Pecos National Historical Park, New Mexico
The kiva and the mission church frame the two worlds of the Pecos Indians. During the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, Pecos Indians destroyed the first mission and built this kiva (now restored) within the mission’s convento. For a few years they followed their religion undisturbed.
The ruins of Pecos Pueblo and Spanish missions of the 17th- and 18th-centuries crown a small ridge overlooking the Pecos Valley in upper New Mexico. At the time of the Coronado entrada, the pueblo was a giant apartment house, several stories high, with a central plaza, 600 rooms, and many kivas—home to 2,000 souls. The village prospered because it commanded the trade path between Pueblo farmers of the Rio Grande and buffalo hunters of the Plains. Pecos was a crossroads of commerce and culture, and its people grew adept at trade and war. The arrival of Franciscan priests in the 1600s with Spanish custom, religion, law inexorably altered Pueblo life. The Spaniards built a spacious mission church on the south end of the ridge, and a second but smaller one when the first church was destroyed in the Pueblo revolt of 1680. Pecos continued as a mission for more than a century. Disease and Comanche raids spelt decline in the late 18th century. The last inhabitants—fewer than 20—drifted away in 1838.
The park is 25 miles southeast of Santa Fe. Among its features are the ruins of the ancient pueblo, two restored kivas, and adobe mission walls. For information on the park and its programs, write:
Superintendent
Pecos National Historical
Park
P.O. Drawer 418
Pecos NM 87552-0418
Extensive pinyon-juniper forests once surrounded Pecos Pueblo.
The vessel is a 16th-century olla. The Spanish spur dates from the 17th century.