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ANTHROPOLOGY: A. V. KIDDER 
one could make the entire circuit without putting foot to ground. The 
people were brave, prosperous and skilled in all the arts of the Pueblos. 
After Coronado, Pecos was visited by several other explorers and when 
New Mexico was actually settled by the Spanish at the beginning of the 
seventeenth century Pecos was made the seat of a mission, a large 
church was erected and the town became one of the most important and 
prosperous in the province. During the eighteenth century, however, 
its position on the eastern frontier exposed it to ever-increasing raids 
by the Comanche. Thus worn down and greatly reduced by sickness, the 
Pecos people managed to hold out until about 1840 when, numbering 
only seventeen souls, they abandoned their home and put themselves 
under the protection of the Jemez, a nearby tribe related to them by 
language and tradition. 
We have, then, a historically recorded occupation from 1540 until 
1840; and an examination of the potsherds scattered about the ruins 
shows also practically all the types of prehistoric wares known to occur 
in the upper Rio Grande district. The Department therefore beheved 
that the site had been settled in very early times and that people had 
lived there, presumably continuously, through all the intervening cen- 
turies. So long an occupation does not seem to have occurred at any 
other place in New Mexico available for excavation and it was hoped 
that remains would there be found so stratified as to make clear the 
development of the various Pueblo arts and to enable students to place 
in their proper chronological order numerous New Mexican ruins whose 
culture has long been known but whose relation one to another has been 
entirely problematical. This hope was strengthened by the fact that 
Mr. N. C. Nelson of the American Museum, New York, had recently 
discovered very important stratified remains at San Chris tobal a few 
miles to the west and it was believed that, if similar deposits could be 
found at Pecos, they would serve not only to complement and, so to 
speak, cross-reference the finds of Mr. Nelson, but also to carry the story 
of Pueblo arts from 1680, the date of the abandonment of San Christo- 
bal, down through the very Httle known eighteenth century to the 
middle of the nineteenth, from which time to the present day it may 
still be recovered by studies among the living tribes. These were the 
chief reasons for the choice of Pecos. 
The Regents of the State Museum of New Mexico, in whom the title 
to the ruins is vested, requested in making their very generous offer 
of the site, that the old church, greatly damaged by the weather and 
by vandalism, and in imminent danger of entire collapse, be so re- 
paired and protected that no further harm should ensue. This work 
