Coronado State Monument

On Friday we accompanied Allyson's class on a field trip to Coronado State Monument in Bernalillo. The monument is located at the edge of the Santa Anna pueblo (from whence comes Allyson's teacher, so it was fun to talk with him about his hometown) on the bank of the Rio Grande at the site of the ancient Kuaua (pronounced like “koala” with a lisp) pueblo. Here Coronado and his party encamped during their first winter in what is now New Mexico, so the monument—in a somewhat split-personality style—celebrates both the pre-contact society of the Tewa people who lived along the Rio grande and the arrival of the Conquistadors in 1540.

We were part of a party of 60 or so kids and a dozen or so adults, representing the whole of the 4^th grade of Griegos Elementary School (a far cry from the 10 or so classes in each grade at the kids' previos and overcrowded school). The three classes split up and went with separate guides to different parts of the monument.

We followed the path along the ruins of the pueblo, stopped every 100' or so for a tidbit of history. Among these pieces of trivia were the following:

• In the Tewa pueblos, women owned dwelling places, and, at the time of marriage, the husband had to trek 40 miles or so to the mountains to get the wood for the roof of the home the wife built in his absence
• The original building style prior to the arrival of the Spaniards was called ball and paddle—pizza dough-sized spheres of mud that were stacked and then coated with more mud to form the walls of the structure
• The ladders you see in these pueblo sites havea symbolic nature—the different lengths of vertical posts represent the man and the woman, of different heights but held together and reaching upward
• “Kuaua” means “evergreen” in the Tewa language, which is odd since the trees nearby are all Cottonwoods—a deciduous tree

During the hike we saw some fun stuff. First, the reconstructed walls of the pueblo rooms (note the rectabgular shape, indicating the post-contact style introduced by the Spanish):

Next, a yucca plant ready to flower, which made us wonder if yuccas are related to asparagus:

A reconstructed room from the pueblo (the structure itself was three stories high and was entered only via ladders like the one seen here—the ceiling inside is only 5' high, meaning the Tewa were a short people):

After walking around we visited the museum, a small structure that houses a set of mural paintings from one of the original kivas at the pueblo. In the 1930s, anthropologists from UNM removed the murals and found layer on layer of these fresco-type paintings. The museum displays a dozen or so of these, the only of their kind in existence.

We then ate lunch and hiked to the banks of the Rio Grande before departing. On the way home, the little boys both fell asleep, which is always good for a picture or two: