What Happened to Sapawe?

Eventually, the great community ceased to function as the large settlement it once had been.

Older histories often describe such developments simply as an “abandonment.”

That word can be misleading.

Buildings were left behind.

The people were not.

Population movements had occurred throughout Pueblo history. Families and communities reorganized, joined other settlements, separated, returned to older places and established new homes.

Tewa oral traditions preserve histories of such movement.

Archaeologist Florence Hawley Ellis became particularly interested in Sapawe because Tewa oral traditions offered ways of understanding movements through ancestral communities of the Río Chama. Her archaeological investigations were partly concerned with comparing those histories to physical evidence.

The descendants of the ancestral Tewa people remain very much alive.

Florence Hawley Ellis Comes to Sapawe

Sapawe entered an important new chapter during the twentieth century.

Archaeologist Florence Hawley Ellis of the University of New Mexico directed field schools at Sapawe during the 1960s.

Ellis was one of the important early women in American archaeology and an innovator in dendrochronology, ethnohistory and the effort to combine archaeological evidence with Indigenous knowledge.

The National Park Service records that she directed University of New Mexico field schools at Sapawe and other ancestral Pueblo sites from the late 1950s into the early 1970s.

Between approximately 1963 and 1969, students excavated parts of Sapawe.

Their work exposed rooms, collected pottery and animal remains, recorded architecture and attempted to understand how the enormous pueblo had grown.

Much of the material from those excavations remains important to researchers today.

Archaeology Has Changed

There is another important story here.

Twentieth-century archaeology frequently treated ancestral sites primarily as scientific resources.

Artifacts were removed.

Human remains were sometimes excavated.

Collections traveled to universities and museums far from descendant communities.

Modern archaeology increasingly recognizes that ancestral Pueblo sites are not simply laboratories.

They are cultural places connected to living peoples.

Pueblo communities themselves have become much more involved in how their history, ancestral sites and cultural materials are interpreted and cared for.

The Pueblo of Santa Clara, for example, explicitly identifies archaeological sites, oral history, Tewa language, flora, fauna, water and traditional landscapes as important parts of its cultural heritage.

The Poeh Cultural Center has similarly developed museum programs in which Tewa people interpret their own history and ancestral material culture.

That approach should guide the El Rito History Project as well.

Archaeology and Oral Tradition

The archaeological record can tell us extraordinary things.

It can tell us approximately when a house was built.

It can identify what animals people ate.

It can reveal where corn was stored.

It can reconstruct irrigation or water-control systems.

Pottery can reveal trade relationships.

Tree rings can sometimes help determine dates.

Chemical analysis can identify where materials originated.

But archaeology cannot tell the entire story.

Oral tradition preserves different kinds of knowledge.

The two do not always ask the same questions, and one should not automatically be used to invalidate the other.

For the Tewa, ancestral places can remain part of a living cultural geography even centuries after people stopped residing there permanently.

As Pueblo representatives have explained at Bandelier, oral traditions connect present-day communities to ancestral places through language, stories, songs and continued cultural practice.

The Landscape Was Sacred as Well as Practical

To modern eyes, land is often classified according to ownership or economic value.

A farm.

A forest.

A vacant lot.

A recreational area.

A mineral resource.

Traditional Pueblo concepts of landscape are considerably more interconnected.

Water, mountains, springs, plants, animals, ancestral villages and particular places can all participate in cultural relationships.

This is one reason archaeological sites should be approached respectfully.

A scatter of pottery that appears to an outsider to be discarded debris can be evidence of ancestral presence.

An eroded adobe wall can belong to a cultural history still remembered by descendants.

A spring can have meanings that should not be photographed, mapped or publicly explained.

Some knowledge is not intended for public display.

Respecting that boundary is itself part of telling the history properly.

A Living Culture, Not a Vanished People

Perhaps the most important lesson for visitors is this:

The Tewa did not disappear.

There are living Tewa communities throughout northern New Mexico.

Ohkay Owingeh describes itself as a Tewa-speaking nation whose people have depended upon agriculture, hunting and subsistence since time immemorial and whose community continues traditional practices today.

Santa Clara Pueblo likewise describes an enduring connection among its people, ancestral places, language, water, animals and land.

At Pojoaque, the Poeh Cultural Center works specifically to sustain Tewa traditions through language, art, oral history and cultural education.

The appropriate story is therefore not:

“The Tewa once lived here.”

A better understanding is:

“This was—and remains—part of an ancestral Tewa cultural landscape.”

When You Look Across the El Rito Valley

Imagine standing above El Rito before the arrival of Spanish colonists.

Remove the paved road.

Remove the power lines.

Remove the modern houses.

Remove the church steeple.

Remove the boundaries that today divide parcels of private and public land.

Now look south.

Smoke rises from a great pueblo.

Beyond it lie fields edged with stones.

People are working beside the creek.

Others follow trails toward neighboring communities.

Some climb toward higher country to hunt or gather plants.

Children move through the plaza.

A potter works a vessel into shape.

Corn is being stored.

Wood is carried down from the mountains.

Turkeys call within the settlement.

Someone has arrived from another village carrying news.

Another person prepares to leave along a trail toward the Río Chama.

This is not empty land.

This is Tewa country.

And this is where the human history of El Rito must begin.

A Note to Visitors

Archaeological sites throughout northern New Mexico are protected cultural resources and, for descendant Pueblo communities, may also be ancestral and sacred places.

Visitors should never remove pottery fragments, stone tools, building materials or other objects.

Do not dig.

Do not climb on archaeological walls.

Do not enter restricted areas.

Do not publish precise locations of sensitive sites.

An artifact removed from its original location loses much of its archaeological information—and removing it can also violate both law and cultural respect.

The greatest contribution a visitor can make is to leave the past where it rests.