Kuaua's Seventeen Layers

In the nineteen thirties, archaeologists from the Museum of New Mexico began excavating a ruined pueblo on the banks of the Rio Grande north of Bernalillo. The pueblo's Tiwa name was Kuaua, meaning evergreen. It had been settled around thirteen twenty-five and abandoned toward the end of the fifteen hundreds. By the time the excavators arrived, its adobe walls had dissolved back into the earth and its kivas were filled with centuries of windblown soil.

Inside one square kiva, they found something remarkable. Beneath the floor that generations of painters had applied over centuries, layer after layer of mural art had been sealed and preserved. Seventeen distinct layers. Each layer represented a repainting of the kiva's interior walls, as one generation of ceremonies ended and another began. The murals showed figures in rain-making rituals, rainbow imagery, lightning, clouds, human figures in ceremonial dress, and animals whose precise symbolic significance belongs to the living Pueblo ceremonial tradition, not to outside interpretation.

The museum team removed the layers one by one, preserving each on backing material. Fourteen of the original painted sections are now displayed in the visitor's center at the Coronado Historic Site, designed by the architect John Gaw Meem, whose work defined New Mexico's territorial and pueblo revival styles. The kiva itself was reconstructed with reproduction murals painted on its interior walls.

What the kiva's seventeen layers record is time measured in ceremony rather than conquest. The Tiguex Province had generations of continuous ritual life before Coronado's army arrived and demanded its food. Those layers were already there, sealed in the adobe. The army never knew.