A Day at Sapawe, Circa 1450
Twenty-Four Hours in the Tewa World Before El Rito
It is an autumn morning nearly six centuries ago.
There is no El Rito.
There is no Highway 554, no church tower, no Spanish language being spoken in the valley and no boundary marking one person's parcel from another in the modern sense.
Instead, overlooking the Rito Colorado stands an enormous ancestral Tewa community.
Sapawe is alive.
By the fifteenth century it had become one of the largest Pueblo settlements in northern New Mexico. Archaeological reconstructions identify at least seven plazas and an immense complex of earthen rooms. Estimates of its eventual size vary—from roughly 1,800 ground-floor rooms in more conservative inventories to more than 2,500 rooms in other reconstructions. Numerous kivas were distributed through the settlement, together with a larger ceremonial structure. Not all of these rooms necessarily existed or were occupied simultaneously. Around 1450, Sapawe itself appears to have been growing and changing.
Beyond the pueblo are fields.
Some are ordinary floodplain plots. Others have been modified with borders of stone, gravel mulch, terraces, check dams or small water-diversion features. Archaeologists have identified at least twenty-four field houses near Sapawe as well as extensive agricultural constructions.
Within the village are people, dogs and an extraordinary number of turkeys.
The following reconstruction chooses an early-autumn day, when ripening and harvested crops would make the relationship between village and countryside especially visible.
The clock times are ours.
The people of Sapawe did not divide their day into numbered modern hours.
Their clocks were the eastern sky, the position of the sun, temperature, shadows, hunger, work, season and the obligations of community.
Before Sunrise — About 5:00 A.M.
For a time, Sapawe is almost completely dark.
The massive room blocks are silhouettes against a sky beginning to lighten over northern New Mexico.
Stars remain visible.
Cold air has settled into the El Rito drainage overnight. Even during warmer parts of the year, mornings at this elevation can be cool.
Inside hundreds of rooms, families sleep close to the thermal mass of thick earthen walls.
Then individual fires begin appearing.
Someone stirs embers that have survived from the previous evening.
Another household rekindles a hearth.
Smoke begins escaping into the still morning air.
Before long, faint columns rise from different portions of the pueblo.
There would have been no single moment when Sapawe awakened.
A community numbering perhaps well over a thousand people would have awakened gradually.
An infant cries.
Someone moves across a rooftop.
A dog hears movement and gets up.
And somewhere close to one of the plazas, turkeys begin making themselves heard.
That sound may have been one of the signatures of Sapawe.
Excavations eventually identified more than twenty rooms containing deposits of turkey dung and eggshell, together with plaza-side pens constructed with upright posts. Turkey remains are exceptionally common in the archaeological collection. Researchers have even proposed that Sapawe may have become an important center for raising birds and producing valuable feathers.
Before humans have fully begun the day, the birds already have.
Sunrise — About 6:00 A.M.
The first direct sunlight touches the upper portions of the pueblo.
Sapawe does not look like the ruins visible today.
Walls are plastered.
Roofs cover most occupied rooms.
Ladders rise between levels.
Large room blocks enclose plazas.
Some sections may stand more than one story high.
Doors, roof openings and ladders create movement between private household spaces and the larger public architecture of the village.
People emerge onto rooftops.
The pueblo begins filling with sound.
Footsteps.
Conversation in an ancestral form of the Tewa language.
Dogs.
Turkeys.
Grinding stones.
Wood striking wood.
The scraping of pottery.
Perhaps one of the most familiar morning sounds is rhythmic:
stone against stone.
Archaeologists studying the Sapawe collections recorded substantial numbers of manos and metates—the paired handstones and grinding slabs essential for processing maize and other plant foods. The surviving Sapawe archive actually contains a dedicated study titled Reports on Manos and Metates at Sapawe.
In one room or work area, kernels of stored corn are placed upon a metate.
A person kneels behind it and pushes the mano forward.
Again.
And again.
And again.
The sound becomes part of the waking village.
About 7:00 A.M. — The First Meal
The first food of the day is probably simple.
Corn dominates the agricultural economy of ancestral Pueblo communities of this period, supplemented by beans and squash and by gathered plants and animal foods. Contemporary northern New Mexico Pueblo sites consistently show the importance of this agricultural combination.
At Sapawe, ground maize might become a porridge or another corn preparation.
Dried food can be rehydrated.
Stored beans can be cooked slowly.
Food preparation takes place in pottery vessels.
By about 1450, a resident of Sapawe could have been surrounded by ceramics that archaeologists would later classify as Biscuit A, Biscuit B and emerging Sapawe Micaceous-Washboard utility ware. Biscuit A was common from approximately A.D. 1375–1450, Biscuit B overlapped it beginning about 1400, and the distinctive micaceous utility tradition associated with Sapawe appeared during the fifteenth century.
Nobody living here calls a bowl “Biscuit B.”
That is an archaeologist's name centuries in the future.
To the person holding it, it is simply a bowl: made from earth, shaped by human hands, fired, cared for and used.
Food passes between generations in such vessels.
So does knowledge.
About 8:00 A.M. — The Village Empties Into the Landscape
Now movement becomes visible beyond the pueblo.
People begin leaving for fields and working areas.
The agricultural landscape surrounding Sapawe is much more extensive than a modern visitor might imagine.
Archaeologists have documented stone-edged plots, gravel-mulched fields, check dams, terraces and field houses in the country around the settlement. Florence Hawley Ellis described some Sapawe plots as fields edged with stone and covered with gravel intended to retain available moisture.
Some fields lie close enough to visit and return from during the day.
Others require a longer walk.
Paths radiate away from the pueblo.
There are no wheeled carts.
Anything brought home must be carried.
Baskets, pottery containers and other carrying equipment therefore matter enormously.
Early autumn is an especially busy time.
Corn must be inspected.
Some ears are ready to harvest.
Squash can be brought in.
Beans can be collected and dried.
Plants that have matured at slightly different rates make harvest not a single event but a sequence of decisions.
Families must constantly judge weather.
A destructive frost could arrive.
Food gathered now must sustain the community long after these fields become brown.
About 9:00 A.M. — Working the Fields
By midmorning, much of Sapawe's agricultural workforce is outside the pueblo.
Imagine one group working a field where stones have deliberately been arranged across the surface.
To someone unfamiliar with northern Pueblo agriculture, the plot might at first appear strangely rocky.
The stones are part of the technology.
Gravel mulch helps reduce evaporation and conserve limited moisture. Stone borders can influence runoff. Small dams slow water rather than allowing it to disappear immediately downstream.
This is not accidental farming.
It is accumulated environmental knowledge.
Sapawe's farmers understand individual pieces of land.
They know where snowmelt runs.
They know where rainwater gathers after a summer storm.
They know which soil dries first.
They know where frost settles.
They know that two apparently similar plots may produce very different crops.
And this knowledge is not written in a book.
It is carried by people.
An older relative can show a younger one where water usually comes through after heavy rain.
A child learning to farm is also learning geography.
The land surrounding Sapawe is therefore both workplace and classroom.
About 10:00 A.M. — Water
Elsewhere, another task cannot wait.
Water must move.
The nearest dependable water is associated with El Rito Creek. Modern spatial analysis suggests a trip from Sapawe to the creek could take only several minutes along an efficient route, but the cumulative labor of supplying a populous village—and its turkeys—would have been substantial.
People travel back and forth carrying water.
Water is needed for drinking.
For cooking.
For pottery production.
For construction and plaster repair.
For other household tasks.
And for animals.
Turkeys in particular require fresh water every day.
If hundreds of birds were being maintained at Sapawe, as the archaeological evidence increasingly suggests, turkey husbandry represented a significant daily demand on human labor.
A single trip for water is easy to imagine.
Thousands of such trips, repeated over decades, begin to reveal what sustaining Sapawe actually required.
About 11:00 A.M. — The Turkeys of Sapawe
Now visit the edge of one of the plazas.
Here the smell gives away the function of several spaces.
Turkeys are being kept close to the room blocks.
Excavators centuries later will find unmistakable yellowish dung deposits on the floors of some rooms. They will recover eggshell, turkey bones, birds with healed injuries and the remains of deliberately buried turkeys.
Twenty-three of 268 excavated rooms examined by researchers contained floor deposits associated with turkey keeping. Penning occurs in different portions of the settlement rather than in one centralized compound.
That suggests something important about daily life.
Turkey care may have been embedded within household or neighborhood activity.
Birds need food.
They need water.
Pens require attention.
Young birds need protection.
Droppings accumulate.
Injured birds need to survive long enough for bones to heal—as some recovered specimens did.
Why devote so much effort to them?
Meat is one possibility.
But feathers were extremely valuable.
Feathers could provide insulation and enter into clothing, blankets and objects whose organic materials rarely survive in the archaeological record.
Bone could also be used.
Sapawe produced worked bone artifacts, including flutes and whistles, and later researchers specifically studied these objects.
The turkey is therefore not simply livestock.
It sits at the intersection of food, craft, exchange and cultural meaning.
Midday — About Noon
The sun is high.
Work slows temporarily.
Those in distant plots may eat where they are.
Others return toward the pueblo.
The plazas are bright.
Adobe walls absorb heat.
Shade becomes valuable.
Children are everywhere—not as passive spectators but as members of a working community.
An archaeological site never preserves the noise of children.
It preserves broken pottery, postholes, ash, animal bone and stone tools.
Yet in a population of this size, a substantial percentage of Sapawe's inhabitants must have been children.
They would have learned through observation and participation.
Carry this.
Watch the younger child.
Bring water.
Gather fuel.
Help with the birds.
Remember where that field is.
Notice what the clouds are doing.
Listen when an older person speaks.
The greatest technology in Sapawe may not be an artifact at all.
It is transmitted knowledge.
About 1:00 P.M. — Inside the Rooms
During the hottest part of the day, some work shifts into shaded or enclosed areas.
Rooms have different functions.
Some are living spaces.
Some hold stored food and possessions.
Others serve work purposes.
Still others are associated with turkeys or specialized activities.
The architecture itself bears evidence of constant change.
Earthen buildings require maintenance.
Plaster cracks.
Roofs leak.
Walls erode.
Rooms are remodeled.
Others are closed.
New rooms are added.
Tree-ring samples recovered at Sapawe preserve portions of this architectural history, with construction timbers representing multiple building episodes during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
Around 1450 the village is not a completed monument.
It is a construction site generations long.
Someone mixes earth.
Someone repairs plaster.
Someone replaces a roof element.
Someone removes deteriorated material.
Someone brings timber down from the surrounding country.
A pueblo this large requires continual labor simply to remain standing.
About 2:00 P.M. — Pottery
In another working area, clay is being prepared.
Pottery is among the most abundant materials surviving archaeologically at Sapawe.
But a pottery sherd in a museum display case can disguise the amount of knowledge required to make the original vessel.
Clay must be located.
Collected.
Prepared.
Mixed appropriately.
Shaped.
Smoothed.
Perhaps slipped and polished.
Perhaps painted.
Dried.
Fired.
The Poeh Cultural Center, operated by the Pueblo of Pojoaque, stresses that among Tewa people pottery should not be reduced to a technical craft. Clay and pottery belong to living relationships among earth, people, community and generations of knowledge.
Around 1450, one sees both older and newer ceramic traditions at Sapawe.
Biscuit ware bowls bear black painted designs.
Utility jars perform the less glamorous but essential jobs of carrying, storing and cooking.
The emerging Sapawe Micaceous-Washboard style has a distinctive ribbed or indented exterior surface.
A broken cooking jar will someday become an archaeological specimen.
Today it is a household problem.
About 3:00 P.M. — Stone, Bone and Wood
Not everyone is farming or making pottery.
Tools require continual manufacture and maintenance.
Excavations at Sapawe recovered projectile points, axes, manos, metates and worked bone objects. Archival records also include studies devoted specifically to prehistoric digging tools and worked bone from the site.
A stone edge grows dull.
It must be resharpened.
A wooden implement breaks.
It must be repaired or replaced.
Stone material itself reveals connections extending beyond the immediate pueblo. Northern Río Grande archaeological assemblages contain materials such as obsidian and distinctive cherts whose geological sources could lie many miles away.
Tools therefore possess biographies.
A piece of stone may begin far from Sapawe.
It passes through someone's hands.
It becomes a cutting edge.
It is sharpened.
Reworked.
Perhaps broken.
Discarded.
Five hundred years later, an archaeologist identifies the fragment and reconstructs part of the journey.
About 4:00 P.M. — The Pueblo Begins Filling Again
The afternoon shadows lengthen.
People begin returning from the fields.
They carry what the season permits.
Corn.
Beans.
Squash.
Collected plants.
Fuel wood.
Materials needed for other work.
Perhaps game from a successful hunt, although hunting success cannot be scheduled by the hour.
Regional archaeological evidence from contemporary ancestral Pueblo communities demonstrates that agriculture was supplemented with deer, rabbits and other wild resources.
The return of workers changes the sound of the village.
Paths converge.
Loads are deposited.
Children come to see what has arrived.
Food must now be processed rather than simply harvested.
Some corn will be eaten relatively soon.
Much must be dried and stored.
Seed has another purpose entirely.
The best portion of a harvest cannot simply disappear into tonight's meal.
Some of it represents next year's field.
About 5:00 P.M. — Grinding, Drying and Storage
Now the metates become important again.
Grinding grain is repetitive, physically demanding labor.
The mano passes across the grinding surface hundreds and thousands of times.
Stone slowly wears against stone.
Grain becomes meal.
Other harvested food is prepared for storage.
The existence of extensive grinding equipment at Sapawe tells us something easily forgotten when looking at impressive architecture:
Great pueblos depended upon ordinary repetitive work.
Every wall required earth.
Every roof required timber.
Every meal required ingredients.
Every field required attention.
Every pot required manufacture.
Every gallon of water had to reach where it was needed.
Civilization at Sapawe was constructed as much through daily repetition as through great public events.
About 6:00 P.M. — Evening Comes to the Plazas
The temperature begins dropping.
Smoke again becomes conspicuous over the pueblo.
Cooking fires are active.
The smell of food mixes with wood smoke, adobe, dust and the unmistakable odor of turkey pens.
People who spent much of the day dispersed across the landscape are again concentrated inside the settlement.
The plazas assume a different character.
This is communal architecture.
Seven plazas at a settlement of Sapawe's scale mean that there was no single center of daily life. Different room blocks and plaza communities probably possessed their own relationships and routines while still participating in the larger pueblo.
People exchange information.
What did the field look like?
Did anyone see game?
Is something wrong with a water-control feature?
Who arrived from another community?
What work is required tomorrow?
Much of what holds Sapawe together leaves almost no archaeological trace.
Conversation does not fossilize.
Obligations do not become pottery sherds.
Kinship cannot be excavated with a trowel.
Yet without such relationships, a community this large could not function.
About 7:00 P.M. — The Evening Meal
Families eat.
A meal might contain corn in one form or another, beans, squash, gathered foods and—when available—animal protein.
But abundance should not be romanticized.
Life at Sapawe depended upon rainfall, temperature and successful harvests.
A bad agricultural year mattered.
Several bad years mattered profoundly.
Food storage was therefore security.
The jars and storage rooms of the pueblo were not merely containers.
They represented winter.
They represented drought.
They represented next spring.
They represented survival.
The residents of Sapawe inhabited one of the largest communities in the region precisely because they had developed remarkably successful ways of cooperating with an unpredictable environment.
But success never made that environment predictable.
About 8:00 P.M. — Another Sapawe
Darkness changes the village.
The world contracts toward firelight.
Rooms that seemed cool and dark during midday are now warm gathering places.
Outdoor work diminishes.
People tell stories.
Children listen.
Skills are explained.
Family histories are remembered.
News from neighboring communities is repeated.
We must be cautious here.
Archaeology cannot reconstruct the stories told on a particular night in 1450, and Tewa ceremonial knowledge that remains private today should not be invented for dramatic effect.
What can be said is that living Tewa communities emphasize the importance of oral transmission—language, history, belief, song and knowledge passed through generations. The Poeh Cultural Center's oral-history work explicitly treats Tewa language and transmitted knowledge as central to cultural continuity.
There is no schoolhouse at Sapawe.
Yet education is everywhere.
About 9:00 P.M. — The Kivas
Somewhere within the great pueblo, the kivas remind us that another dimension of Sapawe remains largely inaccessible to archaeology.
Estimates identify numerous smaller kivas and at least one larger ceremonial structure in the Sapawe complex.
Excavators even found carefully placed ash deposits near ceremonial architecture, suggesting that material from fires could receive treatment different from ordinary household refuse.
But here our reconstruction deliberately stops at the threshold.
The existence of kivas is archaeological fact.
Their architecture can be studied.
Their construction can be dated.
Artifacts within them can be documented.
That does not give outsiders permission to invent the private ceremonies of ancestral Tewa people or to assume that everything practiced by living Tewa communities today can simply be projected backward six centuries.
For the visitor, the most respectful interpretation is also the most accurate:
Some aspects of Sapawe's spiritual life remain beyond what archaeology can properly tell us.
About 10:00 P.M. — Fires Fade
Across the room blocks, activity decreases.
Children sleep.
Work tools are put aside.
Food is protected.
The remaining embers are valuable.
Dogs settle near people.
Turkeys grow quieter.
The thick earthen architecture that absorbed warmth during the day moderates the cooling night.
Overhead is a sky without electric light.
To anyone awake on a rooftop, the stars would dominate the valley.
Beyond the pueblo lie the fields.
Beyond them the hills and mountains.
Beyond those are other communities.
Sapawe is large, but it is not isolated.
Trails connect it with neighboring ancestral Tewa settlements and with the wider Río Grande world.
Objects, people, spouses, information, raw materials and ideas travel those trails.
Tomorrow someone may arrive.
Tomorrow someone may leave.
Midnight — A Great Pueblo Sleeping
By midnight, Sapawe is mostly quiet.
Imagine looking down upon it from above.
Seven plazas.
Hundreds upon hundreds of roofed rooms.
Dark fields beyond them.
A few faint fires.
Turkey pens.
Storage rooms containing the year's accumulated food.
Kivas.
Paths disappearing toward the creek and surrounding country.
Behind every wall is human labor.
Behind every stored kernel of corn is a season of risk.
Behind every pot is knowledge of clay and fire.
Behind every turkey feather is daily care.
Behind every building is timber that had to be cut, transported and raised.
And behind the entire pueblo are generations of accumulated knowledge about how to live in this particular place.
In another six hundred years, most of the buildings will be reduced to mounds.
Pottery will lie broken across the ground.
Archaeologists will uncover fragments of walls and floors.
They will find manos worn smooth from grinding.
Axes.
Projectile points.
Bone whistles.
Ceramic vessels.
Turkey bones and eggshell.
Dried layers of turkey dung.
Postholes marking pens.
Roof timbers.
Kivas.
Fields edged in stone.
And from these surviving pieces they will attempt to reconstruct the community that once existed here.
But on this night in about A.D. 1450, none of those things are artifacts.
They are simply the belongings of people who expect to wake tomorrow.
What in This Reconstruction Is Actually Archaeological?
The strongest direct evidence from Sapawe includes its enormous multi-plaza architecture; kivas; tree-ring-dated structural timbers; manos and metates; projectile points and axes; digging implements; worked-bone artifacts including whistles and flutes; Biscuit and micaceous pottery traditions; nearby field houses and water-management and soil-moisture features; and particularly extensive evidence for turkey husbandry. Excavations recovered large quantities of animal bone and more than twenty rooms associated with turkey keeping.
The agricultural reconstruction is also strong, although some details come from the broader ancestral Tewa landscape rather than individual excavated Sapawe rooms. Research in the Río Chama region identifies corn, beans and squash as staple crops and demonstrates that upland runoff fields alone probably could not have supported the large Classic-period population; floodplain agriculture must also have played an important role.
Specific conversations, family relationships, exactly who performed an individual task, what was served at one particular meal and the precise ceremony taking place on any given evening cannot be recovered archaeologically. Those portions of the reconstruction are deliberately kept general rather than invented.
The Most Important Thing to Remember
A visitor standing near Sapawe today sees silence.
That silence is deceptive.
Around 1450, this was not a ruin.
It was home to an extraordinary concentration of people.
The landscape contained fields rather than merely brush.
The plazas carried voices.
Grinding stones sounded inside the room blocks.
Smoke rose from cooking fires.
People walked constantly between the pueblo and the water.
Children learned the landscape from adults.
Potters transformed local earth into vessels.
Farmers watched the sky.
Hunters traveled into the surrounding country.
Builders repaired walls and roofs.
And everywhere through portions of the settlement were turkeys—fed, watered, penned and cared for in numbers substantial enough to leave one of the most unusual archaeological signatures yet recognized at a northern Río Grande pueblo.
This was the world immediately before El Rito.
Not empty land waiting to be settled.
Not a mysterious vanished civilization.
But a living Tewa community whose descendants remain part of northern New Mexico today.