A Network of Villages

Sapawe was enormous, but it was not alone.

Looking south and west through the greater Chama Valley, archaeologists have documented other important ancestral communities.

Among them were Tsama and Poshuouinge.

Poshuouinge became one of the major settlements of the lower Río Chama country. Recent research portrays it as an important community during a period of population growth, agricultural innovation and expanding exchange.

Tsama stood within the same network.

The Maxwell Museum's archaeological research describes Tsama and neighboring sites as communities whose inhabitants spoke Tewa and participated in a shared cultural landscape.

Farther north, ancestral villages clustered around the Ojo Caliente drainage.

When these places are considered together, an entirely different picture of precolonial northern New Mexico emerges.

Instead of scattered isolated settlements, the region contained large communities linked to one another by kinship, exchange, travel, shared language and cultural traditions.

The Road Before There Were Roads

There was no Highway 554.

There was no U.S. 84.

But there were roads in another sense.

Foot trails connected pueblos to one another.

Trails led to fields.

Others climbed toward hunting areas, wood-gathering places, springs and mountain passes.

Still others connected the Chama country with communities along the Río Grande.

Goods moved over these routes.

So did information.

News of marriages, deaths, conflicts, ceremonies, harvests and distant visitors could move from village to village.

People were not trapped inside their settlements.

The ancestral Tewa world was mobile and connected.

Trade Beyond the Chama Valley

No Pueblo community produced everything it needed.

Exchange was therefore essential.

Pottery moved between communities.

Stone suitable for tools traveled.

Shell from distant regions reached the Pueblo Southwest.

Cotton and other goods circulated through extensive exchange systems.

Ideas moved with material objects.

A visitor arriving at Sapawe might have brought not only something tangible but information about events many days' travel away.

Large communities such as Sapawe consequently existed within economic and social networks reaching far beyond the El Rito Valley.

Why Build Such Large Villages?

Between roughly the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries, settlement patterns across northern New Mexico changed dramatically.

People increasingly gathered into larger pueblos.

The reasons were probably complex.

Agricultural opportunity mattered.

Water mattered.

Kinship mattered.

Security may have mattered.

Ceremonial life and community organization mattered.

Changing climate conditions almost certainly affected settlement.

So did relationships between neighboring groups.

It is unlikely that one explanation accounts for everything.

Sapawe emerged from this larger transformation.

Rather than imagining a single group suddenly constructing an enormous settlement, it is better to picture generations of people creating, enlarging, repairing and reorganizing a community.

The resulting pueblo became one of the great population centers of the Río Chama world.