Coronado Historical Site

We have become Pueblo'd out.  Sunday we drove to the Coronado site that is under the State of New Mexico's jurisdiction, but part of the Pueblo of Santa Ana (current people's name but native name was Kuaua).   Back in 1930's the state of New Mexico wanted to prove that Francisco Vasquez de Coronado (the Spanish explorer who was searching for the fabled 7 cities of gold in the Americas) camped at this site as he was traveling through New Mexico, and they were hoping to discover his camp in time for the 400 year anniversary of when Coronado came through.  What Coronado found when he and his people came through was a very large pueblo, about 1500 rooms, multi-storied, with over 2000 people living at this site.

Archeologists began digging at the ruins and in doing so, found painted murals inside a square kiva, which in itself was rare, square kivas only existed in the Hopi lands in northern Arizona.  The kiva was dated early1200s.  Couple significant things at this site:  1.  the discovery of the murals and the preservation and eventual moving of them to safe keeping (at the University of New Mexico) are the only murals known to exist, not even in the Smithsonian.  2.  with the discovery of the murals, and the graduate students who were doing the digging, they learned through inquiry how to preserve the murals and the science of archeology and preservation of artifacts changed dramatically from that time forward.

No pictures were allowed to be taken of the murals but in the visitor's center in a separate room was the reproduction of the murals that were found.  Hard to see some of the images, but when we took the guided tour to the same square kiva, and descended down 6 feet underground, a Kuauan (native people to this area) reconstructed and painted on the walls what the murals would have looked like, this was done recently.  Pretty impressive.  And no, they never proved Coronado was at this particular Pueblo, but have since discovered that he did indeed camp about 3 miles down stream of the Rio Grande, not far from where we are camping.

Square kiva that was unearthed, the murals are from this kiva,
we climbed up and then down into the kiva underground

This ancient site is right on the Rio Grande 

5 square kivas were discovered, only the one with the murals was left open,
all others were filled back in after researched.

Tomorrow we leave here (Rio Rancho) and head north to a small town called Angel Fire.  We stayed near there about 5 years ago in Eagle Nest, and wanted to come back to visit.  We will be staying living at  over 8500 feet elevation.  Will be much colder, highs only in the low 70s and nights in the mid 30s.  Will stay there through the holiday weekend.