Antonio de Espejo
In February 1583, Espejo arrived at the territory of the Piros, the most southerly of the Pueblo villagers. From there the Spanish continued up the Rio Grande. Espejo described the Pueblo villages as "clean and tidy". The houses were multi-storied and made of adode bricks. "They make very fine tortillas," Espejo commented, and the Pueblos also served the Spanish turkeys, beans, corns, and pumpkins. The people "did not seem to be bellicose". The southernmost Pueblos had only clubs for weapons plus a few "poor Turkish bows and poorer arrows". Further north, the Indians were better armed and more aggressive. Some of the Pueblo towns were large, Espejo described Zia as having 1,000 houses and 4,000 men and boys. In their farming, the Pueblos used irrigation "with canals and dams, built as if by Spaniards". The only Spanish influence that Espejo noted among the Pueblos was their desire for iron. They would steal any iron article they could find.
Chetro Ketl
The Ancestral Puebloans relied on regular rainfall to sustain their agricultural society. This proved challenging in Chaco Canyon, even with consistent precipitation. By 1130, the rains had diminished and the maize crops that the Chacoans depended on had begun to fail, as the region increasingly suffered from the effects of a devastating, fifty-year drought. After a continuous occupation of more than six hundred years, the Chacoans began to migrate from the canyon. Fagan states that by 1140 "Chaco was finished". A study of 12th-century burials in the Gallup, New Mexico, area indicates as many as half of the people who lived during the drought died before the age of eighteen, with sixty percent of all deaths occurring before age thirty-five. The study estimated that for every woman, four children were needed to sustain the agriculture workforce.