This is Acoma Pueblo, aka “Sky City,” and one of the oldest continually inhabited places of north America. Located on a nearly 400-foot mesa, it dates back as early as 1100 CE and has been a home to the indigenous Acoma people of modern New Mexico ever since, preserving ancient customs and beliefs even as the area changed with the times.
You can see a typical street of the village in the second slide — in its heyday, the entire city held about 5,000 people. Pretty amazing considering much of the building materials and water had to be hand-carried up until a road was built in the 1950s.
The Acoma people had variated relationships with surrounding indigenous groups, but their involvement with the Spanish colonizers was particularly brutal. In 1598, the Spanish military leader Juan de Oñate took gruesome vengeance on the Acoma in Sky City for having attacked and killed 14 Spanish. Oñate’s officer and troops killed around 800 inhabitants (about 20% of the population) and cut off the right foot of every man over 25 years. Anyone between ages 15 and 25 was put into slavery.
Acoma Pueblo did rebuild afterwards, but this time it was under the lordship of the Spanish. They constructed a Catholic church called San Esteban in the early 1600s, which is one of the oldest European churches in north America. To me, it was fascinating to learn that the Acoma people today think of San Esteban as an important part of their cultural heritage, despite the fact that their ancestors had to cart 20,000 pounds of materials up the mesa to build it. Part of the reason of their attachment to the building could be because there are many elements in it (red- and- white- striped pillars, the placement of the adjacent cemetery wall, a prominent display of the sun) that connect to their traditional non-Christian beliefs.
Today, only about thirty tribal elders live continuously on the mesa, with the Acoma People settled more in local nearby villages. Acoma Pueblo is considered a National Historic Landmark.
