The Ancient Ones: Pueblos, Plazas, & The Rise of The Kachinas

This episode of the American Southwest Podcast is the 8th in the series about the original Native American inhabitants of the region and specifically about the Puebloans of the Rio Grande Valley, Zuni, Hopi Mesas, and others after the Anasazi Civil War and the Great Migration at the end of the 13th Century. The episode begins by defining the region as the Spanish would have seen it, despite the episode covering the time period spanning hundreds of years before that. It covers the migration of tens of thousands of Ancestral Puebloans out of the Mesa Verde Region and into the area around modern day Santa Fe, with a few stragglers heading to Jemez, Hopi, and Zuni. Expansion, starvation, war, art, migration, language, the boom and bust cycle of the pueblo, belief systems, and the Kachinas are all discussed. I hate to say this is an in-between episode… but it’s sort of a Epilogue to the Anasazi Civil War and Migration and Prologue to the coming Pueblo Revolt Episode. But I assure you there is enough exciting, interesting, intriguing, and engaging topics in this episode to be an over 2 hour standalone episode by itself. Again, calling it an in-between is really doing the piece a disservice. I know y’all will enjoy this in-depth study of the amazing people of the Puebloan world and their beliefs and history.