Zuni (page 3 of 4)

Author:: T. J. Ferguson. Adapted from: Ferguson, T.J., 1996. Historic Zuni Architecture and Society: An Archaeological Application of Space Syntax. Anthropological Papers, No. 60, University of Arizona Press, Tucson, p. 25-40.

The Mexican and American Periods

The basic settlement pattern entailing occupation of a single permanent residential village at Zuni Pueblo with use of a number of seasonally occupied satellite settlements continued into the Mexican and American periods. Archaeological evidence in the form of tree-ring dates from the farming villages of Nutria and Ojo Caliente indicates that there was increased construction at these settlements during the Mexican period. At Ojo Caliente much of this construction occurred on the bench above the valley bottom in a location that was more defensible than subsequent construction at the settlement.

The American period began in 1848 with the ratification of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo when New Mexico became a territory of the United States. During the initial American exploration of the Southwest between 1846 and 1879, Zuni Pueblo became well known as an important provisioning station along the new trails and roads that were under development. Initial accounts describe the Zuni’s productive agriculture, including the peach orchards along the edges of the Zuni valley. They also describe the defensive Zuni watchtowers that were constructed in or near dispersed farm fields for use during Navajo raids. Numerous descriptions of the farming village of Pescado dating from the period between 1846 and 1879 describe a substantial "summer pueblo" surrounded by irrigated fields of wheat and corn.

From 1846 to 1881 the Zuni experienced an economic boom as they increased agricultural production to supply a new market for the corn and forage needed by the United States to support military installations at Fort Defiance and Fort Wingate. As a result, the use of farming villages located near farmlands that could be cultivated using ditch irrigation was intensified. The new source of income enabled the Zuni to purchase many new tools and construction materials, which they used to reconstruct Zuni settlements. The market for Zuni agricultural products dissipated with the construction of a railroad through Gallup, New Mexico in 1881, and the Army gained access to non-Indian suppliers.

The Zuni Indian Reservation was established by Executive Order in 1877. As the need for defensive strategies diminished, greater dispersion of buildings in the settlement plans of farming villages began to occur. The nineteenth-century settlement system solidified into the permanent occupation of Zuni Pueblo and the outlying farming villages. Surrounding each of these villages was a zone of intensively cultivated fields or gardens. On the banks of the river at Zuni Pueblo there were "waffle" gardens containing herbs and chiles grown in small earthen enclosures that could be watered by hand. At the farming villages there were fields irrigated by ditches from small reservoirs or springs. Surrounding these intensively cultivated plots was a much more extensive area of dispersed fields situated where surface runoff facilitated floodwater irrigation. Sheep and cattle grazed in a large open range surrounding the farming districts. After harvest in the fall, livestock were brought into the farming villages, where sheep herders could be more easily provisioned from Zuni Pueblo. The core area of settlement was surrounded by a much larger sustaining area suited for hunting animals and gathering plants and for the ritual visitation to shrines and religious localities scattered throughout the region occupied by the prehistoric ancestors of the Zuni. During the winter, the entire Zuni population resided at Zuni Pueblo, except for sheep herders and a few social outcasts who stayed at the farming villages.

Today the Zuni population has finally recovered from the decline that occurred during the Spanish period. Population estimates for Zuni in the nineteenth century vary between 1,294 and 2,000 people. After 1950, the Zuni population underwent remarkable expansion, increasing to 4,000 by 1960, 5,000 by 1971, and 8,929 by 1988. Even by 1915, there were sizable suburbs located to the north of Zuni Pueblo and on the south bank of the Zuni River. Eventually, the majority of the population began to live in the suburbs, and the pueblo core became known at Zuni as the "Old Pueblo" or "Middle Village."

In 1909, Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) policy led to the completion of a large dam and reservoir at Blackrock. This dam and reservoir were intended to provide irrigation water for a large agricultural development north of Zuni Pueblo. The general idea was to resettle farmers from the outlying farming villages onto individually owned farmsteads, following a model for non-Indian farmers in the larger American society. Part of Blackrock Dam’s long and tragic history is a series of failures, as well as the loss of 73 percent of its storage capacity within 20 years due to rapid siltation.

At the same time that the BIA was constructing large reservoirs and attempting to allot the Zuni Indian Reservation, the landscape was rapidly degrading from stream bed erosion. This erosion was caused by clear cutting of timber in the adjacent Zuni mountains and subsequent overgrazing. With the removal of the vegetative cover, the erosive force of runoff was significantly increased.

Overgrazing on the Zuni Indian Reservation exacerbated the problems with erosion. Between 1846 and 1912, the Zuni had lost 89 percent of their aboriginal land use area from land seizures by the United States. As a result, the Zuni were forced to restrict the geographic extent of the range where they grazed their livestock. They began to develop permanent ranch facilities to lay claim to range land and support their livestock industry. Even with a substantial voluntary reduction in the number of livestock in the first three decades of the twentieth century, the carrying capacity of the reservation range was greatly exceeded.

Stream beds were eroded into deeply incised arroyos during the early twentieth century, and traditional methods of floodwater farming became difficult or impossible. The soils that eroded from stream beds rapidly filled the reservoir at Blackrock, and the ditch-irrigated farming sponsored by the BIA lost its viability. New BIA grazing policies conflicted with the use of dispersed floodwater farm sites, and many of these farms were abandoned. The seasonal use of most of the peach orchard villages ceased about this time, a situation apparently related to these changes in land use.

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