HISTORY OF SIA 
The ethnographer is especially fortunate with respect to the pueblos 
of New Mexico in that he has a long historic record of them even 
though it be meager or even wholly lacking in spots. In many other 
instances the anthropologist must begin his study of a people without 
any specific knowledge of its past. 
The Sia have only their origin and migration myth to account for 
their present location. Like all other Keresan pueblos, Sia’s mythol- 
ogy states that they emerged from the lower world at a place ‘‘in the 
North,” and that they migrated southward until they arrived at 
their present location, where they have lived ever since. They have 
no legends, as far as I could discover, of having lived at some other 
location, although one informant said that one of the nearby pueblo 
ruins is called Tsiya. Nor have they any legendary account, as 
distinguished from the origin-migration myth, of the initial occupa- 
tion of their present site. 
There has been much speculation about the prehistory of the Keres. 
Mera (1935, pp. 35-39) has suggested, principally upon the basis of 
distribution of pottery types, that the Keres once lived in the Mesa 
Verde region. A recent reconsideration of theories of pueblo pre- 
history states that ‘“‘more recent evidence . . . has tended to confirm 
Mera’s cultural sequence”? (Wendorf and Reed, 1955, p. 159). There 
is still insufficient evidence, however, say Wendorf and Reed (ibid.), 
to test Mera’s Keres-Mesa Verde correlation: ‘‘We lack sufficient 
data on the archaeology of the Keres area to permit developing fully 
this hypothesis . . . but it should be noted that the distribution of 
the Mesa Verde-like pottery includes the present Keres area.’”’ They 
believe that reasonable evidence indicates that the Keres-speaking 
peoples lived ‘‘in the upper San Juan region,” around the four corners, 
in the 13th century and earlier, and that “the broad correlation of 
Keresan language with San Juan Anasazi culture . . . should receive 
serious reconsideration” (ibid., pp. 163, 165). 
There are, according to Mera (1940, p. 26-a), seven sites of former 
villages located within some 6 miles of Sia (fig. 1). No. 924 is a small 
ruin which yielded sherds of Mera’s group A, 13th and 14th centuries, 
plus a few of group E, 16th century, which Mera believed came from 
‘a small seasonally occupied house, the remains of which appear to be 
superimposed on the older structure” (Mera, 1940, p. 26). It is this 
site which one informant said is called Tsfya, although he did not 
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