Quarai: What Archeology Reveals About a New Mexico Mission and Its People

Part of the excavations at Quarai. NPS photo.

Before the mission

The Quarai ruins stand in Zapato Canyon in the Salinas Province of central New Mexico, a desert named for salt lakes that drew people for centuries. Long before a 40-foot-tall mission church rose there, Puebloan peoples lived in the Estancia Basin.

• Around 700 CE: people of the Jornada branch of the Mogollon culture likely settled the region, living in half-underground pit houses.
• Around 1100 CE: as the Mogollon shifted toward the Tularosa Basin, Ancestral Puebloans moved south from the Four Corners, and the two cultures blended.
• Settling down: nomadic life gave way to villages — first jacal houses of woven sticks and mud, then jacal walls on stone foundations, and finally multi-room masonry pueblos.

Spanish observers of the mid-1500s to early 1600s wrote little about the Tiwa and Tompiro people they met, stressing instead the region's salt and its value as a buffer against rival colonial powers. Spain brought Catholicism through a large Franciscan mission, one of a string of them.

Excavations and repairs through the 1900s revealed the mission's careful design and a grandeur that outlasts centuries of neglect. Archeology can't settle every question about Quarai's timeline, but its buildings, burials and objects picture Quarai as it was, not as one-sided records imagined it.

The mission's many lives

• 1520s–1530s: Esteban de Dorantes, a formerly enslaved man of African descent, became the first non-native person to reach what is now New Mexico.
• 1540–1541: Francisco Vásquez de Coronado's expedition may have reached the Salinas region, but not Quarai.
• 1581–1582: a small party under Captain Francisco "Chamuscado" Sánchez and Fray Agustín Rodríguez crossed the province. Otherwise Spain mostly left isolated Salinas alone until about 1600.
• October 12, 1598: Governor Juan de Oñate had Tiwa leaders swear allegiance at Acolocu, thought to be Quarai. Few of his followers meant to farm; they relied on Puebloans for food, clothing and labor while suppressing Puebloan traditions and ceremonies.

Bernardo de Miera y Pacheco's 1758 map, marking Quarai (Cuara) as a ruined mission. NPS.

The priests: Fray Alonso de Benavides is credited as the first, around 1626–1628; his successor, Fray Juan Gutiérrez de la Chica, likely built the church of Nuestra Señora de la Purísima Concepción de Quarai. At its height the pueblo held 600 to 700 people of Spanish and Native descent in about 1,000 rooms. Fray Estévan de Perea, head of New Mexico's Inquisition, took charge in 1633; after his death in the late 1630s came Fray Juan de Salas, then Mexico-born Fray Gerónimo de la Llana in 1650, and about a decade later Fray Nicolás de Freitas, who clashed with the anti-clerical governor López de Mendizábal — whose arrest in 1662 followed Freitas's complaints. Fray Francisco de Salazar was the last head before Apache raids, drought and famine forced the Spanish out: in 1677, Fray Diego de Parrada locked the church doors and joined the survivors moving north to Tajique.

Afterward: small groups, recorded and not, reoccupied the pueblo in the 1700s, including Spanish frontier patrols in the mid-1700s, and the Lucero families lived there for a time in the early to mid-1800s, building with stone taken from the ruins. No lasting community returned — which helped preserve the site.

Visitors at Quarai in 1935. NPS.

Digging at Quarai

• 1913–1914: the Summer School of American Archeology — run by the School of American Archeology, the Museum of New Mexico and the University of New Mexico — measured and mapped the church and convento.
• 1934: the Museum began large excavations ahead of repairs. Civilian Conservation Corps workers cleared debris, exposing the baptistry, nave, transepts, residence hall, courtyards and, unusually, a square kiva — an underground Puebloan religious room — in the friary patio.
• 1939–1940: Wesley Hurt and Works Project Administration crews dug further. The buildings show at least four building periods, the earliest probably the core religious rooms of the west convento. Finds included a raised D-shaped structure in Room 33, perhaps an oven or wine press; a round defensive torreón (tower), probably two stories; and a three-part grinding bin in Room 43.

What the objects say

• Local and traded pottery: a version of Glaze A ware with light gray paste and a dark core was made at Quarai itself; Tularosa Black-on-white came by trade from the Little Colorado River region.
• Daily life: a clay candle holder, figurines, possible spindle whorls and gaming pieces, nine clumsy miniature pots — perhaps children's work — beads, selenite pendants, nut-cracking stones and a peach pit show a busy, largely self-sufficient community, not just a religious center.
• Later visitors: iron arrowheads in the top layers may come from Apache attackers; Majolica sherds from central Mexico were likely left by Spanish soldiers in the 1700s; and three brass U.S. Army buttons may have been lost by Lieutenant J.W. Abert's troops in 1846 or Major James H. Carleton's in 1853.

Majolica and porcelain from Quarai. NPS.

Tricks of time

Time makes the record but also blurs it: pottery types have been reclassified, older projects' details lost, and notes and specimens from Hurt's 1939–1940 dig misplaced — reminders that archeological conclusions are tentative. Some finds resist explanation: watchtowers like Quarai's are unknown at other Spanish missions in New Mexico, and while tree rings date the main church to 1630, dates for the other buildings are disputed.

The torreón in the southeast convento, 1940s. NPS.

What is certain is the exchange between cultures: Puebloan potters copied Spanish forms like soup plates and ring-based cups and bowls; the friars used local pottery and manos and metates; and the Puebloans put Spanish knife blades and nails to use. Quarai began as one of many missions and emptied of its Christian residents within a century, but archeology keeps its buildings — and the lives of all its peoples — in view.

Further reading: Excavations in a 17th-Century Jumano Pueblo: Gran Quivira (NPS, 1964); History of Quarai (NPS, 1940); "In the Midst of Loneliness": The Architectural History of the Salinas Missions (NPS, 1998); The 1939–1940 Excavation Project at Quarai Pueblo and Mission Building (NPS, 1990); Jeanette L. Wolfe, "Salinas Pueblo Missions: The Early History" (2013).

Sources

Based on "A Succession of Priests: Archeology at the Quarai Mission and Convento," Salinas Pueblo Missions National Monument, National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain. The source spells the Mogollon culture "Mongollon"; this page corrects it.