Gran Quivira, also known as Las Humanas, was one of the

Jumanos Pueblos The Jumanos Pueblos were several villages of the Tompiro Indians in the mountainous area of central New Mexico between Chupadera Mesa and the Gallinas National Forest, Gallinas Mountains including Pueblo Colorado, Pueblo Blanco (Tabirá), and the ...

of the

Tompiro Indians The Tompiro Indians were Pueblo Indians living in New Mexico. They lived in several adobe villages east of the Rio Grande Valley in the Salinas region of New Mexico. Their settlements were abandoned and they were absorbed into other Pueblo Nation ...

in the mountainous area of central

New Mexico New Mexico is a state in the Southwestern United States, Southwestern region of the United States. It is one of the Mountain States of the southern Rocky Mountains, sharing the Four Corners region with Utah, Colorado, and Arizona. It also ...

. It was a center of the salt trade prior to the Spanish incursion into the region and traded heavily to the south with the

Jumanos The Jumanos were a tribe or several tribes, who inhabited a large area of western Texas, New Mexico, and northern Mexico, especially near the Junta de los Rios region with its large settled Indigenous population. They lived in the Big Bend area ...

of the area of modern

Presidio, Texas Presidio is a city in Presidio County, Texas, United States. It is situated on the Rio Grande (''Río Bravo del Norte'') River, on the opposite side of the U.S.–Mexico border from Ojinaga, Chihuahua. The name originates from Spanish and mean ...

and other central Rio Grande areas. Its ruins are now part of

Salinas Pueblo Missions National Monument The Salinas Pueblo Missions National Monument is a complex of three Spanish missions located in the U.S. state of New Mexico, near Mountainair. The main park visitor center is in Mountainair. Construction of the missions began in 1622 and was ...

History

Beginning around A.D. 800 a sedentary native population settled here building

pithouse A pit-house (or pit house, pithouse) is a house built in the ground and used for shelter. Besides providing shelter from the most extreme of weather conditions, this type of earth shelter may also be used to store food (just like a pantry, a lar ...

s. Archeological evidence indicates that by A.D. 1300, the area overlooking the southern Estancia Basin was inhabited by Tompiro-speaking peoples who built with the culturally distinct pueblo masonry architecture. From about A.D. 1000 to the 1600s, Gran Quivira, along with the other Jumanos Pueblos to the east and the other Salinas Pueblos to the north (Tenabó, Abó, Quarai, Tajique and Chilili) was a major trade center between the

Great Plains The Great Plains is a broad expanse of plain, flatland in North America. The region stretches east of the Rocky Mountains, much of it covered in prairie, steppe, and grassland. They are the western part of the Interior Plains, which include th ...

, the

Pacific Coast Pacific coast may be used to reference any coastline that borders the Pacific Ocean. Geography Americas North America Countries on the western side of North America have a Pacific coast as their western or south-western border. One of th ...

, and the

Great Basin The Great Basin () is the largest area of contiguous endorheic watersheds, those with no outlets to the ocean, in North America. It spans nearly all of Nevada, much of Utah, and portions of California, Idaho, Oregon, Wyoming, and Baja Californi ...

. In 1598, while exploring the territory he had claimed for Spain, Don Juan de Oñate arrived at Las Humanas and administered an oath of obedience and vassalage to the Humano Indians. Years later missionary activities at Gran Quivira began in earnest and around 1626 the pueblo was designated as a visita of San Grégorio de Abó mission. By 1629 Gran Quivira had its own resident priest, Fray Francisco de Letrado, who began construction of the first permanent mission at Gran Quivira. Letrado was removed in 1631 and Fray Francisco de Acevado took control and completed construction of Inglesia de San Isidro in 1635. In 1659 Fray Diego de Santander was permanently assigned to Gran Quivira after which construction on a new larger church, San Buenaventura, began. The churches were built out of the same blue-gray local limestone as the earlier pueblo and were held together with caliche-based mortar. At the time the Spanish came in the 1580s Las Humanas had a population of about 3,000. The area suffered from Spanish expropriation of resources and then from droughts in the 1660s. 450 residents died from starvation in 1668. In September 1670 an

Apache The Apache ( ) are several Southern Athabaskan language-speaking peoples of the Southwestern United States, Southwest, the Southern Plains and Northern Mexico. They are linguistically related to the Navajo. They migrated from the Athabascan ho ...

raid damaged the mission and pueblo, left eleven dead, and took thirty inhabitants as captives. By the early 1670s the pueblo was abandoned. The first detailed description in English is Major James Henry Carleton's twenty-page pamphlet ''Diary of an excursion to the ruins of Abó, Qarra, and Gran Quivira, in New Mexico'' published in 1855. In 1909 the ruins were incorporated into the Gran Quivira National Monument, which was enlarged in 1980–1981 to include Abó and Quarai, and which was renamed in 1988 to

. The site was listed on the

National Register of Historic Places The National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) is the Federal government of the United States, United States federal government's official United States National Register of Historic Places listings, list of sites, buildings, structures, Hist ...

on October 15, 1966, and the Gran Quivera Historic District was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in July 2015.

Notes and references

Sources

*Anderson, Gary Clayton. ''The Indian Southwest, 1580–1830: Ethnogenesis and Reinvention''. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999. {{authority control Former populated places in New Mexico