New Mexico (NM), Acoma Pueblo village - - Pictures
Acoma Pueblo, Native American pueblo (village) and part of the Acoma Reservation, in Cibola County, west central New Mexico. The small population of Keresan-speaking Native Americans who inhabit the pueblo live in long, terraced dwellings made of stone and adobe atop a steep sandstone mesa 109 m (357 ft) high. Founded about AD 1075, the pueblo is considered the oldest continuously occupied settlement in the United States and is a National Historic Landmark. Some cultivation and grazing are carried on in the plain below the mesa, but pottery is Acoma Pueblo's major product. The pueblo was discovered by the Spanish in 1540 and was conquered by them about 1599. Exhausted and embittered by decades of Spanish exploitation and forced religious conversion, the residents took part in the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, which kept the Spanish out of Pueblo lands for 12 years. The community's name is derived from the Keresan word Akome, meaning “people of the white rock.” San Esteban Rey Mission, built in the early 17th century, is at Acoma Pueblo.
