20 BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY [Bull. 184 
for this purpose. It seems quite likely, therefore, that the Sia now 
live where their forefathers were living in 1540. 
It is possible that the pueblo country might have been visited by 
Indians from Mexico, Aztecs in particular, before the coming of the 
white man. Fray Gerdénimo de Zarate-Salmerén reported in his 
Relacién that a Spanish soldier had told him he had seen pictures of 
Aztecs, which he recognized by their dress, in a kiva at Acoma. The 
Aztecs had come from the west and had spent a few days at Acoma. 
Because the Acoma had never seen people like them, they painted 
their likenesses on kiva walls. When the strangers left they went 
toward Sia. All this took place, the Spanish captain was told, a few 
years prior to his visit. “With this information,” said Zérate- 
Salmerén (1900, p.182), ‘‘I made great research; and asking the 
chief-captain of the pueblo of Cia . . . and other elders, if they had 
information of those peoples ... he said yes; that he very well 
remembered having seen them, and that some of them had been 
entertained in his house. That this was a few years before the 
Spaniards made a settlement in New Mexico;...’’ The strangers 
went on to Jemez, also, where they spent a few days. 
The Spaniards first learned of New Mexico, however, from Cabeza 
de Vaca in 1536. In 1539, Fray Marcos de Niza was sent by the Viceroy 
of Mexico to the pueblo country with a party of Mexican Indians and a 
Moorish servant, Estevan. They reached Zufii where Estevan was 
killed. Fray Marcos merely surveyed the Pueblo of Zufi from a 
distant hill; he did not enter the town. He returned with stories of 
a city greater than Mexico itself. Mendoza, the viceroy, appointed 
Francisco Vasquez de Coronado to invade this country and to take 
possession of it for the Spanish crown. 
The documentary history of Sia begins with the Coronado expedi- 
tion of 1540-42. We learn rather little about Sia from its chronicles, 
however. Castafieda records that ‘‘at the end of the siege [of Tiguex], 
. the general sent a captain to Chia, a fine pueblo with a large 
population, which had sent messages offering submission. . . . They 
found the pueblo quiet and left in its care four bronze cannon which 
were in bad condition” (Hammond and Rey, eds., 1940, p. 233). In 
1581 Father Augustin Rodriguez and Capt. Francisco Sanchez 
Chamuscado visited some pueblos in the Jemez River valley includ- 
ing, probably, Sia, although they do not identify it by name (Ham- 
mond and Rey, 1927; Mecham, 1926, p. 285). 
In 1583 Antonio de Espejo and his party visited the “province 
called Los Punames,? consisting of five pueblos, the chief pueblo 
3 ““Punames” resembles the Keresan word for west: Bu-nami. Hodge (1910, pt. 2, p. 327) derives Punames 
from Keresan Pu-na-ma, ‘people of the west,’ referring to the western division of the Rio Grande branch 
of the Keresan stock. 
