeh, Santa Clara, San Ildefonso, Nambé, Pojoaque and Tesuque.

The Poeh Cultural Center describes these communities collectively within the continuing Tewa cultural world.

Tewa place names are particularly important.

One of the strongest forms of evidence connecting archaeological villages with Tewa history is the persistence of traditional names for ancestral places.

Researchers studying Tsama emphasize that the identification of the Río Chama communities as Tewa rests not simply upon modern archaeological interpretation but upon a combination of oral tradition, early Spanish documentation and surviving Tewa place names.

The names themselves are history.