Lecture by Dr. Michael Bletzer, Tierra perdida: New Mexico’s Piro and Tiwa provinces, c. 1650-1700

Popular notions of the Piro pueblos tend to be limited to the historical fact that several hundred Piros (as well as Tiwas and members of other Pueblo groups) ended up in the El Paso area during the Pueblo Revolt of 1680. It is often claimed that the reason for this relocation was pro-Spanish affinity on the majority part of the Piros. Such blanket assertions have little basis in the historical and archaeological record. Period documents instead show that many Piros and Tiwas were deported from their homelands in central New Mexico in two waves in the fall of 1680 and the winter of 1681/82.

For the Piros, the events of the early 1680s brought the loss of the last of their ancestral pueblos and wholesale socio-cultural fragmentation. Among various interrelated reasons for this demise is a long history of unhappy relations with the colonizing Spaniards. Tantalizing if highly episodic references exist to violent encounters and failed rebellions especially for the years after 1650. The material dimensions of such conflicts are now emerging at the Piro mission pueblo of Tzelaqui/Sevilleta. A range of Spanish structures and more than 1,100 metal artifacts, mostly armor fragments and lead munitions, suggest an at times extensive Spanish presence which included several instances of fighting in and around the pueblo. Some diagnostic artifacts indicate hostilities perhaps as early as 1540-42. The bulk of armor and munitions, however, seem to be associated with structures from the mid- to late 1600s, just around the time the Piro pueblos entered their terminal crisis years.