A house on Acoma's mesa, 2008. The first buildings were entered through the roof; ground-floor doors came later. Carol M. Highsmith, Library of Congress.
West of Albuquerque, a flat-topped rock rises 357 feet out of the New Mexico desert, and on top of it is Acoma Pueblo — "Sky City" — one of the oldest continuously occupied communities in what is now the United States. Its isolation kept it nearly unassailable for centuries, and its people still keep traditions that grew up there. It is a National Historic Landmark.
How old
The Acoma say the pueblo has always been there; the name is often translated as "a place that always was". Archeology dates the oldest standing remains to about 1100 CE and suggests the people lived in the desert around the mesa before moving their village to its top. A survey in the 1950s showed them to have been prolific potters and skilled builders.
Life on the rock
Early Spanish accounts describe some 500 adobe houses, three or four storeys high, with small windows and no doors at ground level: people climbed ladders and entered through holes in the roof. The only way up the mesa was a line of hand- and toeholds cut into the cliff, and every building material was carried up it on somebody's back.
Acoma between 1899 and 1928. Arnold Genthe, Library of Congress.
The Spanish arrive
| Year | Event |
|---|---|
| 1540 | Hernando de Alvarado, of Coronado's expedition, reaches Acoma |
| 1581–1583 | the Chamuscado–Rodríguez expedition, then Antonio de Espejo |
| 1598 | Juan de Oñate claims the region for Spain |
| December 1598 | the Acoma kill Oñate's officer Juan de Zaldívar and more than a dozen of his men |
| January 1599 | Zaldívar's brother returns with some seventy soldiers; much of the pueblo is burned, and Spanish accounts put the dead at as many as 1,500. Oñate sentences the survivors: men over twenty-five lose a foot, and most of the rest are condemned to twenty years' servitude |
| 1629 | Fray Juan Ramírez, the first resident Franciscan, likely begins the mission church |
| 1680 | Acoma joins the Pueblo Revolt; its priest, Fray Lucas Maldonado, and the Spaniards living there are killed, but the church survives |
| 1699 | Spain reconquers Acoma |
The early meetings had been friendly — the Acoma often met expeditions at the foot of the mesa to help them. The resistance grew as the Spanish stayed.
San Esteban del Rey
The mission church is the oldest surviving European church in New Mexico and one of the finest examples of early Spanish–Pueblo architecture. Acoma workers carried everything up the cliff, including roof beams forty feet long cut in the San Mateo Mountains, thirty miles away.
- a long nave ending in a many-sided sanctuary at the west end;
- two square bell towers on the front, with bells brought from Mexico in the 1800s;
- a one-storey convento on the north side, once the friars' living quarters, workrooms and stores;
- a walled cemetery in front, where Acoma and Spanish residents lie together.
Whatever the church has meant to the Acoma, the tribe cares for it: a tribal group, the Gaugashti, carries out its upkeep, and it is regarded as part of Acoma's heritage.
Acoma today
A road now reaches the top, and the toeholds are history. Most Acoma live in Acomita, fifteen miles away; elders still live on the mesa, and the pueblo is used for festivals and ceremonies. Much of its old street plan and flat-roofed adobe building survives.
- Visiting: the Acoma Tribal Council admits visitors for a small fee.
- Haak'u Museum and Sky City Cultural Center: tours, exhibits and public events, with a focus on reviving art forms and the Acoma language.
- Zuni–Acoma Trail: a 7.5-mile ancient footpath between the two pueblos across the lava beds, now part of El Malpais National Monument.
Sources
Written from "Acoma Pueblo: Ancient City in the Sky", National Park Service, a work of the United States government in the public domain.
Licence: CC0 1.0 (public domain) · Adapted from www.nps.gov
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