The Puebloans , or Pueblo peoples , are Native Americans in the Southwestern United States who share common agricultural, material, and religious practices. Pueblo people speak languages from four different language families , and each Pueblo is further divided culturally by kinship systems and agricultural practices, although all cultivate varieties of corn maize. Pueblo peoples have lived in the American Southwest for millennia and descend from the ancestral Puebloans.
Pueblo is a Spanish term for "village". New Mexico contains the largest number of federally recognized Pueblo communities, though some Pueblo communities also live in Arizona and Texas and along the Rio Grande and Colorado rivers and their tributaries. Pueblo nations have maintained much of their traditional cultures, which center around agricultural practices, a tight-knit community revolving around family clans, and respect for tradition.
Puebloans have been remarkably adept at preserving their culture and core religious beliefs, including developing syncretic Pueblo Christianity. Despite various similarities in cultural and religious practices, scholars have proposed divisions of contemporary Pueblos into smaller groups based on linguistic and individual manifestations of the broader Puebloan culture.
The clearest division between Puebloans relates to the languages they speak. Pueblo peoples speak languages from four distinct language families , which means these languages are completely different in vocabulary , grammar , and most other linguistic aspects. As a result, each Pueblo language is not easily understood by speakers of the other languages, with English now working as the lingua franca of the region.
Anthropologists have studied Pueblo peoples extensively and published various classifications of their subdivisions. In , Fred Russell Eggan contrasted the peoples of the Eastern and Western Pueblos, based largely on their subsistence farming techniques. Both groups cultivate mostly corn maize , but squash and beans have also been staple Pueblo foods all around the region.
