Acoma Sky City: A Thousand Years on the Mesa
New Mexico
Seventy feet above the desert floor, built onto a sandstone mesa top that is visible for thirty miles in any direction, the village of Acoma Pueblo has been continuously inhabited since approximately nine hundred CE. It is among the oldest continuously occupied communities in North America.
The people who built it chose the elevation deliberately. The mesa offered defense, water catchment, and a clear view of anyone approaching across the valley. For centuries Acoma was a place that held its own. Then in December of fifteen ninety-eight, Spanish soldiers traveling through demanded food and lodging. A conflict broke out in which approximately twelve soldiers were killed. Spanish Governor Juan de Oñate responded with a punitive military expedition.
In January of fifteen ninety-nine, Oñate's forces assaulted Acoma Pueblo. The assault lasted three days. Spanish accounts, including the colonial legal record titled the Relación de los sucesos de Oñate, document that approximately eight hundred Acoma people were killed. The approximately five hundred survivors were subjected to a formal trial. Oñate sentenced adult men over the age of twenty-five to have one foot amputated and to serve twenty years of forced labor. Women and older children were distributed to Spanish missions and colonial households. Young boys were sent to Franciscan friars.
The Acoma people survived this. The Pueblo Revolt of sixteen eighty, in which Pueblo nations across New Mexico rose together and expelled the Spanish for twelve years, drew direct motivation from the abuses of Oñate's era. The Spanish returned in sixteen ninety-two. Acoma was never fully subjugated.
The mesa you can see from the corridor south of the interstate has been inhabited without interruption through all of it: the colonial period, the American territorial period, and the present. The Sky City Cultural Center at the base of the mesa is operated by the Pueblo of Acoma. Visitors are welcome on guided tours. The community does not owe that welcome to anyone.
