Taos Pueblo: One Thousand Years
Near Red River, New Mexico
The pueblo north of town is not a reconstruction. It is not a re-creation, or a heritage site, or a living history exhibit. People live in it. People have lived in it for at least one thousand years.
Taos Pueblo consists of two multi-story adobe structures on either side of the Taos Creek. The north house and the south house, each rising to five stories in places, are built from the same materials as the surrounding landscape: adobe mud brick, straw, and cottonwood timber hauled from the mountains. UNESCO designated Taos Pueblo a World Heritage Site in nineteen ninety-two. It was already the oldest continuously inhabited community in the United States by most definitions of the word community.
The oldest sections of the pueblo have no running water and no electricity, not because the community lacks access, but because the community has chosen to maintain those sections in their traditional form. Water comes from the creek. The Spanish found this arrangement in fifteen forty and could not improve upon it.
The Tiwa language, one of the Pueblo language families of Northern New Mexico, is still spoken at Taos Pueblo. The pueblo maintains its own traditional governance, distinct from the United States government and from the Catholic Church that built the San Geronimo Chapel within the pueblo walls in the colonial period. The original chapel was destroyed by United States Army artillery in eighteen forty-seven, during the Taos Revolt against American occupation. The ruins are still there. The replacement chapel is still in use.
The pueblo charges admission for outside visitors, with restricted areas during ceremonial periods. The ceremonial calendar is not published. The portions of Taos Pueblo's spiritual life that are not for outside observation are not for outside observation.
What is visible from the visitor areas is itself extraordinary: a community that has housed human beings since before the first European ships reached the Americas, still housing them, still practicing in their own language and on their own terms.
