The Zuni Views

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As the prehistoric population of the Zuni region gradually increased in size through internal population growth and immigration, the mobility of communities became constrained. Each community required an agricultural area, presumably near its habitation, and an increasingly larger sustaining area for resource procurement. As the number of communities increased, the amount of available agricultural land decreased, and new settlements adversely impacted the ecology of the sustaining areas used by previously established communities. Regional packing of population into a finite area greatly diminished the ability to expand or maintain the settlement system, leading to a major change in the form and distribution of settlements.

View of Ojo Caliente, one of the Zuni farming villages. Photo taken in 1979 by Barbara Mills. By about A.D. 1450, a series of communities was established in the lower Zuni River valley that continued to be occupied into the historic period. These developments were accompanied by a relinquishment of habitation in other areas in the drainage of the Upper Little Colorado River. By the end of the prehistoric era, a Zuni settlement system had emerged that entailed the occupation of a few, very large villages in a core area of habitation that contained the best agricultural land in the region. This core area of settlement was surrounded by a much larger uninhabited region used for resource procurement. A similar development of settlement patterns occurred in the neighboring Acoma and Hopi areas, and by the onset of the historic period the only occupied villages in the Western Pueblo region were the Zuni, Acoma, and Hopi pueblos.

Two bridesmaids are helping Deidre Wyaco, a Zuni Indian, dress for her big day. She dons her tribe's traditional wedding costumewmdash;white moccasins and deer-hide leggings wound from ankle to knee; a black wool tunic layered over a white blouse; and four saucer-size turquoise-and-silver brooches pinned down the length of her skirt.

The bride's sister, Darlynn Panteah, fastens a turquoise-and-silver squash blossom necklace around Wyaco's neck and adorns her with so many turquoise rings and bracelets that her hands look as if they'd been dipped in blue-green water. Wyaco's niece Michella combs her jet-black hair into a tight bun and smoothes each lock in place while a cousin places a scarf over her shoulders and fixes it with a turquoise-and-silver pin. Then everyone stands back to admire Wyaco, her dress as stark and eye-popping as the red-earth, blue-sky landscape of their home, Zuni Pueblo, on the Zuni Indian Reservation, 40-odd miles south of Gallup, New Mexico.