The Pueblo peoples of the Rio Grande and of the western mesas descend from the ancestral communities archaeologists trace at Chaco Canyon, Mesa Verde and elsewhere, and the collection edited by David Grant Noble sets out that long occupation, its great houses, its roads and the thirteenth century depopulation of the northern San Juan.
Spanish colonisation from 1598 brought missions, forced labour and the public punishment of religious leaders. In 1680, under Pope of Ohkay Owingeh, the pueblos coordinated a revolt across a hundred and fifty miles of country and expelled the Spanish from New Mexico for twelve years. It is the most successful indigenous uprising in North American history, and the reconquest that followed was negotiated as much as imposed, which is part of why so much survived here.
Land and access remain the live religious questions. Taos Pueblo recovered Blue Lake, the source of its emergence account, by act of Congress in 1970 after a campaign of sixty four years, the first occasion on which land rather than money was returned on religious grounds. Pueblo governments have since joined the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition over that landscape, and have objected repeatedly to oil and gas leasing around Chaco Canyon, which they regard as an ancestral centre and not a ruin.