Knowra Ancestral Puebloans Ancestral Puebloans Ancestral Puebloans were Indigenous peoples of the American Southwest who built communities across the Four Corners region from roughly 100 BCE to 1600 CE. Their descendants include today’s Pueblo peoples.
Four Corners : The region where Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah meet. Many ancestral communities developed across this shared landscape.
Pueblo architecture : Building traditions of the Pueblo peoples, including multiroom dwellings constructed from masonry or adobe. Room blocks and shared spaces housed households and larger communities.
Mesa Verde : A plateau in southwestern Colorado known for ancestral Pueblo settlements and cliff dwellings. Its cliff communities are among the best-known ancestral Pueblo sites.
Pueblo Revolt : The 1680 uprising in which Pueblo peoples expelled Spanish colonizers from New Mexico for twelve years. It belongs to later Pueblo history, not the ancestral period, and shows enduring resistance.
Mogollon culture : An archaeological culture of the southwestern United States and northern Mexico, known for distinctive settlements and pottery. Its communities occupied neighboring regions and followed related but distinct histories.
Colorado Plateau : A high, arid plateau spanning parts of the American Southwest and Rocky Mountain region. Its mesas, canyons, and limited water shaped settlement patterns.
Ancestral Puebloan kivas : Circular or rectangular ceremonial and communal rooms found in ancestral Pueblo settlements. Kivas provide evidence for ritual life and community organization.
Cliff Palace : A large ancestral Pueblo settlement built in a sandstone alcove at Mesa Verde. Its rooms and towers show the scale of late-period construction.
Spanish colonization of the Americas : The expansion of Spanish rule and settlement across the Americas beginning in the late fifteenth century. Colonization transformed the societies and homelands of Pueblo descendants.
Hohokam : An Indigenous society of southern Arizona known for extensive irrigation canals and platform mounds. Hohokam lifeways offer a regional comparison in the Southwest.
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