Ancestral Puebloans

Hello. We are the Ancestral Puebloans. Our story is very old, and it is written in the stone canyons and high mountains of our homeland. We are the ancestors of the Pueblo peoples who live in the American Southwest today, and we want to share a part of our history with you. Our home was in a place called the Four Corners region. It is a land of bright sun, deep canyons, and tall, flat-topped mountains that people now call mesas. For hundreds and hundreds of years, this beautiful and challenging land was where we raised our families, farmed our food, and built our communities.

At first, we lived in homes called pithouses, which were built partly underground to keep us cool in the summer and warm in the winter. As time went on, we became expert builders. We learned to cut sandstone into blocks and use mud as mortar to build amazing villages with many rooms. You can still see some of our incredible work today in places like Chaco Canyon and Mesa Verde. Perhaps our most famous homes are our cliff dwellings. We built these large villages right into the sides of steep canyons, tucked safely under the overhang of the rock. Living there protected us from the hot sun and kept our communities safe.

Life in our villages was busy. We were skilled farmers, and we knew how to grow crops in the dry soil. Our most important foods were corn, beans, and squash, and we planted them together to help them grow strong. We were also artists. Our people made beautiful pottery, often with amazing black-on-white designs painted on it. These pots were not just for decoration; we used them every day for cooking our meals and for storing food and water. In the center of our villages, we built special round rooms that went down into the earth. We call these rooms kivas. Kivas were important places where we would gather for ceremonies and community meetings.

After living in our canyon homes for many centuries, a time of great change came. Around the year 1300, we began to move away from our cliff dwellings. No one knows for sure why we left, but we think a long drought that lasted for many years made it very hard to grow enough food for everyone. But our story did not end there. We did not disappear. We traveled to new homes, and our culture and traditions continued. Today, our descendants, the modern Pueblo peoples of the Southwest, carry on our legacy. They continue to live in the region, speaking their languages, creating art, and holding ceremonies that connect them to us, their ancestors. Our spirit lives on in them.